News You Can Bruise for 2005 November 26

This was a weird, weird movie. At almost any point it could have become a noir thriller: the main character would be forced by his own spinelessness to kill someone, and the noir would start. But since it's not a Coen brothers movie that didn't happen. Instead, the characters constructed big tissues of lies which were destroyed and constructed again. It starts out awful Marx Brothers and soft focus sentimentality (which I guess is just the other aspect of awful Marx Brothers; hey, remember those Marx Brothers movies near the end, hideous in form, where Harpo's character was actually named "Wacky"?) but as you get used to it it becomes a sort of relentless psychological slapstick that dies out at the end.

For the first third of the movie I was driven mad by the voice of the male lead. Who was it he sounded like? Then Sumana told me: he sounds like Tony Curtis' imitation of Cary Grant in Some Like it Hot. Because he is Cary Grant. I had never seen Cary Grant in a movie before, except when I was very young.