In the meantime (read: tonight) I watched another movie about a kid and a parent that is really about the kid: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. I picked the movie because it stars Jodi Foster in '76, the year she did Taxi Driver and Freaky Friday. She acts opposite, at least in part, a very distressing Martin Sheen (who, next to Foster the year of Taxi Driver, unavoidable reminds me of John Hinkley Jr.). There is also this Scott Jacoby, who seems more familiar than IMDB says he should.
I really loved it. It's like a lot of things jumbled together: Harold and Maude, Arsenic and Old Lace, the snippets I remember from The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Netflix categorizes the movie as a thriller, and it has won awards as a horror film. To me, though, it feels a bit more like a sad but very relatable fantasy: living alone in a big old house of your choosing, walking alone to town to buy one item, going to the library, studying languages, reading, listening to music, befriending a magician, growing up on your own time, getting away with murder. Watching it, I got the sense that I loved things I was supposed to find unsettling, and was unsettled by the things that should have warmed my heart.
I think it would make an excellent play.
[photo: I could probably do without the magician.]
1 comment:
Wow--I haven't thought about this movie in years! It's one of the first that I serially watched--I saw it three times in a week in middle school!
I definitely think that it is a thriller (not really horror); I found it positively terrifying when I was young; but primarily because I was worried for Jodie Foster's well-being. As I recall it from many years ago, the movie is supposed to be complicated--I think it intends for you to come away feeling like you didn't really like the parts you should have...Or maybe I was confused too!
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