special thanks to miss tara for being gifted enough to indulge my night-before-hey-can-you-do-something-with-movies request.

she’s the cupcakes, our Lady Noble.

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I think it goes without saying that Sam Mendes is a fine director.  American Beauty, for my money, was nothing short of a masterpiece.  And even though I didn’t personally enjoy Revolutionary Road (it made me feel like a teenager who had locked myself in my room because I was scared of my parents’ fighting), I had to admit that it was beautifully shot and thoughtfully framed.  Mendes bears the mark of a confident director who knows exactly what he wants out of a shot and always manages to get his actors to carry out that vision.  He clearly knows what he is doing, but he doesn’t seem to be adled by an overly-inflated ego, either.  In that regard, it’s not entirely surprising to learn that he comes from the stage.  Yes, many years before the glossy big budget movies he would put up on the silver screen, he was directing Cabaret, Company and Little Voice back in London.

And it’s this Sam Mendes that we feel in Away We Go.

This is not a movie with an especially ingenious plotline. It does not exude its own star power like so much sexy sweat.  It almost feels home spun.  It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that it had been made by a girl I went to high school with on a budget of 200 thousand dollars.  I think these are all reasons why it works the way it does.

Sam Mendes was no doubt thanking his lucky ass stars when this movie wrapped.  The actors in this movie did a truly amazing job.  The chemistry, especially between the two lead actors (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph),  is so genuine that you buy everything that they are selling.   They are all (this movie has a fantastic supporting cast!) utterly natural, believable and sometimes even so recognizable, it makes your heart ache.

This is a movie about two people who literally don’t know where they are going in life.  And being 34 years old with a baby on the way makes it all feel especially distressing.  It is as much about self discovery as it is about the dynamics of different kinds of families and support systems.  In other words, there’s a little something for each and every one of us to relate to in this sweet movie.

At one point, Maya Rudolph’s character, Verona, leans into John Krasinski’s Burt wearily and asks, “Are we fuck-ups?”  And that instance feels like walking out onto the porch at a house party and accidentally interrupting a bittersweet moment between two lovers.  You almost feel like backing away and apologizing, it feels that intimate.

There’s also an all too realistic messy-family-plot-twist wherein Burt and Verona rush to Burt’s older brother, who has just discovered his wife has left both he and their young daughter behind.  The brother has an especially heart-wrenching monologue about how his little girl’s future is about to become irrevocably damaged having been abandoned by her own mother.  I had more than a little difficulty getting the lump in my throat to subside during that scene.  And it’s only one gem of many.

Being a music fanatic, the soundtrack is very important to me.  It’s really something that can make or break a cinematic experience for me.

Choosing Alexi Murdoch to helm the soundtrack of this film was a further stroke of genius for this production.  Alexi was born to a Greek father and a Scottish mother and he lived in both countries before eventually making his way to America.  He seems like a rather unassuming person given his obvious skills as a musician.

The story goes that not long after moving to Los Angeles, he ran into KD Lang in a grocery store and handed her a demo tape.  She called him back two days later wanting to work with him and he simply told her that he wasn’t ready.  After receiving radioplay on KCRW, he sold 50,000 CDs on CD Baby.  But he turned down every major label offer that came his way in the interest of maintaining creative control over his own work.  He eventually self-published, again for CD Baby, in 2002.  But it wasn’t until 2006 that he would release a full-length album  (Time Without Consequence) and he did so under his own label, Zero Summer.

The accompanying music to this movie is as organic as the work of everyone else involved. It is tender without being cloying, complimentary without being overbearing or distracting.

If you have not yet seen this movie, I highly recommend that “away you go” to your Netflix queue;)

Alexi Murdoch – All My Days

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catch all of ‘tuesdays with tara’ here. and all the rest, the most, of tara here.