December 21 movie: Withnail & I. I think I saw this movie at the wrong age. I really enjoyed it, it was funny and all, but it didn't change my life or anything. Maybe if I had been in my mid-twenties, broke, and really into getting wasted I would have had the emotional response so many people describe.
I do give them major credit for depicting poverty that actually looks like poverty. Not the shiny, quaint fake poverty you see in movies so often. (The most egregious example I can think of off the top of my head is Where The Heart Is. Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are supposed to be working poor, single mothers barely surviving, but they both have expensive haircuts, perfect makeup, impeccable clothes and homes I would be lucky to live in.) The house Withnail & I lived in reminded me a lot of an infamous flophouse that belonged to some friends of mine back in college. I don't think my friends' kitchen was as gross as the one in the movie, but that may have been just because my friends didn't have enough dishes to create that mess.
The one thing I really did not like about Withnail & I was the lonely uncle attempting sexual assault on the narrator. The DVD sleeve described him as "hitting on" the narrator but I'm sorry, if you have to physically fight someone off then it's not "hitting on." Call me humorless but I don't find attempted rape funny regardless of the genders involved.
So anyway, I did really like this movie, it cemented my Richard E. Grant love (like that needed any encouragement), but I'm not going to watch it a zillion times or start quoting lines all the time or anything.
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