What's up with giant hand obsession, Gondry?

This past weekend started out awful (I had food poisoning and a fever, and Jess was pretty sick too); but we spent Saturday morning watching the closest thing to a cartoon in the house - Get Shorty, which was surprisingly good. John Travolta shows a surprising amount of charm in it; I wouldn't go so far as to say he's a great actor in it or anything, but his character is an easy one to root for. Anyway, it's an entertaining way to pass an hour and a half, and didn't require we pay full attention or be completely awake. Which we weren't.

Saturday night was the Ottawa debut of Tusks, my ex-bandmate Samir's new group (opening for the Acorn, who were excellent as always) at Babylon. They sounded much like the last Kepler record, only more so - about three or four songs in, it clicked and I realized that this was what he'd been aiming for them to sound like on Attic Salt, or possibly even Missionless Days. In any case, it was excellent, well-orchestrated (but not orchestral) pop; slick, but not grossly so - to put on my fake-record-critic pants, like the Fleetwood Mac album their name references, minus the coke abuse and millions of dollars. Also: better haircuts.

On Sunday afternoon (after an embarrassing and painful accident, proving that I can't be trusted with as complicated a task as drinking water in a car) we caught The Science of Sleep, and yes, it's very good. Gael GarcÌa Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien) is just stellar as Stéphane, a young man who has trouble discerning the difference between his dreams and the real world. Frequently the viewer shares this difficulty - ostensibly 'real' scenes will start falling apart, water turning into cellophane, wads of cotton batting will float in the air held by an appropriate piano chord, and so on. He meets his crafty new neighbour, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and awkwardly falls for her (nearly every review I've read suggests that he's initially attracted to her friend Zoë, but I'm inclined to think that Stephanie just assumed that he was interested in Zoë. At least, that's how I interpreted his being upset at the novel he dreamt he wrote, I Am Just Your Neighbour and a Liar. By the Way, Do You Have Zoë's Number?*)

It's a sweet and poignant film, but doesn't pack the emotional wallop of Eternal Sunshine, which puts me nearly in tears every time (especially the scene in the collapsing house in Montauk). There's a scene in The Science of Sleep that come close - Stephanie puts a very drunk Stephane to bed, and says to him, "It will happen the way you want, if only you'll trust that I love you." But this one is much harder to approach, and I'm still not sure how much of the film is meant to be taken literally, and how much is Stephane's adolescent and subjective view (the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking: all of it), exaggerating his emotional clumsiness and inability to communicate. I also can't heap enough praise on the character of Guy (Alain Chabat), Stephane's erratic and frequently sex-obssessed co-worker; Chabat steals nearly every scene he's in with a sort of understated fearlessness that's quite enjoyable.


*This would have been a great title for a record, and maybe in ten years, it will be.