A BUNCH OF STUFF

“My husband is in Jamaica with a 19-year-old. A friend of my daughter’s. And he had the fucking nerve to ask me to sell his singles collection and send him a check for whatever I got, minus a 10% commission. Which reminds me, would you make sure to give me a $5? I want to frame it. Put it on the wall.”

Deleted scene. When I used to watch the VHS of this over and over growing up all the deleted scenes played after the credits. I’d listen to the Stevie Wonder song, the Love song, then the Howard Shore score, then these would pop up. Since jumping ship to DVD (and then to an mp4 when the DVD broke) I haven’t had a chance to see these in a while. But this was always one of my favorite parts of the movie and book. It’s a shame they had to leave it out. 

The riskiest choice the filmmakers made was casting a Danish newcomer, Iben Hjejle, as Laura. ”We had been reading a lot of actresses,” Mr. Cusack says, ”and we had no consensus about choice. And then Stephen went to a film festival in Berlin where he saw ‘Mifune,’ in which Iben is just wonderful, and she was there getting an award. And he called me in the middle of the night, screaming: ‘I’ve found her! I’ve found Laura!’ I said, ‘Where are you?’ He says, ‘In Germany!’ I say, ‘Laura’s German?’ He says, ‘No, from Denmark.’ That’s when I asked him if he was drunk.”

Mr. Frears says: ”But the truth is that this is a story about a man obsessed with a woman. Well, this has to be something everyone understands. You have to have someone who fulfills that requirement. Well, that’s an incredible thing to hang on someone; no woman in life is like that. But on that cold night in February in Berlin, Iben was.”

“And she liked me. She liked me. She liked me. She liked me. Or at least, I think she did. I think she did. Etc.”

“Oh, so you’re slamming to Joni Mitchell now?”

“Songs at my funeral: ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ by Jimmy Cliff, ‘Angel’ by Aretha Franklin, and I’ve always had this fantasy that some beautiful, tearful woman would insist on ‘You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ by Gladys Knight. But who would that woman be?”

Charlie is awful. 

It doesn’t help that Charlie talks bollocks all night; she doesn’t listen to anyone, she tries too hard to go off at obtuse angles, she puts on all sorts of unrecognizable and inappropriate accents. I would like to say that these are all new mannerisms, but they’re not; they were there before, years ago. The not listening I once mistook for strength of character, the obtuseness I misread as mystery, the accents I saw as glamour and drama. How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years?

How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world’s problems?

High Fideli-Fridays.

High Fideli-Fridays.