Jeremy's Weblog

I recently graduated from Harvard Law School. This is my weblog. It tries to be funny. E-mail me if you like it. For an index of what's lurking in the archives, sorted by category, click here.

Monday, July 19, 2004

I just saw Before Sunset, a modest little film by Richard Linklater.  It's a sequel to a 1995 film, "Before Sunrise," about an American man and a French woman who meet on a train headed toward Vienna one day and fall in love -- but he has to leave the next day.  They don't exchange information, but promise to meet 6 months later, to the day, back in Vienna.  They don't.  9 years later, and he's back in Paris.  And there she is.  The movie throws out all of this exposition in the first five minutes, for those of us who didn't see the first film.  I didn't see the first film.  A bunch of the reviews say seeing the first film makes this one even better.  This one was pretty darn good anyway.  It's 80 minutes of talk.  They talk.  And talk.  But it's good talk.  It draws you in.  It makes you listen.  It has depth, it has emotion, it has some meaning.  It doesn't sound like movie dialogue.  That's a compliment.  It's talk that makes you think about yourself, and makes you care about the characters.  For the most part.  I found the talk about the meaning of their lives much more compelling than the talk about their sex lives, which could have been excised out without losing anything for all that I cared.  I found the ending dragged a little bit.  But those are quibbles.  This is a good film.  Well worth seeing.