Let's Go Out To The Movies

Last night I went to see Shopgirl staring Clair Danes and Steve Martin. The movie was adapted from a novel by Steve Martin. The movie is narrated by Steve Martin.

Generally I like Steve Martin. I can't speak to his ability to write novels as I haven't read any of his work. But I am convinced about his ability to adapt his novels into movies. Shopgirl was terrible.

There were several notable problems with it. First and foremost being that it didn't make any sense. It was as if they started out with waaay too much movie and they had to sacrifice all the scenes which made the plot cohesive. It was just a series of vaguely connected vignettes.

Really great movies have good dialog. Or at least good chemistry between actors. This had terrible dialog and all of the on screen interactions made me feel uncomfortable. And I don't know if this counts as dialog, but I found the narration to be really disconcerting. Steve Martin plays Ray Porter. But Steve Martin also narrates from kind of an omniscient point of view. (Can you have a point of view if you are omniscient?) So he ends up referring to himself in the third person. "As Ray Porter watches her walk away..." Is he narrating as Ray Porter? Is he narrating as Steve Martin outside the context of the movie? Did the original narrator quit with no notice?

The other problems were just weird plot elements. What's Jeremy doing just off stage with an amp? Whose amp breaks in the middle of a set? I mean really. Who gave this band such a nice tour bus? They aren't a very good band. I realize none of this stuff makes sense without context, but rest assured that if you had context you would know what I was referring to, but it still wouldn't make any sense.

The single positive aspect of the movie is seeing a lot of Clair Danes. A LOT. She has a semi-nude scene, an actual nude scene, an obscured nude scene, and 3594 scenes of her shaving her legs in between. Unfortunately the movies timeline is a little hard to follow, so I'm not sure if those leg shaving scenes constitute really smooth legs or just regular smooth legs.

Either way I would wait until it comes out on DVD and then rent something else.