The Joys of Marriage

I wanted to soak in Another Year the way all the critics did. It's great food for thought, they all said. I wanted to nod appreciatively at how it keeps its few plot mechanics quiet and sometimes abandons them entirely. Mike Leigh tells this story by accumulating what seem to be loosely related bits of wisdom, an incidental ball of wax to which each scene has something to contribute. I wanted to gratefully accept this tangle of quotidian truth and experience and awaken to its themes and its purpose, and articulate my own correlatives to its characters and situations.

Because I really love doing all those things.

But Jamie simply could not sit still. She obviously was extremely bothered by something, and my solemn contemplation was constantly interrupted by her fidgeting. At last, she blurted out: "I'm sorry, but I can't take this seriously- I can't stop thinking about The Dark Crystal! Don't you see it? Every person in this movie looks like a character from The Dark Crystal!!!!"

I made a photo montage to represent what was going on in Jamie's head:




As a quick search reveals, the practice of comparing various famous people to characters in The Dark Crystal is already rampant online, so I won't make any attempt to point out who looks like whom. But I did want to note that I put Mike Leigh in there too, because he kind of looks like Aughara.