Review of Girl, Interrupted (1999) by Gustave K — 26 Jul 2011

Girl, interrupted was the movie which got angelina jolie an academy award in such a young age, 25, of course, young quirky sexy jolie then showed up in oscar, wearing a vampire dress, marking incestuous notoriety for openly tongue-kissing her brother (OLD news, for sure)....i was 17 when I firstly went to theather for it, captivated by the very young angelina's volcanic magnetism, pouty full lips, long legs like any other fresh bi-curious straight girl in adoelscence. for me then, watching dynamic supernova like jolie in rising is like a kid peeping thru the world of adults with envious yearnings. ever since then, i've felt like a kid in awe of the charm and grace of grown-ups when I saw these young rebellious beautiful people strutting their ways in arthouse-wanna-be movie like girl, interrupted.

Years passes by, somewhere inside me, I still feel like the 17-year-old kid who's clueless over what charm and grace the grown-up is about, and still in awe of the allure of those silver-screen hellcats...suddenly, i'm aware that now i'm 27, ten years have been passed. there're a bunch of interesting new-comers like megan fox or amanda seyfried or earlier scarlett johansson ..etc, and those women are all several years younger than me and I still look at them as if they were the superb grown-ups and I were the little jaded girl of 17. it's been quite a shock to realize a decade has passed while your mindset still lingers over the good old 90s with movies like lost highway, uma thurman in pulp fiction and patricia arquette in true romance...there's a sense of minor accomplishment in me to be able to grow into such stage like "i recall in my younger days, how different I was 10 years ago"..that sort of nostalgic routine. (when you were 17, 10 years ago you were just 7, so what was there for reminiscience? your life was a blank of desperate anxiety).

People always say it's good to be young, or sorrows should be left to the old, young people should be gay and full of fun...but frankly 17 was the most painful stage in my life, when you had the wildest ambitions of the world meanwhile hen-packed by your overbearing parents at home, you were not strong but brittle with a faux-poise which is so easy to shatter into pieces by a mean remark from others. you felt the lowest and the most vulnerable among all despite you've got youth, which didn't worth a dame because you were clueless about yourself, about the world. and your sorrows were cheapened because there wasn't any great cause behind them except your petite individual self-pity. (worthlessness is the word)...i would never wanna be 17 ever again (even I don't mind to look like 17 again, but be 17 again? NEVER!), and it's hateful because you're all alone there, without a bit substantial hard-boiledness to sustain you through the shits.

I suppose that was the circumstance when I watched girl, interrupted. I enjoyed the part lisa takes the pen to intimidate the nurse then soothes the tension casually with a one-liner "good to know!" or any of those over-sentimentalized melancholic shits about women who have lost their ways of life. now the stars are older, maturer: winona ryder became a thief, now struggles in obscure movies; angelina became a do-good addict of charities, motherhood and beauty-queen super-stardom in a bunch of commercial action movies; brittany murphy were just dead last year for anorexia and drug-overdose. now I feel like awakening from a slumerous dream like rip van winkle, and i've found myself an anachronistic misfit on everything. I suppose it's time to abandon the sentiments then strive my last effect to grasp the pleasure I could have in my late 20s. (i never felt young, the 20s young, always cowering within the 17-year-old fright of the world, the timid fear of the hostilities from the people..i had been afraid of the world.).

Still it's nice to "live thru this" (pun of the hole album), and I think i've trasncended that live thru this stage. I used to think life's very dreadfully boring with a series of even more serious sufferings after you're 30, and it would be a bless from god if you just die before it (adolescent mindset) or have a heartattack then just stop breathing. now I disapprove of such thinking, and maybe that's the reason I give this movie a three-star despite how much I liked it then.