We saw an extraordinary movie Saturday night, After the Wedding.
I don’t want to describe the plot, because I knew nothing about the movie before I saw it (the Big Man ordered it from NetFlix), and I think that’s the best way to see it.
I’m struggling to explain why I loved this movie so much, without making it sound like a lot of work – which it’s not. It’s a completely riveting, enjoyable movie.
In law school, exams often take the form of “issue-spotters.” The professor presents a story of a few paragraphs, and you have to spot and analyze all the legal issues. They’re exhausting, but also sort of fun.
Well, for me, After the Wedding was a happiness-project issue-spotter.
Happiness questions abound in After the Wedding: what’s the nature of happiness? how do we live by our values? how do we put love into action? Every time I thought the movie was slipping into simple cliché, it twisted into something more complex.
I love a surprise ending (like The Sixth Sense or Jacob’s Ladder), and the ending of After the Wedding – though not really a “surprise” – was astonishing. Just at the end, when it seems like the characters have resolved their issues, everything opens up again with a few comments by a six-year-old.
This makes the move sound dull and preachy, but it wasn’t at all. I haven’t seen such a great movie on the subject of happiness and love (and virtue – fact is, if you want happiness and love, you have to have virtue) since the happiness masterpiece Junebug.
*
My friend Marci Alboher, author of the terrific book, One Person/Multiple Careers and on-line columnist for the New York Times, tagged me in a meme called The W List: Women Who Blog. It was started with this post by Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent to catalog the great blogs by women. The list has grown quite a bit since the original post because when you’re tagged, you’re supposed to republish the list with your additions.
So I’m going to tag four women who have great blogs that I really enjoy — partly because the blogs allow me to enter into an experience, in many but not all ways, so different from my own. And they’re so different from one another that it’s funny for me to see them listed in a group. That’s part of what’s great about the Internet – the mash-up of all information.
So check out…
Brangien Davis at the Petri Project
Jennifer Niesslein at Jennifer Niesslen’s Internet Presence
Carolyn Elefant at My Shingle
Carolyn, Juggling Frogs
Confounded by my un-techiness, I can’t seem to figure out how to copy the complete list, with links, into my post. So to see the list, which is well worth a look, I refer you back to The HeyMarci Blog.
*
New to the Happiness Project? Consider subscribing to my RSS feed: Subscribe to this blog’s feed. Or sign up to get email updates in the box at the top righthand corner.
