Watched TV: Saw Love and Other Disasters (Alek Keshishian, 2006).

Watched TV: Saw Love and Other Disasters (Alek Keshishian, 2006). I saw it on the big screen back then, but it gets better on second viewing. Quite a gem, really, in its own very special way. Keshishian, famously, is the director of the absolutely indispensable Truth or Dare (In Bed With Madonna, 1991). Love and Other Disasters (nothing to do with the interesting Aussie pic Love and Other Catastrophes) is a romantic comedy that constantly pokes fun at itself and at the genre. I'm tempted to call it postmodernist, rather than postmodern, inasmuch as the metacinematic bits are so pointed and deliberate and pervasive. Lots of allusions to all sorts of pop culture monuments, from Whitney Houston to Karl Lagerfeld; permanent rewrite of Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany's (the critics who thought it was excessive missed the point, it was meant to be over-the-top); tremendous critical insights and jokes (like the line about only the French liking "truth" at the cinema!).

*Great fart / love theory (no spoiler here).

*Funny cameos by Dawn French, Gwyneth Paltrow and Orlando Bloom.

*Great Welsh actor Matthew Rhys playing a loveable gay guy (he does a loveable Californian gay guy in the good TV series Brothers and Sisters).

*Charming Venezuelan / Chilean actor Santiago Cabrera (he's in the good TV series Heroes) playing an Argentinian photographer.

*Totally adorable Britanny Murphy in the lead, doing Audrey. Adorable throaty voice, tremendous fake eyelashes. Spendidly perched, half-naked, on her spike heels, she makes the movie flow forward. I can see why some people might see her as insufferable, I guess.