Margaret

I'm watching Margaret. I'm 1:58:44 in but so far wow!

The gold standard for movies seems to be that they pull you in and you momentarily forget that you are watching a movie. But because I'm watching it on DVD I get to pause. And I do. So the illusion is frequently being broken and I see the seams. So I hear the words as dialog/script, the characters as actors, and the spaces as locations and sets. Normally seeing the seams is considered a bad thing but in this case it's not. In this case the seams reinforce how good the illusion is. As a matter of fact, without the seams I wouldn't like the movie because I don't like or identify with any of the main characters. There is a selfishness that pervades all of them that [if this were TV] makes me want to switch channels. But in the universe that this movie creates they are real. There are real people in America, right now, that are these characters and would say what they say, how they said it, and  would feel exactly how these characters feel. It's just that, if I lived in this universe, I wouldn't be friends with any of them.

Margaret isn't a "Must See" film. But I feel I need to add it to my personal collection in the event that I ever have a daughter. Because once the onset of teenagerism takes hold, if she is remotely like Lisa (the main character) her mother and I are going to need all the help we can get. So I think Margaret will serve as great reference material, not in telling us what to do or not do, but because it seems to honestly represent an example of what I teenager in a particular type of emotional crisis looks like.