Even the title of the new Miguel Arteta crooked comedy of manners, The Good Girl, is contrary and mocking. Like Chuck and Buck, this director's previous collaboration with the writer Mike White, Girl is about a perverse need to create romance. Here it's like a Bette Davis melodrama: ambition and heartache with a poisonous under-current of anti-bourgeois absurdity. And it's a winner, helped along by a no-frills performance by Jennifer Aniston as the soul-sick cashier Justine.
Justine spends her dreary days at Retail Rodeo, a down-at-the-heels Texas version of stores like Target and Wal-Mart. Her co-workers include a thoughtless, proud manager (John Caroll Lynch), a bullying born-again security guard (Mr. White) and Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel), who makes sour, deadpan attacks on the inane day-to-day routine of the store's public address system.
When Justine stares into the big, droopy eyes of Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a new employee who wears his voluble, depressive air like the Red Badge of Courage, she's enchanted. In his early 20s and still living at home, Holden is smitten by Justine's worldliness, even though when he tells her he was named after the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, she asks if his name is Catcher. (It's one in a series of running riffs on the character's name that The Good Girl supplies.)
PHOTO COURTESY OF PROVIEW ENTERTAINMENT
Despite this episode, The Good Girl doesn't condescend. Justine's own life is treated like that of a J.D. Salinger character. Now 30, she's mired in her job and in a marriage to Phil (John Reilly), an amiable stoner and house painter whose initiative was long ago suffocated in clouds of weed smoke. (Apparently, so was his ability to father children.) Most of the time he sits and blazes joints with his pal Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson). So when Justine begins an affair with Holden, whose pliable lower lip fills her ears with his literary pretensions to suffering, she's at first fulfilled. But eventually she becomes as much Holden's mom as she is Phil's, even though she embarked on the relationship with Holden to give her life a new charge.
It's Aniston who surprises in The Good Girl. In some ways she may feel as trapped as Justine by playing Rachel Green, the poor little rich daddy's girl of television's Friends. She comes up with an inventively morose physicality for Justine: her arms hang at her sides as though shackled; they're not limp appendages but weighed down with unhappiness. The plucky dream girls she's played in movies like the underseen 1999 classic Office Space are expressive and given to anxious displays of hand waving. But here she articulates Justine's sad tales through a narration that's as affected and misery laden as Holden's ragged, ripped-off fiction.
And for Arteta, Aniston's comic authority is a sure laugh-getter. The persuasive results are a ripe, daffy comedy about the turbulent mixture of depression and jealousy. The director and writer don't judge their characters; rather they show how difficult it is to maintain morality, and that the actions of needy people set in motion a capricious fate that damages everyone.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PROVIEW ENTERTAINMENT
Arteta is more than lucky in assembling an able-bodied cast, and his comfort with actors has grown. With Chuck and his previous Star Maps, he focused more on the ideas behind the scripts; in The Good Girl, he works out the emotional life of the material. The sum total is far more satisfying and tougher to shake off.
There's great support, too, from the always solid Reilly and Gyllenhaal, who's become a specialist in sending up infantile narcissism. He satirizes the spaniel-eyed sensitivity that other actors would exploit. And Nelson is both sprightly and rueful; he gets a lot out of his honeyed yokel's voice.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby