Shopgirl

Somehow last Saturday night we ended up without the kids (Krista's mom took them) and with forty bucks (donated by my parents). Krista and I had a great night out. We started with dinner at the AMAZING Jerusalem Cafe. I highly recommend starting all your evenings there if you are able. Then we bought some snacks at a soulless chain grocery store and headed off to see "Shopgirl", the new Steve Martin film.

I love Steve Martin. And the movie was well done. But I can't really recommend it. It had its funny moments but mostly it was the story of a lot of lonely people having lonely sex (no surprise to those of us who have read the novella).

I will say this, though. I can't shake this one image in the film that shows the main character (Mirabelle) lying in her bed looking up through her skylight, straight at the audience. The narrator says something to the effect of, "What she really needed was an omniscient voice to tell everyone that she was there and that she was valuable, this girl, this one right here, the one that works at Saks in the glove department" and as he speaks the camera pans back and we see that all the houses have skylights and it pans back farther and we see that the skylights are actually the stars in the sky. That picture--every star representing a lonely, detached person in Los Angeles--I can't shake it. It makes me melancholy. It makes me sad for all those poor lost souls out there who don't know the Creator and really honestly have no idea how to find peace, completion, rest, companionship.