Philadelphia!

So last weekend, I attended the greatest wedding I've ever seen. It was called Rachel Getting Married. Now if you don't know Rachel you should and if you don't know Kym, her sister, then you REALLY should because she's Anne Hathaway. If you haven't caught on, I'm talking about a movie. This is the ultimate wedding film and family film. Jonathan Demme who over a decade ago redefinied a genre with Silence of the Lambs has done it again. What I love about this is his choice to film it as if the camera is a character itself. It's intimate and you're in this set space of a limited time - just a few days. You come in on these characters problems not at the very beginning like most films are but right smack in the middle of it. You see it as it is. It doesn't give everything that happened in the past, but just enough so you can follow where this family dysfunction comes from. Anne Hathaway is great, giving her best performance to date, but the rest of the cast, while mostly unknowns or theaters actors are all very strong. While it feels like a huge ensemble, and it is, Demme cast most of his friends and family as extras and the cast's friends and families so everyone felt comfortable with one another. I knew I'd love this film about half way through, there's a rehearsal dinner scene where about 10 different people give speeches. Half of these people, are really limited roles, some of the people giving a speech, we haven't seen in the film and won't see again, but what they have to say about Rachel and her future-husband is so beautiful and of course, it's all leading up to what Rachel is going to say and how it's gonna affect this family and boy does her speech deliver. There's so much to this film that makes it great, check it out.



It's a great time to live in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Phillies won the 2008 World Series this past week and the entire city just went nuts. Out on Broad Street, seas of people marched all the way to City Hall to riot and it was nuts. A few film friends and I took a camera out and documented the chaos at its finiest, catching people hanging off stop lights, screaming drunk and standing on top of moving vehicles. It was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it in all my life and I probably never will again. City Hall was a complete riot and it was amazing. That was Wednesday night and this afternoon on Friday, they had a Philadelphia Phillies Parade and even more people were down there celebrating, detched out in their red and white. We saw all the players come by on top of buses and the whole Broad Street and Market and City Hall went crazy. It was the most incredible moment I've ever seen in the city. It makes me proud to live in the city. Its been like 25 years and we earned it.