Godammit, I’m Mad!

I haven’t seen The Darjeeling Limited but nevertheless I am here to share my review of it. It is the whimsical and sentimental story of three guys with huge noses. Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman struggle to get their noses to fit inside each frame,  examining the theme of The Nose as the mirror of the soul.

While the noses vie for superiority, one is naturally tempted to focus on Owen Wilson, whose halfhearted suicide attempt hovers over the movie like a cloud of black tar heroin. We see the flat, vacuous face of Kate Hudson in his tortured eyes, and we wonder if it was their hair that drew them together. Jason Schwartzman deploys his enormous nose with the usual panache, as would anyone whose uncle is Francis Ford Coppola.

The story is offbeat and witty, with an undertone of obscure homoeroticism and maybe even incest. Men belong together, the film suggests, instead of with Kate Hudson or Lisa Marie Presley, who was once Schwartzman’s Auntie. Angelica Hudson appears in a role that highlights her own large nose and important family connections.

All in all, if you like guys with big noses and you don’t mind whiny voices, this is a film to treasure. It will leave you feeling a stronger sense of your own facial blessings and a richer sense of why even suicide can’t solve problems.

Audrey Santo fell into a swimming pool when she was three years old and nearly died. Most of her brain died, apart from some activity in the brain stem. Later, her mother decided she was a ‘victim soul,’ someone who agrees to take on the suffering of others to pay for their sins. The comatose child became famous, and visitors came to her house to view her through a glass window. Religious statues and paintings in the house dripped with oily tears, which visitors could take home with them on q-tips.

It’s a weird and awful story that brings to mind Terri Schiavo, who at least didn’t have to undergo this indignity. Little Audrey Santo finally died early this year, but her story lives on, thanks to the miracle of the internets and my morbid preoccupation with stigmata. Read about Little Audrey here, here, and for maximum impact, here.

If that’s not enough for you, read about miraculous weeping statues, etc, here.