Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

My hostess for the evening mentioned that she had a copy of Secretary and asked whether I'd like to watch it. It's been on my "I really want to see this" since I read an article about it shortly before it hit theatres, so I said yes. (She said she's shown it to a lot of guests, so she's seen it several times now.)

Short review: Wow.

I'm going to want to watch it again sometime. The actors playing the lead characters are both very good -- his character is somewhat opaque for the first half of the movie (neither one really starts of knowing himself/herself, but he's more self-controlled and, uh, "tightly lidded" than she is), but both actors are good enough that I often knew what the characters were thinking and feeling even when the characters themselves weren't sure. There were several, "Oh, he/she just figured X out!" moments visible on their faces, along with a bunch of, "Oh yeah, I've seen that reaction in real life!" moments for me.

While one character starts out as almost a charicature at the beginning, they both wind up being believable characters in a mostly-believable story. (I say "mostly" because I was aware of some elements of self-discovery and relationship progress being time-compressed for the sake of the pacing of the movie -- there were several, "Well, he probably wouldn't have gotten away with that," or, "They probably would have talked about that" moments, but they were all forgivable because they didn't destroy the story as a whole.)

The line, "For the first time in my life, I felt beautiful," really jumped out at me.

I'm going to have to find a copy of the story the movie was adapted from / based on.