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Quirk Lives

Fisher_king Michael Hirschorn has an article in the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly entitled "Quirked Around," in which he gathers together examples of endearing eccentricity both modern (Little Miss Sunshine) and relatively ancient (David Byrne). He’s against it, mostly, and he makes some good points. We do seem to be drowning in quirk of late.

In the 1980s, the major contributions to the catalog of teen quirk were made by John Hughes (catch Pretty in Pink tomorrow night on AMC and study both Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer). You can draw a direct line from Anthony Michael Hall's odd little dance in Sixteen Candles to Jon Heder's odd somewhat bigger dance in Napoleon Dynamite.

Quirk is positive. (Heroes have quirks. Villains have pathologies.) And sometimes it's not a film's characters who exhibit quirks, it's the film itself.  Witness The Fisher King, airing this month on AMC. It wanders off in unexpected directions, slows down, speeds up, digresses. Certain scenes – the ballroom dancing in Grand Central Station, Michael Jeter's singing telegram – are effective, beautiful even, in isolation. But they don’t fit comfortably into the larger narrative. The film is well worth a look, both for the fine acting (Robin Williams was nominated for his role; Mercedes Ruehl won for hers) and for the hallucinatory fantasy sequences.

Posted by Helen Pfeffer
September 13, 2007 10:01am


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