Laurel Canyon

Watched Laurel Canyon a few nights ago. The DVD. I liked it. A relationship movie. Written & directed by a woman. The last few scenes I thought particularly well written. A man and a woman in his psych program are mutually attracted; some nice dialogue in the car where he's trying to say he's sticking with his girlfriend and the woman asks him if he dreams about her, if he thinks about her when he's masturbating. I didn't remember in the press about the film reading that the two main female characters have a couple scenes of hot kissing. The same-sex affection is treated respectfully if a bit exotically. Nobody says anything disapproving. Except that the girlfriend and her sexy not-yet-mother-in-law doing the kissing might not be, the older woman acknowledges, the most appropriate interaction, considering.

There are, however, a couple lines of dialogue that stuck in my mind as unfortunate. The son, who is doing a psych internship, he's going to be a psychiatrist, tells his girlfriend he had to treat a patient who had a psychotic break as a result of taking the drug Ecstacy. This abstract suggests that it does happen, though they say "twelve cases of acute psychotic episodes after ecstasy have been ... in the [medical] literature." Considering the huge numbers who've ingested the drug that seems a number almost vanishingly small. The menace of Ecstasy is mainly the menace of drug war hysteria, not the chemical itself. As the young man in the movie who had the "psychotic break" was in all sorts of un-Ecstasy-related trouble it seemed facile and inappropriately fashion-conscious to blame Ecstasy.

The other line ... girlfriend says to boyfriend of her father, "He's a Puritan. He quotes Proust."

Come again? Proust? The definition of sensualist? Quoted by a Puritan? Isn't that like saying, "He's a Homophobe. He quotes Wilde."