Now what should I say about I [Heart] Huckabees? I just watched it, a movie that I had been wanting to see for awhile now. The writer and director, David O. Russell, impressed me greatly with his last film, Three Kings. Thus, I was eager to see his follow up and became more so upon seeing the trailer over and over at work on the promo DVD we loop in the department. I loved the trailer's closing montage with music from the movie, throwing out random shots and scenes to screw with the viewer's head and leave you wondering just what the hell the movie is about.

If you've seen it, you know. If you've read a review of it, you probably know. The movie is about existence, about existentialism. It's about what the hell the point of life is. It's a strange and bizarre and uneven movie, one that seems to have so many ideas bouncing around that you hardly know where to begin. It opens strangely, in a confusing manner, and quickly shows itself to be one very odd movie, as Jason Schwartzman's character, Albert, goes to see a pair of existentialist detectives--played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman. As that scene progressed, I was left wondering what the hell I had gotten myself in to. The movie was strange, clearly, and I suspected it was not going to get any less strange as it progressed.

And oh, it doesn't. There are bizarre daydreams and weird visual effects and the conflicting base ideas of whether everything is connected or if everything is nothing, pointless, utterly unconnected. It's a great conflict of ideas for a movie, but I'm not sure if I [Heart] Huckabees is nearly as great a movie as it aspires to be.

I hardly know what to think of this film. There are some great momemnts in it, without a doubt. There are some funny as all fuck scenes, to boot. When Mark Whalberg's character, Tommy, and Albert have dinner with a Christian family and their adopted Sudanese son, well . . . it gets out of hand quickly. Once you have Whalberg's character yelling at the father about petroleum and the father yelling at Schwartzman's character about Socialism, the scene becomes utterly bizarre, but disarming and entertaining at the same time.

Oh, but what to think about this? Existentialism is right up my alley, just the kind of deep shit that any self-respecting mid-twenties person such as myself likes to pretend to seriously think about. And, despite the flippancy of that sentence, I do sometimes think about all of that. What is the point of being here? What is the point of existence? I don't know, I'll say without hesitation, but I have certain thoughts on the subject. I have thoughts on the idea of whether or not everything is connected. I tend to fall into the connected camp, and yet there are times when I think that it's all bullshit, that this life is little more than floating through existence and trying, hoping, that there is something greater and deeper behind what seems to be endless and random inflictions of pain.