THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES

Imaginative, impetuous and wild, Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) can’t wait for her adult life to begin. Whiling away the final days of high school in the lush springtime, Diana tests her limits with sex and drugs as her more conservative friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) watches with concern. But Diana’s aura of invincibility is shattered when a senseless act of violence erupts at school, forever changing the lives of the two best friends. Fifteen years later, a grown Diana (Uma Thurman) is still trying to come to terms with the traumatic events of that fateful day. On the surface, the adult Diana has made a picture perfect life for herself. She’s still living in the sleepy Connecticut suburb she grew up in with her husband Paul, a professor at the local college. Her beautiful young daughter, Emma, is smart and creative, and possesses a fiercely independent streak reminiscent of her mother. But all is not well—as the anniversary of her adolescent trauma approaches, the darkness that Diana has tried to escape closes in. Meanwhile, her husband has become increasingly absent, her daughter has taken to hiding from teachers, and worst of all, Diana’s own grip on reality is starting to falter. Moving seamlessly through both stages of Diana’s evolution, THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES delves deep into the crossroads that we all face—where a simple decision can change the course of everything to come, and where a lifetime can be encapsulated in a single moment. With THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES, Vadim Perelman, director of the acclaimed HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, has established himself as one of America’s greatest young directors of serious, probing drama.

Crazy Love

Oldest story in the book: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl because she finds out he’s been lying to her face about getting a divorce…
***1/2
Distributor: Magnolia
Cast: Burt Pugach and Linda Riss Pugach
Director: Dan Klores
Producers: Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens
Genre: Documentary
Rating: PG-13 for language, including sexual references, and mature thematic elements
Running time: 92 min.
Release date: June 1, 2007 NY, June 8 ltd
Oldest story in the book: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl because she finds out he’s been lying to her face about getting a divorce. Boy hires thugs to blind girl by throwing lye into said face. Boy gets sentenced to hard time.

But boy, oh boy, is there a Crazy twist here: Boy gets paroled and…marries girl!

The second straight Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee from director Dan Klores, Crazy Love documents certifiable couple Burt Pugach and Linda Riss Pugach, whose irregular relationship has been chronicled in the headlines of the front pages of New York newspapers since the 1950s.

It all started in 1957, when Burt—an angular, ambulance-chasing attorney—spotted brown-eyed beauty Linda sitting on a park bench.

His reaction: “I gotta have her.”

Her reaction: “I said, ‘What the hell is all this?’”

An audience’s initial reaction to the stranger-than-fiction fiasco that followed may be similar to Linda’s, but there’s no denying that Burt was a flashy fellow—squiring the 15-years-younger woman around town in a powder blue convertible, instructing the house band at his nightclub to play “Linda” whenever she walked in the door. Fans of that old standard will recall its lovelorn lyrics:

But miracles still happen
and when my lucky star begins to shine,
with one lucky break,
I’ll make Linda mine.

Crazy Love is proof that miracles do, indeed, still happen—in this case, that these charismatic characters’ emotional honesty with not only each other, but also the filmmakers, almost makes sense of their marriage. That, for Burt, taking care of Linda is the only way he can ever really make it up to her, and that, for Linda, letting him do it is “the best revenge.”