This was only my second time seeing Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and I loved every minute of it. The first time I saw it was a year or so ago at the California Theater in downtown San Jose, another fancy movie palace.
I won’t ruin the story of the movie for those of you who haven’t seen it, but let’s just say that Audrey Hepburn plays “Holly Golightly”, a not-so-innocent girl who seems to be the life of the party for anyone she meets. Something about her charm and spacey attitude really works for me. The only weakness of the movie in my eyes is her co-star of George Peppard as Paul, or Fred-Baby… depending on who is on screen at any given moment. The rumor is that Paul Newman was supposed to play the role of Paul, but plans fell through. I love Paul Newman, and think he would be great in the role, and much more interesting than Peppard, but I also think that Breakfast At Tiffany’s required a lower-key actor to play alongside Audrey to allow her to radiate more off the screen. I can imagine if it were her and Paul Newman, the hotness of the movie would hurt the story and style of the film.
Three things I find very interesting about this movie:
1) Audrey Hepburn’s style is unmatched. No one has ever come close to looking as modernly elegant has her in any movie. She’s built like a boy, and just ends up looking so gorgeous. Her hairstyle was just perfect for her outfits every time, and the shades that made her look high ironically worked to make her look even more elegant sometimes. My only complaint was we didn’t get more focus on her shoes…
2) Moon River: This might be the saddest song ever. Every time it came into the film it was very affecting. The song acts as Holly’s theme song, and serves as the centerpiece of the film in the scene where she plays and sings the song on her balcony, using her real voice and an acoustic guitar. The scene works as a sort of confession that she gives to the streets below, and in my opinion identifies her with the alley cat theme that the film carries as a subtext.
3) The final scene... I won’t ruin it, but it has to be one of the most gut-wrenching scenes ever. There is such a sense of loss, pain, and disappointment all wrapped up into about three or four minutes of film, it hits like a brick in an otherwise upbeat film. As Emily said, the cat in the film deserves an Oscar for his performance.
After the movie, we went to Paxti’s Chicago Pizza. The place is not very big, and has a very long wait time for food, but the pizza was pretty good. An 8 on my pizza scale for the main ingredients: the cheese, and spaghetti sauce topping was nice, and it was a nice place to eat. Unfortunately, it scored pretty low on my scale for crust and leftovers. The crust is pie crust, and I’m not a fan of it…. And, the pizza simply was not good later that night when I took some leftovers home. That’s too bad. Tomatina pizza is still #1 in my book, tied with a funky little place in Napa that I always forget the name of….
We had some gelato afterwards, and it was good as always. It was a good way to spend a Saturday night.
Hopefully the Stanford Theater will get off its butt and get some more great film series’ showing there like they did in 2003 and 2004. Emily and I practically lived there back then, when they had Western and Jimmy Stewart marathons.
