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claire danes
August 2009 
Shopgirl
Posted on Feb 6th, 2007
by 
Steve
Steve
I was watching the movie ‘Shopgirl’ the other night and I saw the most inexplicable thing. I saw my old life.
Whenever I watch a movie that has been shot in a city in which I have lived or traveled through, I tend to look for landmarks in the exterior shots. Places I’ve been. Things that I’ve seen. There is a certain overwhelming glee in seeing a place that I’ve visited immortalized on celluloid.
In this particular film, exterior shots were somewhat limited. The fact that the majority of the film took place in Los Angeles was not exactly a motivating factor of the film, however, the director, and perhaps writer Steve Martin, was trying to portray that the simplicity of the heroine’s life occurs in the overlooked places, as do most of the adventures of the everyday person. As such, the heroine, played by Claire Danes, lived in the often overlooked Silver Lake.
In a grand establishing shot of Sunset Junction, I noticed the unmistakable sign for the landmark, and remarked to my current ex-girlfriend Jasmine that I used to live there. Within three seconds, I saw the most notable of Los Angeles’ landmarks, the apartment where I lived while I called Los Angeles home. If you happen to have the DVD, at 50 minutes and 40 seconds into the film, the camera pans across Sunset Junction. There is a building with blue trim under the two tallest palm trees that once housed the man who brings you these words.
The irony of this miraculous event is that within an hour of the ending of the film, which told the story of a girl’s relationships with a man who could give her everything but love and a boy who didn’t know how to, my then girlfriend decided to end our relationship.
Perhaps it’s frivolous of me to say that she decided to end the relationship. Perhaps I should say that she transmogrified it by setting me free of the shackles of looming matrimony. Or perhaps I should say that she finally agreed with the logic that I used when breaking up with her, bastard that I am, on Christmas Eve, a division of our paths that lasted two days before we both realized that parting would be harder than expected.
Suffice it to say that my Mirabelle has complete control of her life again, and I have recently looked at an available apartment as close to the traffic-laden Fruitville Road as my immortalized apartment was to Sunset Boulevard. Shall history repeat itself and let the drone of traffic lull me to sleep. Or will I wake up from this amber dream to find myself a better environment to extricate the future which awaits me?
Whenever I watch a movie that has been shot in a city in which I have lived or traveled through, I tend to look for landmarks in the exterior shots. Places I’ve been. Things that I’ve seen. There is a certain overwhelming glee in seeing a place that I’ve visited immortalized on celluloid.
In this particular film, exterior shots were somewhat limited. The fact that the majority of the film took place in Los Angeles was not exactly a motivating factor of the film, however, the director, and perhaps writer Steve Martin, was trying to portray that the simplicity of the heroine’s life occurs in the overlooked places, as do most of the adventures of the everyday person. As such, the heroine, played by Claire Danes, lived in the often overlooked Silver Lake.
In a grand establishing shot of Sunset Junction, I noticed the unmistakable sign for the landmark, and remarked to my current ex-girlfriend Jasmine that I used to live there. Within three seconds, I saw the most notable of Los Angeles’ landmarks, the apartment where I lived while I called Los Angeles home. If you happen to have the DVD, at 50 minutes and 40 seconds into the film, the camera pans across Sunset Junction. There is a building with blue trim under the two tallest palm trees that once housed the man who brings you these words.
The irony of this miraculous event is that within an hour of the ending of the film, which told the story of a girl’s relationships with a man who could give her everything but love and a boy who didn’t know how to, my then girlfriend decided to end our relationship.
Perhaps it’s frivolous of me to say that she decided to end the relationship. Perhaps I should say that she transmogrified it by setting me free of the shackles of looming matrimony. Or perhaps I should say that she finally agreed with the logic that I used when breaking up with her, bastard that I am, on Christmas Eve, a division of our paths that lasted two days before we both realized that parting would be harder than expected.
Suffice it to say that my Mirabelle has complete control of her life again, and I have recently looked at an available apartment as close to the traffic-laden Fruitville Road as my immortalized apartment was to Sunset Boulevard. Shall history repeat itself and let the drone of traffic lull me to sleep. Or will I wake up from this amber dream to find myself a better environment to extricate the future which awaits me?
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