Shopgirl

Steve Martin wrote the best selling novella, adapted it for the big screen and now also stars in Shopgirl, the Anand Tucker directed love story about searching for that small connection that can mean love, little moments that cause a big impact in someone, and even though the look or the moment is not right, sometimes is just enough for it to be love. Even though it has some stuff that didn't work for me, it's pretty good, and I really liked it.

This is not the cliched Hollywood love story. The male characters here don't fight over the girl or anything like that. And there are no characters breaking up and then getting back together at the end in the usual big fashion.
Instead we have Claire Danes as Mirabelle, a lonely girl, depressed, with low self esteem and a weird, old looking wardrobe. She works at the gloves department in the Saks Fifth Avenue in Los Angeles, and even though she is not looking for love, she wants it.
She meets Jeremy (played by Jason Schwartzman) one day while doing laundry, and they go out. He's an "ok guy" he says, and he's right. But he's also clueless about relationships and love, but he's charming, and Mirabelle sees that in him. There could be something in him, they have stuff in common (they are both wannabe artists, very different ones though), but she knows he is not ready yet.
Jeremy works at an amps shop, but he has big ideas for them as they are very important for musicians he says, even though nobody gives them respect. But soon he is backstage at a concert, the band's machines fail, Jeremy saves the day his amps and soon he leaves with the band on a road trip around the country that will change his life, he'll learn about love and perhaps will be ready for Mirabelle one day.
So he leaves, but it must be Mirabelle's lucky week, as she meets Ray Porter (played by Steve Martin) one day at work. Ray is an older man, has money, is sophisticated, and he is charming too. They go out, and she falls in love quickly. He likes her and cares about her, and he tells her that, but he also leads her to believe that they have a future together, when inside (and to his therapist) he's thinks that he only wants to sleep with her and use her when he's in town (he's a logistics guy and is usually out of town).

The movie has a little bit of everything when it comes to the performances.
Steve Martin was fine, though he tried to do the kind of quite person that Bill Murray plays often these days (like in Lost in Translation) but I don't think it worked that well here.
And I loved his voice over in the Father of the Bride movies, but here it pretty much sucks. He is doing the voice over, but the one talking is not Ray Porter, the character he plays, is just a narrator. That was very distracting.
Claire Danes was all over the place, happy and sad, laughing and crying, but it was a very good, very realistic performance. Her Mirabelle is the usual pretty ugly girl at first glance, but once she starts acting is amazing.
And then Jason Schwartzman. He was truly brilliant. I don't know how much is he acting here, because I've seen him in interviews and he is kind of like that, but still, he was excellent. The situations his character has are hilarious. I was almost in tears in his scenes with Bridgette Wilson (who plays Lisa, a coworker of Mirabelle's) and I think that if he would've had a couple emotional scenes he could've ended up Oscar nominated. Is a performance a lot like Thomas Haden Church's last year in Sideways, minus the crying.

The soundtrack is pretty good, lots of indie rock, but the melody played in that excessive amount of slow motion scenes got annoying after the first few times. The way they made Los Angeles look, while not true, is pretty good, smoke free so you can see an apartment from one side of the city to the other.
I had mixed feelings about Shopgirl at first, but the more I think about it in my head, and the more I talk about it, the more I like it every time, and it's a movie I'm sure I'll watch again.