Like family

Union Square

Crit

In the opening sequence, Lucy (Mira Sorvino) is composing a text to a lover on her smart phone. Apparently seeking the precise level of flirtiness desired, she erases 2 or 3 drafts before settling on "Time 4 a meeting today? Cal [sic] me" and hitting Send. We're seeing all of this as a close-up on the screen of the phone, and for a fraction of a second after the Send, we see the history of texts sent. It looks like something out of The Shining:

Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
Time 4 a meeting today? Cal me.
[And then somewhere around here something different.]

Now, 3 months ago I would have seen that and thought, "odd," if I thought about it at all, but my post-Scary Normal self quickly does the math and realizes that no one on the set--Sorvino (or perhaps the hand stand-in for the shot), props person, script supervisor, DP, director, maybe even editor (though I suspect the brevity of the visibility can be credited to that operative)--ever said, "Hey, we need to clear the send history of this phone after every take!" And so if you get the DVD and freeze frame and count, you can probably tell exactly how many takes there were of this scene.

The film is a moderately interesting, extremely stagey (though seemingly not originally incarnated as a play) drama about one fucked-up honest sister and another (Tammy Blanchard) in denial about who she is, thus fucked up in a different way. (She has told her fiancé that her family is from Maine, and the fact that he doesn't seem even to begin to grasp the truth when Bronx-talking Lucy shows up suggests that Jenny will never have much trouble getting him to believe her lies.) Spoiler alert: they're fucked up because their mother is Patti LuPone.