BEFORE: Here in the last few days of February, it feels like I've maybe reached the "It's complicated..." portion of the romance chain. But isn't love always complicated? It's been that way from the start, even if I didn't want to acknowledge it as such.
Emily Mortimer carries over again from "Rio, I Love You".
THE PLOT: The story of an obsessively organized efficiency expert whose life unravels in unexpected ways when fate forces him to explore the serendipitous nature of love and forgiveness.
AFTER: You know, some movies kind of feel like they've just been thrown together randomly, or perhaps they feel that way because they were made by committee, and all the little details had to pass through the hands of so many people before making it on to the screen that perhaps nobody ever stops to take a look at the big picture, or to look at the small details from a distance, just to make sure that they make, you know, sense. This feels like one of those movies, in which a man's very organized life begins to unravel one day because of a small event - the intent was to show that our lives are maybe like knitted sweaters, and everything is maintained as long as we don't pull on that little loose thread...
But the event here that causes all the cases is essentially a mistake - it's a movie flub, one that easily could have been fixed, only it wasn't. This main character's wife, realizing that he lives his life in a very organized fashion, changed the clock one morning in order to give him more time to return some rented movies. Normally if one were to do this (but really, nobody does this) one would set the clock on the wall ahead, say, 10 minutes and by doing so, you've perhaps given your life partner a gift, 10 extra minutes to get out the door early and get something done. But since this needs to be an event that disrupts his life, it's clear that they intended for the wife to make a mistake here - the simplest plot point would therefore be that she MEANT to turn the clock ahead, only she set it 10 minutes BACK, therefore making him late, too late to return the movies, too late to catch the ferry, and so on.
But that would make the wife stupid, it would show that she doesn't understand how time works, or that she'd be making him late, which he HATES, by setting the clock back. And we can't portray a normal, thinking human as stupid, especially a woman, because then we'd imply that all women are stupid, so it feels like somebody spoke up and changed this plot point. So since she didn't do THAT, we're left with the fact that she moved the clock ahead, and still somehow this made her husband late - that doesn't make any sense! The whole sequence doesn't work anyway, because the guy wears a watch, and is very organized and efficient to boot, so changing the clock on the kitchen wall wouldn't have made him late any more than changing the clock would have changed the actual time in the world. This whole sequence needed to be rewritten, or removed and replaced with something else that worked.
(Also, Daylight Savings Time is coming up in about two weeks, so I'd like to point out, once again, that changing the clocks twice each year does NOT change time itself, it's just a mass delusion that we've all agreed to, it causes MANY more problems than it solves, it's an expensive waste of money across the board, and should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Look, I know there are a lot of bigger problems in the world right now, but maybe next year if some things get better we can somehow lobby to get rid of DST? Like, come on, who's really in favor of keeping this antiquated system going? Who benefits?)
But let's move on, because the film clearly does, it just glosses over this big mistake and then shows Frank Allen missing the ferry, and being late for his seminar on time management. Yeah, that looks really bad, I don't know why everyone at the seminar didn't just demand a refund. After the seminar he hangs out in the hotel, and for some reason his best friend, Buddy, is there (this also makes no sense) and tries to get him to join in on hitting on two women - nope, this doesn't work either, because why would his best friend be encouraging Frank to cheat on his wife? OK, I guess maybe Buddy just wanted a wingman, but this is still clunky, clunky, clunky. And the best friend is named "Buddy", for Chrissakes - this shows how little thought went in to the details here.
Anyway, Frank doesn't act as Buddy's wingman, instead he has too many drinks in the hotel bar with another woman, one who invites herself up to his hotel room and tries to seduce him. She's apparently got a thing for sleeping with married men. Why? Just because - again, don't get bogged down in the details here, because clearly the writer didn't. Frank doesn't cheat on his wife, he excuses himself from the situation, and leaves the hotel without checking out (another thing that nobody does, because that's not how hotels work, either...). On the long drive home (the ferry doesn't operate at night, we're blatantly told), Frank encounters a very pregnant woman trying to drive herself to the hospital, who then crashes her car - so he drives "Pregnant Nancy" (that's her name in the credits, I swear...) to the hospital, sort of half-fills out the admission forms, and Pregnant Nancy gives birth, then she disappears. Umm - how? Why? She checked herself out of the hospital and left her baby behind? That's beyond weird, and it's yet another thing that doesn't happen, for a number of reasons.
Look, perhaps nothing is meant to be taken seriously here, because it's just too far-fetched in general, and people are seeing just not acting in reasonable ways, but remember there is a framing sequence, Frank is telling this story to his daughter's fiancé just before their wedding, so given that memory is unreliable, and Frank might be trying to illustrate a larger point about the randomness of life and love overcoming adversity, so he may be enhancing a few of the details here to bring about the result that he wants. There's no way to know for sure. What's important is that all these unlikely events create a scenario where Frank's wife sees evidence that Frank has been cheating on her, and possibly had a baby with another woman. But it has to bend itself over backwards in order to get there, and cut a few corners here and there to make THIS unlikely situation dovetail with THAT one, and so really, what are the chances of the pieces fitting together well when there's no real quality control?
A bigger story-telling sin is probably to be found in conflating several personality quirks - being organized, having OCD, and not taking any risks. These are three DIFFERENT lifestyles, but they're all sort of lumped together here as if Frank suffers from some over-arching condition - which results in him being a person so controlled by lists that he can't do anything in the real world without writing it down on the list first. As someone who maintains several lists of my own, I feel the need to speak up here. Just because I keep a list of movies to watch, it doesn't mean the list controls me - I made the list, so I'm in control of whether I follow it, or not. Yes, I like to think of myself as an organized person in some respects, but I've been known to leave the house or head out of town on a whim. OCD is a completely different problem, which often involves going back to check that the office door is locked even though I've already taken the elevator to the ground floor - I'm just not going to be able to relax until I'm 100% sure that door is locked, and if that means going back and double-checking, so be it. But yeah, if you reach the point where the list controls your life, or you're (essentially) rolling a die or flipping a coin to determine your next course of action, you may have a problem.
It's weird seeing Stuart Townsend in this - he's one of those actors I just don't see very often, and maybe I start to wonder about some actors, like, where do they GO when they're not making movies? I guess maybe some of them work in theater, or they take time off for personal reasons, not every actor feels compelled to make a blockbuster every year like Tom Cruise does. But I'm also reminded that we're WAY overdue for a "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" sequel - or a reboot, whichever. Is this in the works or did somebody really drop the ball with that franchise? Maybe the first one didn't make enough money, but I really liked that movie, even though it was a bastardization of the comic book's first volume in some ways. And now Sean Connery's passed away, just like his character. But the whole point of the book's second volume was that the team could just recruit new members, there were so many great literary characters to steal - I mean, borrow - to join the League. This franchise could easily continue with new old characters like John Carter and Dr. Moreau joining Dr. Jekyll and Captain Nemo, facing off against the Martians from "The War of the Worlds". Jeez, I'd watch that, somebody make it happen. (Ah, apparently this was in the planning stages in 2016, but Disney's acquisition of Fox's assets scrubbed it. Disney may eventually get around to exploiting it again...)
Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Stuart Townsend (last seen in "Aeon Flux"), Sarah Chalke (last seen in "Mother's Day"), Mike Erwin (last seen in "The New Guy"), Constance Zimmer, Matreya Fedor, Elisabeth Harnois (last seen in "A Single Man"), Chris William Martin (last seen in "The Age of Adaline"), Jovanna Huguet, Christopher Jacot, Alessandro Juliani (last seen in "Love Happens"), Jocelyne Loewen, Ty Olsson (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Donavon Stinson, Daryl Shuttleworth (last seen in "Watchmen").
RATING: 4 out of 10 index cards
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