BEFORE: Ginnifer Goodwin carries over from "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!" and over at TCM, it's Day 9 of their "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Spy Stories" (before 8 pm) and "Sports" (after 8 pm). Here's the line-up:
9:00 am "The Fallen Sparrow" (1943)
10:45 am "Foreign Correspondent" (1940)
1:00 pm "Watch on the Rhine" (1943)
3:00 pm "Ice Station Zebra" (1968)
5:30 pm "North by Northwest" (1959)
8:00 pm "The Pride of the Yankees" (1942)
10:15 pm "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956)
12:30 am "This Sporting Life" (1963)
3:00 am "Hoop Dreams" (1994)
6:00 am "The Stratton Story" (1949)
8:00 am "Pat and Mike" (1952)
I think I've only seen four out of these 11: "Foreign Correspondent", "North by Northwest", "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and "Pat and Mike". I was raised in Red Sox country, so you'll never catch me watching "The Pride of the Yankees". So not a terrible record today, but not a great one either. I'm now at 51 seen out of 104, or 49%. BUT, I'm going to record "Hoop Dreams", because it's been on my "someday/maybe" list for a long time, and I've got a doc block coming up with some sports movies in it, and I think it's going to fit right in-between two films on the list. It's going to crowd my April a bit, and make it a little more difficult to get to Mother's Day on time, but that movie is on the list of "1,001 Movies to Watch Before You Die" so I'll have to make some room.
THE PLOT: Friendships are tested and secrets come to the surface when terminally single Rachel falls for Dex, her best friend Darcy's fiancé.
AFTER: Now I kind of get why TCM is only devoting half a day to each topic - because I've been on the romance beat just WAY too long. Next time I've got to seriously consider trimming the list down to JUST February - 28 or 29 romance films seems a lot more manageable. If I had changed gears after "Maggie's Plan" I wouldn't be so burnt out right now. Sure, I'm proud that I finally crossed off "Green Card" and "The Pallbearer" and "Juliet, Naked", but was it really worth it if that meant I had to watch crap like "Monster-in-Law", "When in Rome" and whatever THIS is?
Maybe "Something Borrowed" is an OK film, maybe it's not, but now I'll never know because my perceptions might be out of whack. It's a movie about people falling in love, but I can't help it, I simply HATE all of these characters, and now I'm not sure if that's a screenwriting or directing problem, or if I am the problem. Let's assume for just a moment that I'm still OK and this movie sucks - what are the reasons?
For starters, every single person is SO self-centered - and they're all judging themselves based on whether they're in a working relationship or not, which is not healthy. There are millions of New-York based assholes who are NOT in relationships at the moment, and they're OK with that, or at least they should be. We all go through phases, different things happen to us and sometimes they're out of our control, and that's OK. We do the best we can to get by and we either struggle to improve our circumstances or we struggle to feel OK about the things we can't fix, and hopefully it all kind of works out in the end, or we die alone and then it doesn't matter.
But it's important during it all to be excellent to each other, and not just resort to being self-centered a-holes - but that seems to be the theme here, unfortunately, everyone just ends up being a self-centered a-hole, and that's not OK. Couldn't we have found a better way to tell this story than just exposing everyone as a self-centered a-hole? How come everyone, to get what they want or what they feel they deserve, has to hurt somebody else to do that? Is that the formula, for two people to be happy then some other person needs to be made miserable? I guess that's what happens when you start messing around with monogamy - for any two people to get together, there will therefore be at least one other person denied happiness. It's the classic love triangle, it appears to "work" until somebody makes an exclusive decision, and then one person is left out of the situation and therefore unhappy.
But even though there's a love triangle at the center of this - Rachel's loved Dex since college but once her pushy best friend Darcy had feelings for Dex too, then Rachel bowed out. And it's only with the approaching wedding that Rachel admits to Dex that she never acted on her feelings back then - and thanks to wedding jitters, Dex is willing to explore the other possibility, because it seems he got steamrolled by pushy Darcy, too, who always gets what she wants and leaves some form of destruction in her wake. But wait, there's more, because Rachel has a best friend, Ethan, who she's not that attracted to, but he carries a torch for her.
And because these are all NYC a-holes, that means that in addition to having impossibly large city apartments (WITH roofdecks) they also rent a house in the Hamptons for the summer, and that's where the love triangle really gets expanded, because Rachel brings Ethan, and Darcy brings Marcus to set Rachel up with Marcus, and also Claire, to set Claire up with Ethan. So now there's a chain of SIX people all staying in the same house every weekend - Claire pursues Ethan, who's realliy in love with Rachel, who's in love with Dex, who's getting married to Darcy, and what we find out MUCH too late, Darcy's got a thing for Marcus, so come on, nobody's very happy where they are, everyone wants to be with someone else, and I guess that's what makes the world turn, but it's just so pathetic. The spirit of William Shakespeare is looking down on this and saying, "NO NO, this isn't what I had in mind AT ALL!"
But hey, if you want to watch almost two hours of people who can't make good decisions and situations that just can't be resolved while people keep digging their holes deeper, go ahead. Just be warned that it can be extremely frustrating to watch everyone continue to make every romantic situation worse, and not better. Look, I'm not saying I have all the answers, but if something's bugging you, take action. If you care about somebody, take a damn step in that direction - and if you get a vibe that they're not the one for you, then take a damn step back. DO SOMETHING, don't just wallow in your misery or take your frustrations out on the people who you care about, or who care about you for some reason.
Darcy's clearly the villain here, she acts like a Bridezilla but she's also rude in every other aspect, and she has no boundaries, always prying into everyone's personal business and pointing out their shortcomings - and this is with her FRIENDS, imagine what she's like with people she doesn't like. Oh, and what's Darcy's job, anyway? Does she have one? I realize the film is here to focus on relationships and such, but there's no balance - we don't know what half the characters do for a living, and even when we know they're a lawyer, we never see them at work. Our perspective gets really skewed if there's no balance, if we only see these characters at night, on dates, going house-hunting, partying their asses off. This is kind of why we hate them, because real people have to spend half of their time working, and we don't get to see that half here, it's a problem.
But mostly we just see them making more problems for themselves, and not taking steps to fix them. It's also way too flashbacky, because it starts in the middle and then has to go back later and show us how Rachel screwed things up with Dex in college by NOT acting when she should have, and letting Darcy steamroll all over her. But look back on one tiny thing, Rachel shows up for her first law school class with four pens, arranges them neatly on the desk in front of her, then promptly knocks them all on the floor, but is too embarrassed to get up, pick up a pen from the floor, and continue on. She made the problem much more complicated than it needed to be, and then she couldn't bring herself to solve the problem in a very simple way - just STAND UP, walk around and pick a pen up off the floor! No? Too much work? OK, just sit there then and wait for the man to give you HIS pen and fix YOUR problem, you clueless dolt.
EVERYTHING in this film is like that, much more complicated than it needed to be, from Darcy forgetting her purse to Rachel drinking too much at her birthday party, to Darcy's phony story about getting accepted to Notre Dame, pretending to have to work on July 4, and so on. There are simple solutions - maybe don't drink so much, maybe don't forget your purse, maybe call your best friend out on her bullshit. If you can't do these simple things, then I just can't help you. And once you start telling lies to your best friend because you're sleeping with her fiancé, and then you have to tell MORE lies to support your previous lies, yeah, wow, you're really in deep and it sucks to be you. But that's probably when this film crossed over the line, from romantic comedy to romantic tragedy. None of these people deserve to be happy after the fall-out, and it's kind of wrong to portray them as such, maybe?
Whatever else you do, do NOT watch the post-credits scene. It makes no sense, it's completely out of place and even more misguided than the film, and it implies that there will be a sequel. But it's been 12 years now, and so far, no sequel. Thank God.
Also starring Kate Hudson (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Colin Egglesfield (last seen in "Reprisal"), John Krasinski (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Steve Howey (last seen in "Stuber"), Ashley Williams (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Geoff Pierson (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Jill Eikenberry (last seen in "Young Adult"), Jonathan Epstein, Sarah Baldwin, Mark La Mura (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Sandy Dell (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Brian McCormack (last seen in "Fair Game"), Peyton List (last seen in "Hubie Halloween") with archive footage of Glenn Close (last seen in "Swan Song"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Haywire"), Neve Campbell (last seen in "Scream 4"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), Denise Richards (last seen in "Love Actually")
RATING: 4 out of 10 shriveled-up red roses (see, THIS is why my wife told me to not buy her flowers any more....)
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