BEFORE: Now I'm finally getting to some romantic comedies - so I think the dark days are over for now. In a few days I've got a neat little transition back to some classic films from the 1940's and 1950's, and those always tend to have happy endings. But for tonight, I'm back on Netflix for this film, and Amy Adams carries over from "Junebug" and completes a hat trick.
Here's tomorrow's line-up for "31 Days of Oscar" on TCM for Saturday, February 10 - celebrating the nominees and winners for the Best Art Direction award:
7:30 am "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" (1962)
10:00 am "Little Women" (1949)
12:15 pm "Knights of the Round Table" (1953)
2:30 pm "The Red Shoes" (1948)
5:00 pm "America, America" (1963)
8:00 pm "Moulin Rouge" (1952)
10:15 pm "Julius Caesar" (1953)
12:30 am "Barry Lyndon" (1975)
3:45 am "Camelot" (1967)
I've seen 2 of these - "Julius Caesar" and "Barry Lyndon", plus I've got another 2 on my watchlist - "Knights of the Round Table" and "Camelot", which I plan to watch together (along with "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword") as soon as I can, in April or May, I think. So I'm going to count another 4 out of 9, which brings me up to 39 seen out of 108. Still hovering around 36%, and I still haven't found anything I need to record this year. Which is fine, that frees me up to keep adding more current films to the watchlist.
THE PLOT: Anna Brady travels to Dublin, Ireland to propose to her boyfriend, Jeremy, because, according to Irish tradition, a man who receives a marriage proposal on February 29 must accept it.
AFTER: Around this time last year, I was watching a succession of rather horrible "road trip" movies, like "The Sweetest Thing" and "Just Married" - in that last one, a man and woman went on a honeymoon in Europe, and whatever could go wrong certainly did. Ah, slapstick, the lowest form of comedy. Today's film shares some DNA with that sort of "bad vacation" storyline, because most of the story is what happens on the way to Dublin, Ireland, not what happens when she finally gets there. So on one level, everything HAS to go wrong, because if she arrives OK and on time, the story is essentially over.
So we get to see Amy Adams (as Anna) have plane trouble, then boat trouble, then car trouble, and finally train trouble. Which allows for many more beautiful views of Ireland's scenery, as mandated by the Irish Tourism Board (I'm guessing...). However, any potential increase in tourism was no doubt offset by the depiction of how hard it is (apparently) to get from one point in Ireland to another - and the capital, no less. Look, Ireland is just a little bigger in size than West Virginia, and if you can't get across West Virginia in one day, man, you're just not trying hard enough.
You'd think that at some point she would realize that the universe is against her, it really doesn't want her to get to Dublin, and a more superstitious person would take that as some kind of sign. Oh, now the cows are blocking the road. Oh, now it's raining, now it's hailing, now she rolled down the hill and fell in the mud. BUT she's one of those obsessive planning types, and if I weren't one of those people myself, I'd probably hate the fact that she's one, too. She had the good sense to build four extra days into the schedule, giving her time to not only find her boyfriend at the medical conference, but learn her way around, get a ring, do some shopping, and then find the perfect place and time to propose on Leap Day. All that foresight goes out the window, and she finds her determination tested when she has to hire the local innkeeper to drive her to Dublin, and then when that fails, to get her there by whatever method he can.
He's her total opposite - she's a planner, he's not. She's friendly and bubbly and loves to chat, he likes to brood silently. She's got a positive outlook, him not so much. But what she doesn't expect is the fact that when you travel, you change your point of view - and when you spend time with other people, you have an effect on them, and they have an effect on you. See where I'm going with this? So she learns to be a less obsessive planner, and he learns what it's like to spend time with someone who actually HAS a life-plan, and maybe they become a little more alike over time...
(Damn, I can't believe that's the actor who played Ozymandias in "Watchmen" - one of the channels has been running "Watchmen" recently, so I caught bits of it last week while flipping channels. I really need to sit down and watch that film again, start to finish. Actually, I need to watch the full expanded version with the "Tales From the Black Freighter" bits worked in - because the comic book showed us THAT'S how you toggle between two or three plotlines AND the story-within-the-story - are you listening, director of "Nocturnal Animals"?)
Anyway, the comedy of traveling errors continues, and they end up staying at a B&B as it takes them four days to get to Dublin. But they have to pretend to be man and wife at the inn, because otherwise the innkeepers won't let them stay in the same room. Sure, it's contrived, but it sets up the conflict that sets up the love triangle, and then maybe eventually she might be wondering why she made the trip in the first place, or whether the journey might be more promising than the destination, or something like that.
Come to think of it, why DID she make this journey in the first place. It's a really big NITPICK POINT that she didn't HAVE to go to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on Feb. 29. She could have done that in New York, really - she lives in the 21st century and it should be OK for a woman to propose to a man. How can she be so sure of herself in other areas of her life, such an obsessive planner and so in control of everything, but not be willing or able to take charge of her life in this one aspect? It doesn't really make sense. But again, the fact that she decides to follow this "tradition" is what sets her on the journey in the first place, and if she hadn't made the journey, she wouldn't have learned more about what she really wanted in the end.
NITPICK POINT #2: Nobody in 2010 had a cell phone? Seems hard to believe. Why did they always have to wait until they got to the next town to use a pay phone? Was this story written in the 1980's or something? The lead character has an unlimited travel budget, including last-minute tickets to Ireland, but can't afford a cell phone?
NITPICK POINT #3: A woman travels to Ireland for four days and only packs ONE small travel bag? That's just not possible, at least according to my experience.
Also starring Matthew Goode (last seen in "Self/Less"), Adam Scott (last seen in "Black Mass"), John Lithgow (last seen in "The Accountant"), Kaitlin Olson (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Noel O'Donovan, Tony Rohr (last seen in "Les Miserables"), Pat Laffan (last seen in "Barry Lyndon"), Alan Devlin, Ian McElhinney (last seen in "Rogue One"), Peter O'Meara (last seen in "He's Just Not That Into You"), Maggie McCarthy (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), Vincenzo Nicoli, Flaminia Cinque.
RATING: 5 out of 10 scenic cliffside views
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