OK, another 7 seen out of 12 today. I've seen all of these except "Five Star Final", "The Human Comedy", "The Little Foxes", "Picnic" and "Cavalcade". "Picnic" is on my list, but I just haven't been able to link back that far and cross it off. This brings me up to 111 seen out of 286, up to 38.8%. Still making a little progress every day.
THE PLOT: A single woman takes the place of a stranger's blind date and accidentally finds the perfect man for her.
AFTER: So many of the situations (and situationships) seen in this year's chain have resulted due to a lack of communication - for example in "Shotgun Wedding" where the bride told the groom she didn't want a big wedding, but he didn't listen, and then he was so into preparing the ideal destination wedding, she was afraid to remind him that it wasn't what she wanted. Or in "Your Place or Mine" where both halves of the couple were afraid to tell each other that they wanted more than friendship, and also that they were both complete idiots. The ultimate example was probably in "Over Her Dead Body", where a woman's ghost tried to prevent her husband from dating again, and she found it difficult to communicate with them, because she was super dead.
Here we have a woman who gets mistaken for a man's blind date, and she finds it difficult to correct him, that she's not really Jessica, so instead she just plays along, at least for a while, until she's forced to admit that her name is really Nancy, and she was only holding the self-help book that would identify her as Jack's date because it was given to her by a woman on the train, the real Jessica. How was Nancy to know that by holding THAT book and standing in THAT spot at the train station that she would give off such high-energy Jessica vibes? Besides, the self-help book was all about being daring, taking chances, going for it in this crazy mixed-up world of six billion people, also Nancy had been challenging herself with daily mantras along the same lines.
So, she takes the bold move, the daring move, she pretends to be Jessica, and maybe hiding as another person gives her the confidence she needed to open up to someone, who can say? They go out for drinks, they talk, they connect, they go bowling, then things start to go wrong when they encounter an old school-mate of Nancy's, and he can't help but wonder why she's going by Jessica now. When he figures out the scheme, he blackmails Nancy for a kiss in the rest room, and wouldn't you it, Jack walks in and sees them, so she's got to confess to the even worse sin of not being who she's pretending to be, to explain why she's kissing another man on their date. And also why that man was almost naked.
I'm reminded of what John Cleese's character said in "A Fish Called Wanda" about what it's like being English, having to be correct all of the time, being stifled by a dread of doing or saying the wrong thing. Perhaps this is universal, but sure, it's also very British, and could explain why Nancy is so hesitant to own up to being Not Jessica, because doing so would not only expose her lie, but also because she felt good, and ending their date probably also felt like the wrong thing to do if she was having a good time. Still a lie, though, but I get why she'd want the lie to continue if Jack was the first man she'd dated in a long time that she made a connection with.
There are further complications and mix-ups, Jack doesn't take the truth well when she finally spills it, and then he makes Nancy keep up another charade and pretend to be his girlfriend after they bump into his ex-wife in the pub, along with the man she left Jack for. They mix up their journals, which would only be a problem if the speech Nancy wrote for her parents' anniversary party was inside, and then Jack leaves his satchel behind in the pub, which would only be a problem if his signed divorce papers were in it. Now all of a sudden this is feeling very familiar, and I'm wondering if a film I watched near the start of this year's romance chain, "The Wrong Missy" stole quite a bit from this film. Come to think of it, "The Wrong Missy" had two characters with identical luggage, "LOL" had two characters with identical handbags, and now this film has two characters with identical journals. Wow, these movies just keep repeating the same things over and over, don't they? Even though none of these are really earth-shattering plot points, I can't ignore the coincidence involved.
Nancy proceeds to her parents' party, while Jack finally has a date with the real Jessica - only to find that not only does he not share much in common with her, but also, she's a dud personality-wise, at least compared to the more manic BUT also more fun Nancy. So he races to find her parents house with the help of some local partying teens, to tell her that somehow even though she was the wrong girl for the date they went on, she's the right girl for him. Yeah, that's almost exactly how "The Wrong Missy" ended, so I'm thinking that film was somehow sort of a gender-swapped remake of this earlier one? Or else all of these films are just drawing from the same playbook, which is also quite possible.
Also starring Lake Bell (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Simon Pegg (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Sharon Horgan (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), Rory Kinnear (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Ken Stott (last seen in "The Dig"), Robert Wilfort (ditto), Harriet Walter (last seen in "The Last Duel"), Ophelia Lovibond (last seen in "Rocketman"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "The Last Days on Mars"), Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Henry Lloyd-Hughes (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Dean-Charles Chapman (last seen in "Breathe"), Keir Charles (last seen in "Love Actually"), Paul Thornley (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Simona Brown, Maya Henson with archive footage of Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder")
RATING: 6 out of 10 bowling pins (I didn't even know they had bowling alleys in the U.K.)
No comments:
Post a Comment