BEFORE: Julia Roberts carries over from "Love, Wedding, Marriage", because OF COURSE she does, and remember it's still Wedding Week here at the Movie Year, in addition to Valentine's Week. Sometimes I even amaze myself...
I'm starting the second third of the romance chain, and here's the line-up for Friday, 2/14, Day 14 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", no doubt they're aware it's Valentine's Day:
Best Original Song Winners and Nominees:
5:15 am "A Star Is Born" (1954)
8:15 am "The Sandpiper" (1965)
10:15 am "Dear Heart" (1964)
12:15 pm "Swing Time" (1936)
2:00 pm "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964)
4:00 pm "The Tender Trap" (1955)
6:00 pm "High Society" (1956)
Oscar Worthy Lovers:
8:00 pm "Casablanca" (1942)
10:00 pm "Marty" (1955)
12:00 am "Pillow Talk" (1959)
2:00 am "Now, Voyager" (1942)
4:00 am "Brief Encounter" (1945)
I was at 59 seen out of 151, but here's where I start to improve my stats, because I've seen a full 9 out of Friday's 12: everything BUT "Dear Heart", "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Brief Encounter". SO now 68 seen out of 163 takes me back up to 41.7%.
THE PLOT: A divorced couple teams up and travels to Bali to stop their daughter from making the same mistake they think they made 25 years ago.
AFTER: This is the third time George Clooney and Julia Roberts have played a divorced couple, two of them were in the "Ocean's Eleven" movies. But if you can't predict the ending of tonight's film after watching the first five minutes of it, you really need to get out more or just watch more romantic comedies. You don't PUT these two together unless you want to see all of the chemistry, the good and the bad, only not in that order. At the start of this film they declare that they can't even be in the same time zone with each other, and I feel that, but then they both attend their daughter's graduation from law school, and they support her decision to take a vacation to Bali before she starts practicing law. (This brings me to my first NITPICK POINT, which is that I know law school takes a long time, and Kaitlyn Dever still does not look old enough to have finished both undergrad college AND law school. She may BE old enough - 26 at the time of this film's release - but she doesn't look it.)
Her parents did not expect her to fall in love with a Bali native who rescued her and her friend after their boat left them swimming in the Pacific, too far from shore. The guy farms seaweed for a living, and she decides to stay in Bali because she's found a new sense of balance there, living in harmony with nature and the local people. Now at least her parents are united in their desire to fly to Bali and convince her to not get married early and make the same mistake they did. Well, technically she's NOT doing that, because when we find out how and why David and Georgia got divorced, it sounds NOTHING like going to Bali and farming seaweed, they just bought a house too early or something. It's a little unclear to me because I couldn't watch this film with captions, and my hearing is still getting worse, I think.
This film got me in some trouble - because I had to turn up the sound so I could hear what the characters were saying, and that woke up my wife who was sleeping upstairs. Things were sort of fine until I fell asleep myself, and then 10 minutes later there was a scene where the Cotton family was playing beer pong (something you do with your parents? I doubt it...), with very loud music playing in this Balinese club. Thanks a lot guys. But then I kept waking up and rewinding back to the same spot and falling asleep again, so I had to finish the film this morning before heading to the movie theater at noon for some Adobe product launch, they're trying to win AI or something.
Ah, isn't it hilarious that the two divorced parents end up on the same plane, and then even in the same ROW? Well, no, not THAT funny really, plus it strains the bounds of credulity that they took the same plane from the same airline on the same day at the same time. But then again, maybe not every airline services Bali and even then, there might be only a few direct flights a week, so who knows, I have no way of calculating the odds against this. But at least the long flight gives them a chance to form a united strategy for dealing with their daughter and trying to convince her to not get married so young. They're looking at her life through the (shattered) lens of their own experiences, of course they don't want her to get married young because that's what THEY did and it didn't last. But they can't say the whole marriage was a mistake, because that implies that their daughter was a mistake, and they both like her, just not her rash decisions.
I'm glad that this wasn't just a typical "destination wedding" movie, because then their daughter would have come off as too entitled, making her parents pay to fly all the way around the world just to see her get married. Instead they come with a purpose, to pretend to be on her side while working to change her mind, and maybe convince her to come back to the U.S. and be a lawyer because, you know, that's a potentially lucrative career. But showing the audience that Lily found something more meaningful than money, that's important, because now we want to root for her, and we want to see her parents proven wrong.
Georgia has a boyfriend who's a pilot, I'd say it would be another far-fetched convenience that he's piloting their plane to Bali, but the line saying he switched routes with another pilot, in order to spend time with his girlfriend while she's in Bali, that's almost enough to dispel the coincidental nature of this plot point. Paul intends to propose to Georgia while they're together in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, however it never seems to be the right time, then he gets bitten by a snake, and then when he finally gets to propose, Georgia says no and it probably has NOTHING to do with her seeing her ex-husband again, but you never know...
Whatever else can go wrong seems to go wrong, of course. Georgia steals the wedding rings from the little girl who's supposed to be holding them, but their daughter's boyfriend figures out what they're up to. There's that snakebite that Paul gets, but maybe they really should have learned a bit more about the cursed temple they were visiting, I mean, COME ON. And then of course after viewing the world's most beautiful sunset they realize that David didn't properly secure the boat, so it drifts away and they're forced to spend the night on a small island and resort to cannibalism. JK. Then the film would be called "Eat, Prey, Love".
There's a meaningful message at the end of the film, the same one as "Queen Bees", which stated that "It's never too late." This film's addendum is that "it's never too late to get back together with your ex, after you've developed a new trust and friendship while working together toward a common goal." There you go, today's mantra, for anyone out there who's divorced or newly single, also remember that your kids are NOT you and you don't need to stop them from making the same relationship mistakes as you - just let them make all new relationship mistakes they can call their own.
Directed by: Ol Parker (director of "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again")
Also starring George Clooney (last heard in "IF"), Kaitlyn Dever (last heard in "Next Goal Wins"), Maxime Bouttier, Billie Lourd (last seen in "Booksmart"), Lucas Bravo, Agung Pindha, Ifa Barry, Cintya Dharmayanti, Sean Lynch (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Arielle Carver O'Neill, Charles Allen (last seen in "Elvis"), Genevieve Lemon (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Romy Poulier, Dorian Djoudi (last seen in "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Ling Cooper Tang, Ilma Nurfauziah, Nom Gunadi, Inaya Servais, Ida Pandita Putu Wirata, Eduard Alexander Waloni, Joshua Chan, Mia Amrisyanda, Anto Widjaja, Casey Wright, Rowan Chapman, Kyoko Yates, Eric Gletzlaf.
RATING: 6 out of 10 upper class auction bidders
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