scarlettina | Satan, ice cream, and a movie (Reply)

markferrari works for the devil. Every time we have a meal together, ice cream is involved. He claims that it helps him lose weight. Sure, dude. Whatever you say. Not that I don't like ice cream. I love a scoop of creamy-and-delicious Hagen Daaz chocolate peanut butter on a sugar cone (my absolute favorite), but--wow--it feels like sin.

Just had to get that off my chest. Otherwise, my movie-and-dinner engagement with said infernal fellow and

calendula_witch was perfectly lovely . . . except for, well, the movie, about which I'm going to rant.

We started the evening by going to see the new Anne Hathaway/Jim Sturgiss romantic dramedy One Day. Although I tend to avoid romantic comedies (well, most romantic movies in general, but that's a journal entry for another time), two friends, independent of each other, had expressed interest in this one, so I thought I'd give it a go. After all, I find Ann Hathaway appealing.

"One Day" follows two friends--Emma and Dexter--over the course of 20 years, checking in on them and their lives on July 15 from 1996 through 2006. Of course, they're destined to true love, but must first go through the tempering of emerging adulthood, including dead-end jobs, a brush with alcoholism, bad or overestimated relationships, and so on. Anne Hathaway is once again cast as the ugly-duckling-turned-beautiful-swan. (She ought to be looking for other script gimmicks at this point; she's good enough not to need this one anymore.) Some of the banter is witty and pointed, nicely delineating character, and some bits in the film made me laugh out loud. But I saw the end coming by about halfway through the film: repeated shots of Emma on a bicycle, repeated moments of Dexter wistfully appreciating Emma, and the final moments of true bliss. When the inevitable Mack Truck of Reality finally hits (first seen in "City of Angels" pulverizing America's sweetheart, Meg Ryan, also heedlessly riding a bicycle in the wake of true bliss), my response was an audible and irritated, "G-d dammit, I knew it!" And, of course, the last 10 minutes of the film involve Dexter coming to terms with having lost his best friend, his true love, and discovering the Decent Man Within.

Here's the thing: I don't believe--as so many films would insist--that wisdom can only come at the price of misery. Good girls shouldn't have to pay for their happiness by having their lives cut short. Death isn't romantic. And every time I see a movie like this, I want to throttle someone. How nice it would have been if the twist at the end of the story had come in some other way, how original it would have been for the film to not fall back on cinema's oldest easy answer. I'm annoyed because there was so much potential here for a movie to actually say something relevant about human relationships, and because it fell back on a trope I've seen a hundred times and am, frankly, just sick of.

In short, you can skip this well-made and infinitely frustrating flick, and not feel bad. But if you should happen to meet the director or the writer of this movie, slap 'em for me, will you please? ::sigh::