My friend and I went to Blockbusters last night with the express purpose of renting a crappy romcom. We were up for some cheesiness, but neither of us was prepared for the absurdity and stupidity of this movie.
A couple minutes in -- around the time that Orlando Bloom said "I'm fine," for the tenth time -- we began to see that we had brought home a true turd of a movie. The 203- minute label on the case was worrying.
It started out ridiculous and uninteresting, but just unraveled from there. Individual scenes were unbelievable, and strung together they make up an unfathomable whole. The writing is so terrible that the question of whether the actors were good or bad is moot.
"Trainwreck" is definitely the word for it.
I have a couple theories:
1) Cameron Crowe was under the influence of horse tranquilizers while writing the script. The disjointed scenes, the odd combination of dull scenes that go on insanely long, and potentially juicy moments that are truncated, abridged, or turned into musical montages (for instance, phrases from relatives' eulogies are spliced together in about 30 seconds, shortly followed by Susan Sarandon's truly horrible and drawn-out stand-up/tap-dancing number). It doesn't seem his brain was functioning properly when he wrote this one down.
2) Does he have a 12-year-old daughter who may have written large parts of the script for him? Reflecting on the supposedly romantic parts of the film, it occurred to me that they're in line with what I understood of love and life as a seventh-grader: all-night phone conversations when what you say isn't as important as the fact that you're talking, spontaneous declarations of love (and demands for such declarations), laughing at jokes that aren't funny because you're riding high on infatuation, and the almighty mix-tape. If Drew and Claire have any chemistry, it's because they're both completely embracing the middle school concept of love and life.
3) Finally, perhaps this film is actually a genius artistic masterpiece. Maybe if you removed every other scene and mashed the remainder into a 1-hour film, it would transcend the genre of crappy romcoms and enter the realm of theater of the absurd.
A couple minutes in -- around the time that Orlando Bloom said "I'm fine," for the tenth time -- we began to see that we had brought home a true turd of a movie. The 203- minute label on the case was worrying.
It started out ridiculous and uninteresting, but just unraveled from there. Individual scenes were unbelievable, and strung together they make up an unfathomable whole. The writing is so terrible that the question of whether the actors were good or bad is moot.
"Trainwreck" is definitely the word for it.
I have a couple theories:
1) Cameron Crowe was under the influence of horse tranquilizers while writing the script. The disjointed scenes, the odd combination of dull scenes that go on insanely long, and potentially juicy moments that are truncated, abridged, or turned into musical montages (for instance, phrases from relatives' eulogies are spliced together in about 30 seconds, shortly followed by Susan Sarandon's truly horrible and drawn-out stand-up/tap-dancing number). It doesn't seem his brain was functioning properly when he wrote this one down.
2) Does he have a 12-year-old daughter who may have written large parts of the script for him? Reflecting on the supposedly romantic parts of the film, it occurred to me that they're in line with what I understood of love and life as a seventh-grader: all-night phone conversations when what you say isn't as important as the fact that you're talking, spontaneous declarations of love (and demands for such declarations), laughing at jokes that aren't funny because you're riding high on infatuation, and the almighty mix-tape. If Drew and Claire have any chemistry, it's because they're both completely embracing the middle school concept of love and life.
3) Finally, perhaps this film is actually a genius artistic masterpiece. Maybe if you removed every other scene and mashed the remainder into a 1-hour film, it would transcend the genre of crappy romcoms and enter the realm of theater of the absurd.