“Movie Dud” Day

The following post is going to be so full of spoilers, I’m not going to bother using the spoiler tag to hide any of them. In fact, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about these two movies so that you won’t need to go.

For both of these movies I actually read the description, a couple of reviews, and watched the trailers. Both movies ended up to be totally different than what I expected. I just can’t understand how people could write the things they did for either of these movies.

You may read online about how Blue Valentine is this sweet movie about falling in love and the heart wrenching sadness of when two people change and fall out of love. Everyone say “Awwww” *sniff*. A movie that may tug the heart strings a little bit with such poignant sadness, but holds a lot of truth for so many people. LIES! I tell you LIES! That is all utter bullshit.

Here is the lowdown of what Blue Valentine is ‘really’ about. From the flashbacks you learn that girl has a crappy boyfriend who didn’t use a condom and obviously didn’t even have the self control to make his ‘deposit’ on her back as he is banging her. Queue in main guy character. He meets standoffish girl at nursing home, falls in love with her, gives her his phone number and of course she doesn’t call him back. He moans and groans about how he can’t stop thinking about her and she could care less. But his shitty luck (yes “shitty”), he bumps into her on the bus and they have ONE fun night. Yes this night consists of some sickly sweet romantic “awww” moments, but keep in mind that this is ONE night.

Next moment in time, we see her in the bathroom taking a pregnancy test. Big shocker – she is pregnant. Now that she has a bun in the oven, she feels compelled to finally call the nice guy. Keep in mind that the bun was put in there from the shitty ex-boyfriend and not the nice guy. This is not romantic. I don’t care what anyone says. There is no story here of how two people fall in love. Sure it shows the guy falling in love with her, but it really shows how she hoodwinks this guy who isn’t even the father of her baby and gets him to marry her in under a year of them first meeting. That just annoys me greatly.

Fast forward to now, the couple is with a little girl and they are having tons of marital issues. He wants affection, she won’t show him any. He is still immature and living in fantasy la la land and thinks they are in love. She never loved him even from the beginning. He was just convenient! He wants to have a child with her, she decides then she wants a divorce. Geeze… Nice wife. Good riddance is all I can think.  THE END.

Moving right along to next movie – Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Oh how you fooled me trailer. I thought you were so much more. A Jazz musical is what I was hoping for. Instead I got first year film student’s school project. Which included a couple of lessons of how to get a Darwin Award. Seriously… Hello land of idiots.

The film is black and white. It is shot with a hand held so fairly shaky. Lots of unnecessary closeups of the mouth and face area. And a story that makes you go “huh?”. What few dance and music numbers there were, made absolutely no sense. If you want to see a movie like it, just head down to your local college and check out the films that the first year students are putting out between their bouts of drinking binges. The only real reason to see this movie, is to see how NOT to pick up a guy.

Movie starts out with Guy (lucky for us, the guy is named Guy) and Madeline on a park bench. They break up. Boo hoo. Guy goes back to apartment and hides all of her pictures.

We are then introduced to Elena and learn about her little fetish for picking up creepy men. She goes up to a juggler on the street that she had never talked to before, hits on him, then gives him her number. You know… Strangers that juggle pins on the street are a safe catch. He wasn’t even a good juggler. He could only do 3 pins, and at one time he had to put one of them between his legs because he couldn’t even handle the three.

After that Guy and Elena happen to end up in the same subway car. Guy notices Elena. Elena notices Guy. They end up holding onto the same bar. Their hands inch closer and closer to each other, till her pinky strokes his hand. Then she places her other hand in his pocket. No words exchanged. You can only assume they went back to his place and got it on. Yeah… There is nothing like some skinny young white chick picking up a black guy on the SUBWAY without even talking to him first. How easy can a girl be?

Next thing you know she has practically moved in with him and wants to sell her bed to make it a permanent thing. But he pisses her off by playing his trumpet early in the morning and she leaves.

No. It does not end with that. She is walking around in the city when creepy old guy comes up to her and won’t leave her alone. Keeps begging her to just talk to him. Did her parent’s not teach her to “never talk to strangers”? So what does she do? She doesn’t tell him off and run away. She ends up going to his house. But surprising to him his daughter happens to be home, so he can’t do what he was planning and instead the 3 of them play 20 questions. End of story of Elena. We can only presume that she eventually ended up dead in some gutter from picking up the wrong creepy guy.

So what happened to Madeline, girl from the park bench? Good question. Guess because she can’t live off of Guy anymore and he left her on the bench to sleep with the homeless, she gets a job. She is only qualified to be a waitress and do dishes at some restaurant, where she likes to tap dance and sing on the counter. And she isn’t that good, so she should really stick it out with the waitressing.

Guy is a young black guy, so she decided to head to the other side of the tracks after she was dumped and picked up some old white French guy. Which must of been a one night stand, because you only see him once.

Madeline obviously doesn’t like to work, so she gets up and quits in the middle of work to move to New York. She bumps into Guy, they go back to her place, she packs and he plays her a song he has been working on his trumpet. THE END

What did we learn from movie? Once you go black, you can never go back? I honestly don’t know or care. Something in common with both movies though – bad tap dancers.