This movie chronicles the tale of a recently dumped dude who decides to vacation in Hawaii where his bitch ex girlfriend, coincidentally, is also vacationing with her new Rock-and-Roll celebrity boyfriend. He spends his time on the island crying a lot, making friends with some zany locals, meeting a new cute, carefree girl who works at the front desk, and making some serious decisions about life and love.
Without ruining anything, this is a happy ending movie, and I love happy endings. And although I haven't personally been through a painful breakup lately, or ever, sometimes it's important to believe in love and destiny, however gay that sounds.
I find it interesting that this particular group of guys got together and have made a bunch of, basically, love story movies. We as Americans tend to...emasculate the love narrative as something of a trivial, female frivolity. Do we make love stories here? Love is IN our movies, but rarely the driving force. We have Disney Love Epics (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin; basically any Disney movie) Historical Love Epics (Titanic, Troy, Pearl Harbor, Last of the Mohicans) action flick lovers (Braveheart, The Matrix, The Fifth Element) Romantic Comedies (As Good as it Gets, Pretty Woman) and more and more lately, the Male Romantic Comedy (Knocked Up, 40 Year Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).
Late in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a character makes a brief, yet revealing, self-referential statement when talking about a show he wrote and produced: "I didn't even know it was a comedy until people started telling me it was funny."
So maybe, after all, the boys behind this recent spate of movies are just a bunch of single guys moping around L.A. waiting for love to come around in just the right way, who happen to be funny. I certainly know many straight guys who sit around playing video games, talking shit, ordering pizza, and farting who want nothing more than to fall in love with the types of girls you see in these movies. These girls awaken their spirits; they force them to try an extreme sport or give them the confidence they need to just, you know, quit that hated day job and turn that lifelong hobby/ passion into a dream career. These girls fix their lives.
In my view, people can't fix each other, but it is nonetheless heartwarming to see such a happily idealized tale played out on screen. That's why we go to the movies, right, to escape? Of course, this all from me, a single dude with his own hangups. Maybe I should write a movie about it?
No comments:
Post a Comment