The doomsday clock is ticking.
Why do they not produce clothes in my size? Honestly. I understand that I'm short, but everything is either way too big or way too small. Maybe I should just get every individual outfit tailored to my liking.
I'm going old school with the song for this entry--well, sort of. It's a White Stripes song that many of you have probably heard, but probably not recently. It's called Fell in Love with a Girl, and it makes you want to dance--at least it does if you have a soul.
#27: Post-Grad
Unlike a lot of guys I dig a lot of so-called chick flicks: Big Fish, The Terminal, The Notebook, The Time Traveler's Wife, Mean Girls, What Dreams May Come, etc. Conversely, like most guys, I love Alexis Bledel. So I figured this was a no-brainer. I'm a recent college graduate. I love other films in this genre. I love the star of the movie. At the very least I anticipated this to be tolerable.
Boy was I wrong.
The movie clocked in at just under 90 minutes but you never would have guessed that if you were sitting in the audience. It wasn't even that the movie was slow-moving; simply put, the movie seemed to have no direction and as a result there was no logical progression to the plot.
It was virtually impossible to determine what the movie was exactly aiming for. I guess there was the general concept that Alexis Bledel's character was grappling with life after graduation, but the motif of familial relationships and the painfully flat romantic substory seemed to be added simply because they couldn't think of enough material for the more important adult-life conflict. As a result, all three storylines were thin and hastily wrapped up.
The family storyline was far and away the movie's weakest point. I'm hard-pressed to recall a more obnoxious movie family. In any other situation such an irritating family wouldn't be so hard to overlook; the typical frustrating movie family comes off as such because it is how they were written to be. Here, however, it was obvious the family was supposed to be quirky and endearing. The father was so bizarre and awkward that he was cartoonish in an off-putting sort of way. The grandmother was similarly annoying and virtually impossible to sympathize with. The son went beyond the unfortunate oddball pariah one may find in a show like Weeds and instead traipsed in the realm of bizarre to the point of disturbing. The mother ultimately became lost in the shadow of that rat pack, but in the few scenes she had she suffered by association: in her context, her excessive affection came off less motherly than irksome. Tack all of that onto a house littered with highly-prized garden gnomes, a revolving display case containing medicine and toiletries, and an ultimately illegal belt-buckle sales ploy that leads to a needless jailing and you have a group who got lost on the way to the studio for the filming of an indie movie that's trying too hard.
The romantic storyline had so little substance to it that any pain or joy the young lovebirds got out of the relationship seemed senseless. The only way the creators compensated for Zach Gilford's unsuccessful wooing of Alexis Bledel's character was his perpetual reiterating (almost word-for-word) of "You just have no feelings for me even though I'm in love with you." It's one thing to move the plot through dialogue, but the only way the audience could have been smacked in the face harder with that conflict is for the screen to have been blinking "WARNING: UNREQUITED LOVE." Similarly, the short-lived fling between Alexis Bledel and the suave, mysterious, exotic older neighbor was non-sensical and nauseatingly rapid. Besides being a completely unconvincing couple, whoever determined the necessity of this quirky motif relinquished the opportunity of having this character contrast starkly with the bothersome family and instead made him fit in this apparently alien community perfectly with his strangely furnished house and bizarre job. Granted, the bizarre job allowed for one of the few genuinely humorous scenes in the movie thanks to a Demetri Martin cameo, but the movie's creators failed to understand that quirky is only quirky when there is something to compare it to. When every character is a pod-person, the charm is lost.
Finally, as a recent graduate myself, I fail to sympathize with the apparent 6 or 8 months it took the protagonist to find a job. If the entire movie were to be about Alexis Bledel's struggle with adjusting to the real world there would have been ample opportunities to laugh at awkward scenarios and root for her character. Instead, though, when it seemed that the movie's focus was about to remain with job-hunting, it switched gears to her love life. When it seemed that the movie's focus was about remain with her love life, it turned to the quirky family. By the time her new job comes up at the end the audience has forgotten that that was her primary concern in the first place. And it certainly didn't take too long for her to land on her feet.
I'm not sure where I'm supposed to get my Alexis Bledel fix if movies like this fail so miserably. Sure, her cameo in Sin City was fantastic, but I WILL NOT see any of those Traveling Pants flicks and she doesn't have much else in her filmography. She has the talent to make good movies and I certainly hope the future of her career holds brighter spots than this or I'm going to need to petition for a Gilmore Girls comeback. Yes. I like Gilmore Girls. Sue me.
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