Sunday, January 03, 2010

Up in the Ass


If you haven't seen the movie and plan to, stop reading - spoiler alert.

First, I loved the movie. Who doesn't love watching Clooney being Clooney? And Jason Bateman is always great - more Bateman please. I liked how they made flying seem like fun, even though it's really a giant pain in the ass.

I really loved Vera Farmiga's character, Alex. She's smart, sexy, funny, adventurous, uninhibited, confident, and on top of all that, gorgeous.

*** spoiler alert ***

Then we find out she's a lying whore. Of course. She would have to be. No woman could be all that and not also be tragically flawed. Thanks, Hollywood. Fucked me in the ass again.

I could feel it coming and hoped so much that I was wrong. I knew there wouldn't be a fairy tale ending for her and Ryan, but did we have to make the interesting female lead a cheating ho-bag?

David pointed out that it's almost always the man that turns out to be the philandering douchebag and he's right. I suppose it's fair to make the female lead the asshole, it's just disappointing.

The "good" girl is shrill, uptight, arrogant, asexual, ignorant and someone I would love to slap in the face. It's a bummer that the "cool" woman in the movie turns out to be a shit bag and the "good" girl is an irritating bitch.

I don't know how else it could have been written to make her ultimately unavailable to Ryan, the little boy lost, and to be fair, he never asked her about her situation. He either assumed she was single or wasn't interested in really knowing her - but that seems hollow when it comes time to go to his sister's wedding.

If you're just banging a guy between flights and then one day he asks you to go with him to his sister's wedding, that seems like the right time to say something like, "I don't want to be a downer, but you should know I'm married and I have fifteen kids."

At that moment, she, being the smart woman she is, should have realized they were not on the same page. And if she's not wearing a ring or slipping away to take phone calls in private, why would he ever imagine she could be married? She seems just like him but as she said, "with a vagina." He's got a fair position in assuming she was unattached. Naive maybe, but fair.

So not only do we get to see an interesting female character turn out to be an asshole, we get to see marriage treated like it usually is in the movies - the drudgery of real life, the thing that needs to be escaped. How original.

It was a good movie, but I don't think it was a "great" movie or the "best" movie. Up was far better, as was The Hurt Locker and Fantastic Mr. Fox. I'd even put The Hangover above it, just for Mike Tyson alone.

The best thing about it was the powerful but dark reality of getting canned and having to start all over, even if it's almost time to start planning to retire, and asking yourself "what am I doing with my life?" So, it's got that going for it, which is nice.

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