Just a few of the many reasons I don’t watch movies

Today, I went to the movies for the third time in more than a year in Russia. Me and three friends attended the 9:50 Friday night showing of ‘Holiday’, staring Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black. Having watched the movie with my movie filter set to turbo mode [filtering out the banality of the script; the same old shot of smiling faces taking up the entire screen; and the corniness that makes me want to gouge my own eyes out with a blunt pencil] I can actually say that it was a decent attempt at the genre. Aside from the fact that Jack Black was severely mis-casted and that there appeared to be no reason for a fox like Jude Law to fall in love with the beautiful-but-shallow-as-a-puddle Cameron Diaz, the movie moved me. However, the emotional rollercoaster that I rode in those two hours is in no way to the credit of the filmmaker: I just happen to be female and have had almost everything that happens to the women in the film – except the happy ending, of course – happen to me.

I realized the weight of my baggage right at the beginning of the movie. It starts with desperate Kate Winslet looking at the man she has loved for three whole years, but whose love she can’t gain in return. As we learn of the details of her devastation, we instantly come to hate him and love her and, vuallah, five minutes in and I am already upset, but not because I feel bad for her. No. I completely empathized with her, but I am like a fish in water in that misery. I was upset because I knew this was Hollywood and that, in the end, everything would be ok. That this movie is just another fairytale plagiarizing from life, making it a recipe for disaster.

Recipe for Disaster

1 Filmmaker (ranging from decent to good)

1 Writer (ranging from not very good to very good)

4-6 actors (i.e. 2-3 couples)

5 sad songs (for the the first and third quarters of the movie)

5 happy songs (for the second and fourth quarters of the movie)

So where’s the disaster? It builds throughout the film. First, they give us (I hate to do it but I think when I say ‘us’ I mean ‘females’) a negative situation that we can all relate to. We bite. Then, the actors all start, quite miraculously, falling head over heals for one another and, naturally, we fall with them. And here the film begins to act like a mirror: after reflecting all of the pain that we once had, we think it natural that the happiness that the actresses found is bound to reflect upon us, too. Then about ¾ of the way through, the love stories encounter a slight bump and everyone is upset. We are then subjected to shots of each person sitting alone at home in their pajamas, loading up on crap-food and watching TV – the entire scene overlaid with some corny “Have yourself a merry little Christmas” tune. And then – but of course – missing a plane, running through the snow, traveling across the globe or any other number of unrealistic, grandiose sacrifice, just to say the magic words. Then passionate kissing, sex and the good ole’ happy ending.

So we have a beginning that, to some degree, is realistic – as can be the middle of the film. But the happy endings just plain don’t happen that way in real life. So my point is this: Today’s cinema culture – at least where blockbuster chick-flicks are concerned – give birth to unreasonable expectations of relationships. When we [now I’m speaking only for hyper-emotional females, like myself] watch these movies, we can’t help but personalize the experience of our fellow she-tigers on the screen. We manage to internalize the feelings so that we walk out knowing how nice it is to finally be appreciated. But when the movie is over, we return to our reality in which we begin looking for that same high in our own lives. But it doesn’t exist – not in the same effortless form that it takes on in the movie. Real relationships that breed the kinds of results that screen relationships do, take a lot of work: its not enough to bat your eyes just right; smile on queue; or recite a cute story over a romantic lunch. Subconsciously, after watching enough such films, young women begin to develop a completely false sense of what constitutes a good, healthy relationship. And so, the gap – between the idyllic scenario portrayed on the silver screen and the situations that we are likely to encounter in reality – is insatiable.

So then what is the point of such films as “Holiday”? To stir up feelings and emotions that I worked so long and hard to put to rest and to remind me that, in real life, there are no happy endings? I pretty much just paid 25o roubles for two hours of reverse-psychotherapy.