A Movie To Dump Your Partner To

Rating: 3/10 (23 May 2005)

From the very first notes of the horrible opening music, I knew I was up for a pretentious pile of garbage. By the time it ends with the same crap song you'll wish it'd been just an annoying dream you had while napping to that track, but the sad news is these 2 hours will really have passed and you gained nothing out of it. Unless you got there just to see the Natalie Portman's campy strip-dance that makes Elizabeth Berkley in "Showgirls" look like Rita Moreno.
I can imagine Hollywood suits brainstorming about an original romance to make - original ideas still get audience, so there's a market demand for them - but as everyone knows, they're not really good at it, so they just take an average romcom and reverse everything. Instead of sympathetic characters we get a bunch of shallow creeps. Feelings are replaced by instincts, morality by lack of it, and relationships are formed in sole purpose of breaking them later on. The ending is of course, sad, as opposed to sugary epilogues of formulatic romances, and the cars drive on left, because most of the action takes place in England. Long story short, it's just as worthless, clichéd, stupid and tasteless as most of Hollywood romances, the only difference being it's depressive. I figure it's because it's not aimed at teens-who-believe-in-the-love-for-life, but at their cretinous parents-divorced-multiple-times who believe that having 3 broken marriages makes them emotionally mature and experienced in the subject of love. No wonder it gets Hollywood critics off - finally a movie with characters they can identify with.
I'd recommend about a random french romance to see theme of unfaithfulness tackled in a way that won't insult your intelligence. "Closer" is to be avoided unless you're looking for a movie to take your partner to and dump him/her afterwards.