Intolerable

Rating: 3/10 (24 November 2007)

As if regular life isn't tough enough...and expectations for men to be Prince Charming aren't demanding enough, now women have movie-inspired notions of a supposedly more realistic fairy tale prince....if of course, your supposed real-life savior is Patrick Dempsey from Grey's Anatomy. Supposedly this is how things would play out if someone came from a fantasy land to NYC. (Seriously...haven't we seen enough of NYC? Why not Topeka? Or Louisville? Or Milwaukee? Or Pierre...anywhere but NYC) Only this person doesn't know, or doesn't seem particularly concerned with trying to figure out, or explain where this fantasy land (titled Andalusia for the movie) is. This girl, played with the fairy tale airiness of a princess quite well by Amy Adams somehow emerges in New York and doesn't seem even to have any worry that she can't get home or that her family might be concerned or that she can't call them, or other mundane concerns. All she is concerned about is that her prince Edward find her. I won't give away any more of the movie, but this mixing of fantasy and reality is really insidious. To suggest that New Yorkers would treat people running around, quite clearly without any irony, fighting chivalric fairy tale battles, wearing faux-medieval garb and stabbing people-or that such people-if indeed they were people, would not be a bit more concerned about their immediate safety and how to get back to where they came from, is idiotic. And now, supposedly, we have a recipe for a "more realistic" fairy tale. We have no such thing. There is no such thing and women should come to terms with it...this just raises expectations. Yeah, you can say I'm taking this too seriously, and that's fine, maybe in some ways I am, but let's not pretend that entertainment doesn't have an effect on young tweener and adolescent girls. This just muddies the waters further and confuses expectations for young girls...and really, how can men compete with McDreamy? Yeah, I didn't like this movie.