Eat Pray Love

This highly anticipated Julia Roberts vehicle was exactly what I expected it to be which means it accomplished exactly what it set out to accomplish. It inspired.

The movie follows Liz Gilbert, a married and successful 30 something woman who ideally has everything she thought she ever wanted in life. After a few years of marriage, she finds herself unhappy and unfulfilled and sets out on a one year journey to Italy, India and Bali. In Italy she finds the unprecedented pleasure in wholesome nourishment. In India she finds inner peace through prayer and in Bali she finds humanities ultimate felicity in her discovery of pure and true love.

As a 21 year old, I cannot say that I can relate on the level that my mother could relate to this film. I am still in college. I am not sure if I've ever been in love. I am still in pursuit of my dreams. However, as a woman, with incredible dreams of success and tremendous dreams of falling in love, I can see how one can get lost, and truly lose sight of the real importances in life. Like Liz at 21 I'm sure, I do not doubt in life that I will make my career dreams a reality, and that I can ultimately accomplish any thing that I put my mind to. It's the higher pleasures in life I worry about. Sometimes our pursuits of success and accomplishing our ultimate career goals cause us to forget what we really need in life, and all we've ever really wanted. Sometimes we can become so tainted along the way by never finding love, or by being hurt in pursuit of it, we hide behind our careers and pretend we have found our inner happiness that way. Sooner or later it all gets old. The fame doesn't mean much. The people who are supposed to be there for you, are not who you thought they were. Something is ultimately missing.

There is far too much pressure placed on women today to maintain a certain image; to be a size 2, to not live "promiscuously," to dress a certain way, to have a certain amount of intellect-not too little but certainly not too much-we can't be more intelligent or successful than our male counterparts right? As the movies tagline states, we have to let ourselves go. We have to let ourselves be happy, to be free. Without any of these things, the other pleasures in life are meaningless; we are ultimately incapable of truly enjoying them.

So I say to you...

Live your life. Love yourself. Love. And go see this film. See it with your girls. See it with your mother. See it with your boyfriend. See it.

Charlie St. Cloud

AWFUL.

Horrendous.

Horrific.

Terrible.

Puzzling.

Ridiculous.

Absurd.

Simple.

Complicated.

Convoluted.

Annoying.

Poorly-Scripted.

Mediocre(ly) Acted.

Aimlessly Directed.

...I could go on, people, but for the sake of time and space, I will not. I must tell you how hard it is for me to say all of these things because I genuinely wanted this movie to be good. I thought it was going to be good! I am not just a movie fanatic, but I'm a movie advocate. I love films. I love seeing movies. They make me happy and I ALWAYS want them to be good, and typically, there is always something good I can say about a movie, even if the overall rating of the film is poor. I unfortunately just cannot say that this time. There is nothing about this movie that saves it from its utter badness.

I first saw the trailer when I was at the theater seeing Sex and the City 2 with my Mom. We both gasped at the scene of the car accident, when the drunk driver hits the little brother and we just knew it was going to be a good movie. After seeing the trailer for months leading up to the film's release, my expectations changed a bit. I no longer thought it was going to be a movie of epic tear-jerking nature as I did when I saw the trailer the first time. Lets face it-the trailer tells you everything major that happens in the film. So at the least, I thought it would be a cliche´ "feel good" movie where tragedy happens to boy, boy falls from grace, and boy falls in love, and love conquers all. That's pretty much how the trailer makes it look right?

Yes. But what about this whole boy talks to dead brother aspect? Lets revise: boy falls from grace, boy lives in the past by seeing dead brother, boy falls in love, and love conquers all. I wish I could tell you guys this was it to the movie. This predictability would have been so much better than the abashed multi-themed, foreseeable(ly) scripted, and feebly acted cinema absurdity that ensued.

I sat there as this movie got worse and worse and did my damnedest to try and some how rescue this movie, to try and see the silver lining so that I could some how tell my readers that like the trailer displays, love, film love, that is, really does conquer all. I know how badly Zac Efron wants to be a serious actor and I want it for him! He does a decent job acting wise, and he is perfectly good eye candy if nothing else. But even the costuming fluidity is poor in the film because even after Charlie St. Cloud's fall from societal idealism after his brother's death, he's still beautiful and terribly attractive. I understand that Zac Efron is hard to "rough up" but make up these days is revolutionary and even Efron, the metrosexual himself, is capable of having a bad day. The movie misses the mark completely...on so so many levels. It attempts to combine multiple themes and is unsuccessful at fully eliciting any of them, and in no way ties them all together.

Unfortunately, everyone, even my love for the cinema couldn't save this film. I am sure none of you after reading this blog are going to go "run to the theater" to see this one, unless of course you're in the mood for a good laugh at the joke this movie is in its attempt at anything rightly cinematic. If nothing else, I hope you were at least minimally entertained in reading this blog.