HJNTIY was a serious braindrain. This is the kind of movie that almost makes you wish you hadn’t wasted your time watching this movie. It wasn’t remotely feminist, nor did it pretend to be. The writing basically made every character out to be the most annoying or pathetic person ever.
Ginnifer Goodwin’s character was insufferably embarrassing. I think it must take courage to play such a terribly wimpy, cloying character. Most of what she says/does is a hyperbolic form of some totally embarrassing thing you’ve probably said/done trying to attract the attention of a potential date, but it’s a repeated, relentless type of embarrassment pumped on A-rod type roids. I feel bad that she basically got the shit-end of the movie’s wardrobe too. The director must have told the stylist to dress Ginnifer’s Gigi in the most fug, marmie clothing possible. And her character’s name is Gigi for fuck’s sake! Gigi is the dumbest name ever. Gigi is what WASPy old ladies name their little fluffy white dogs. The resolution of the movie is supposed to make the viewer feel like Gigi finally gets what she deserved all along, the redemption for her being such a sweet and pure type, but that is just Hollywood trying to 5 card shuffle you, because in my opinion her emotional idiocy is pretty inexcusable. That goes the same for just about every character in HJNITY.
It is pretty fairytale unbelievable that I’m a Mac suddenly comes to his senses and is all “Gigi, I love you. I’m sorry that I’ve been a total boner all along!” This type of unreal romanticism is precisely my major gripe with "da movies". I think it promotes a very damaging ideal to those types with undiscerning eyes.
Jennifer Connelly, an actress I never seem to think about, but is unbelievably beautiful, is supposed to be the grounding, stable force amongst the gaggle of weakling women depicted in HJNTIY, but I reached a certain point in the film where I wanted to scream at her DTMFA, to quote relationship and sex columnist Dan Savage, who probs should have been consulted in the writing of this peice o'shit, who probs could have saved HJNTIY from its ugly fate as a peice o'shit. In the film she’s married to Stella shorts’ Bill Zebub, who is basically a bobo version of Will Arnett. Whoever handled casting seriously effed up by not casting Will Arnett.
Bill Zebub is seriously hot for Scarjo’s character, which is basically just her Vicky Christina character redux. Face it, Hollywood, SCARJO CAN NOT ACT! She is an actress that coasts by her milkmaid hoots and stupid pouty lips and has lucked out in her choices of roles/directors she’s worked with so that now she has indie cred. She will forever play the adultress, an oversexed, emotionally cold character that is out to bone married dudes/steal her friend’s love interest, etc. She did have some of the best lines in the movie though.
Scarjo to Bill Zebub on why she can’t resist his married-manly man appeal: “[You have] An ass that makes me want to dry hump.”
(What? You want to dry hump his ass, Scarjo?)
To which Bill Zebub responds: “I think I just fell in love.”
(Really? Is that what it takes to fall in love? The possibility of dry humping butts? Wow, men really are just boners.)
At this point Scarjo dives into her gym’s pool naked. Ewww! I think that breaks some kind of gym hygiene rule, no?
Then there is Entourage Dude who is almost entirely superfluous. His character seemed more like a plot device to include the gays, as he panders to them in his real estate business, which brings me to BIG OFFENSIVE MOMENT #2 in HJNTIY: two prospective gay clients try to explain to Entourage Dude that it is easier for gay men to pick up on when a potential date is 'bout it 'bout it because if gays look at each other for more than three seconds IT'S ON, time to go to the bone zone. I think this is simplistic at best and it perpetuates some nasty gay stereotypes amongst hetero losers. But maybe I am just being a PC superfreak.
Drew Barrymore’s character is actually totally superfluous. There is virtually no point to her being in this movie except that it added just a little bit more star power to this trashy waste of time. It makes sense that the two most superfluous characters in HJNTIY end up together. It all equals up to a giant, yawning "WHO CARES."
Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck are the only mildly redeeming actors here. Jennifer plays a character that I can only imagine is quite similar to her normal self, desperately wanting to get married, wondering why she's always the bridesmaid, never the bride, and Ben plays a somewhat depressed dude (Is he depressed irl? Is it because he has a wife I hate for no reason and an uggo baby?) who is just trying to be real with himself and stick to his guns. It is just one of those fundamental disagreements in a relationship that takes some time to achieve the eye-to-eye. In any event they seem to be the only ones with any sense about them. Their on-screen chemistry resulted in me crying at the dumbest movie ever. It was an incredibly romantic scene, loaded on at the very end to pull out all the stops and give emotional viewers like me the weepies. We can only hope that all us women find a partner who will make such grandly romantic gestures and treat us nicely, right?
The all white cast of characters in HJNTIY live in a Fantasy Land called Baltimore where everyone works for weekly's and advertising and lives in newly renovated luxury lofts decorated by Crate n Barrel. This movie could have been saved by a few more jokes and some cameos from the cast of The Wire. I would have liked to see Entourage Dude trying to sell a condo in the gay district to Omar, or Bubs begging for change outside Drew Barrymore's place of work. Another instance of YOU SERIOUSLY MISSED THE BOAT, HJNTIY.
All in all, this movie doesn’t teach you anything that reading Cosmo hasn’t already. It is full of the clichés that popular culture has already forced down your throat or hit you over the head with one million times in regard to men/women/sex/heteronormative relationships. It’s replete with the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus rhetoric that women are dumb, sexually frigid, or whore-y, and they don’t know how to interpret men’s intentions ever, and men are basically just boners.
I keep wondering what part of my reptilian brain does this movie and movies of its type appeal to. Maybe it's the part that hates myself? It feels a little bit like self punishment. One of the real reasons I wanted to see this movie, aside from the frothy appeal of a chick flick, and the seriously loaded-for-absolutely-no-reason cast, was that when the book (from which HJNTIY was adapted) was released, I was attending university and I was in a wishwashy college relationship with someone whom I still love very much as a friend, but was not really suited for as a lovematch. At that time my very outspoken and opinionated feminist grandmother who watches a lot of Oprah and has a lot of time to her self to just think, took me aside and said, “Perhaps you should read this book. It seems as though ***** is not that into you.” Regardless, I did NOT read the book because I thought it sounded terribly trashy and dumb, but my grandmother’s words resounded with me and it wasn’t that much longer before that relationship went the way of the dinosaurs. This book was co-written by two people who also wrote for Sex and the City, one of which is a gay man who I think must hate women. The world has perfected an infinite number ways to make women feel like complete shit and this movie is one of them. The movie incorporates some of the stylistic elements of early episodes of SatC, and by that I mean there are many asides by random work-a-day everyman/woman types, breaking down the fourth wall, and weighing in on such hot topics as Why he/she hasn’t called, Why you are no longer having sex with him/her, Why he won’t ask you to marry him. It is generally pointless and ineffective to say the least. HJNTIY lacks any of the appeal of SatC and Patricia Field’s interesting wardrobe choices.
I do subscribe to a conspiracy that HJNTIY was intended to have stupefying, mind-erasing qualities because both Jen and I were so blasted at its end that we got lost somewhere on the edge of Brooklyn Heights and could not find the metro for the life of us, which resulted in us Gossip Girling it home in a cab.
Don't see this movie or you will need to
GET A BRAIN, MORANS.
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