Eat. Pray. Smash my face in a wall.

13 Oct 2010, Posted by Cape Town Girl in CTG, Celebrity, girl stuff, movies, 18 Comments

Okay maybe I shouldn’t have gone to see this movie while running on an 8-hour sleep deficit but it seemed to be just the thing for Sunday afternoon. But things are not always as they seem.

I liked the book Eat, Pray, Love. The destinations were exotic, the descriptions were detailed, you felt like you were eating the pasta and getting fat along with the author without having to actually quit your job and leave your marriage (f*ck that – mission). It was a nice little detour, but it wasn’t the greatest story ever. In fact, it’s quite a cliche of a story, the main variation on the tale is that the person travelling is 45, not 19.

So Eat, Pray, Love was basically a really long gap-year travel article, peppered with emotional lightbulb moments and buzzwords like ‘Ashram’. It was sweet. It was nice. It was fine.

And then they went and made it into a movie.

I think it’s fair to say that travel articles do not translate into movies well. Not even the MASTER of travel hilarity, Bill Bryson, has had any of his books made into movies. That should have been a red flag for the producers, but no.

Look, making a movie is hard. Proper works of fiction with well-planned story arcs tend to fail at the best of times (examples include The Time Traveller’s Wife, or Atonement, or even American-goddamn-Psycho – look how they butchered that). So how they thought this distended travel article would make an interesting movie is beyond me.

If you pushed me up against a wall, held a knife to my guts and threatened to remove my ovaries unless I listed some highlights, I’d probably say the following:

- I liked it when Julia Roberts’ character threw a fit about how she ‘feels nothing anymore’ and then her publisher says ‘You’re acting like a child suck it up like the rest of us and get on with your life’ (she’s right)

- I liked the hot young guy Julia Roberts’ character hooks up with post her divorce, and I liked the part where she fell off the bed in the middle of the night and lies sobbing on the floor like a teenager (made me feel better about crying when I lost my parking ticket the other day, if this is how the average 45-year old woman behaves)

- I really really liked the part where it said ‘The End’.

I could go into detail but the truth is I slept through much of the movie, and then let out a wail when, upon waking, it still wasn’t over. I nudged PD and said ‘Priscilllllllaaaaaaaaa….” And she nudged me back and said “It’s nearly finished” and I curled back into a ball until the credits rolled.

Do yourself a favour and take the time you’d spend watching this movie and donate it to a charity that needs it. Remember, you will never get those 2 hours back.

Did anybody out there enjoy this movie? Did I miss something?