Eat Pray Love (2010)
Eat Pray Love (2010) — You ever have someone tell you about their spiritual awakening? You smile and nod and hope like hell they change the topic before your head explodes. This movie is two and a half hours of that. I think I have to chalk this up to personal bias since the movie doesn’t do anything overtly wrong other than failing to entertain and the estrogen-charged crowd that was in the theater seemed to get a kick out of it (laughing at things I didn’t even realize were supposed to be jokes). I did actually respect that early in the movie they do have a reasonably honest portrayal of a doomed relationship between Julia Roberts and James Franco (that, coupled with her divorce from a doofus-like Billy Crudup, prompts her global sojourns in Italy, India, and Bali). In a movie of great actors in underwritten roles, Franco probably comes out of it the best. The usually-amazing Richard Jenkins has a scene where he pretends to cry. I don’t mean that in the way actors usually pretend to cry, I mean his voice shakes and he makes sobbing noises and the like and it all sounds real but his eyes remain totally dry. It’s odd to behold. Coupled with his sort of vague impression of a Texan, it makes for a rare miss by the most reliable character actor in cinema today (he still has more personality than anyone else in the movie though). This movie does have some good food-porn moments as Julia Roberts eats some things that made me hungry, but I don’t know that that’s the mark of good film-making, unless you’re doing a Macaroni Grill commercial. Ryan Murphy, best known as the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee, directs this movie with a very deliberate pace that might have worked better if I was the least bit interested in the story. I was ready for the movie to be over around the time things were wrapping up in Italy but then I realized with a groan that there were still two more countries to visit. I guess the moral of the story is that if you have a fuckton of money to travel across the globe then you can achieve spiritual growth? I’m not sure. The film may actually have good points about growing spiritually, I’m not sure. I’ve never been very well tuned-in to those types of things. Silly me, when I go to the movies I’m mostly just looking for… you know, entertainment.
Persistence of Vision 