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Occasionally I grow tired of renting movies where everything explodes and the body count climbs higher than my cholesterol level. When that happens, I head to the Cineplex for a chick flick and a much-needed infusion of estrogen. We're in a bit of a drought as far as chick flicks go, but typically anything starring one of the Exalted Three - Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock - will do nicely. Unfortunately, Julia is busy having babies and Meg is busy adopting Chinese orphans and injecting collagen; we're down to Sandra. So it was that on a recent Saturday afternoon I bought a tub of popcorn, a gallon-sized container of Diet Coke and a ticket to Premonition.
If I had any sort of psychic ability, I would have stayed home and watched While You Were Sleeping for the 37th time. Sadly, despite Sandra's best efforts, this movie is beyond hope. Just like 2006's illogical The Lake House, this is yet another time-warp exercise. Only this time, instead of falling in love with Keanu Reeves, Sandra plays a housewife, Linda, who has to deal with the death of her husband, Jim (Julian McMahon).
After Jim dies in a grisly car accident, Linda wakes to find him alive. Then he's dead, then he's alive, then he's dead…it's tedious just to type this, even more so to watch it. Screenwriter Bill Kelly has great fun whipsawing Linda through a chronology so twisted she resorts to writing it out on a giant sheet of paper in a vain effort to make sense of it all. (Note to Hollywood: If the plot is so complex you need a calendar to decode it, maybe you should try something simpler.)
Kelly's worst sin, though, is that he breaks the golden rule of mystery writing: Never lie to the audience. Misdirect them, sure. Throw so many red herrings at them they practically need a fishing net, but never lie. When all is eventually revealed, there should be a sense of, "Oh, I get it now," and not "Geez, that is freakin' impossible." I will say this for Kelly: He made me fervently wish time travel was a reality, if only so I could go back in time and watch a different film.
Sigh. I really miss Sandra's charming, lovelorn characters. Eventually all actresses, even members of the Exalted Three, get a little long in the tooth to play ingénues, and/or they long for more serious roles. As much as it pained me to see her be brittle and racist in Crash, at least that was a good movie with a well-written script. But The Lake House and Premonition - these films are an insult to cinema fans who stubbornly insist movies should actually make sense.
It's time for an intervention. The situation has gotten out of hand, and we can't keep enabling this behavior. We need to sit Sandra down and confront her. Really, it's the compassionate thing to do. We'll gather in a circle, those of us who love her, and gently but firmly recount our pain. "Sandy, honey, you have a script-selection problem. Stop denying it. We've spent many dollars and countless hours in darkened theaters watching you crash and burn, and we just can't go on like this."
It will be difficult, sure, but it must be done. Sandra has lost her way; it's up to us to bring her back into the fold. We'll have to watch her carefully for signs of relapse, but that's the nature of love and codependency.
Now, if we could only do something about those temporally-confused screenwriters…
Correction: In the March 14 issue, the news article Students rally around Gov. Ritter, son, lobbying was done by independent students and not by COPIRG.
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