Current IMDB score: 7.9
Director: Dan Fogelman
Main Actors you care about: Olivia Wild, Oscar Isaac, Antonio Banderas
Why I liked it: My Eighth grade teacher once said she only goes to see one movie a year. I thought to myself at the time that she was crazy. In 2018 I only saw maybe 2-3 movies in theaters. This movie I did not see in theaters but I'm sad that I didn't. The trailer was astounding. When it came out I got busy. I read the reviews in anticipation and they were super negative so I didn't watch it till it came out in my home theater. Most people complained about the ending which I was scared to watch when I was halfway through it. Halfway through it I had actually felt something unlike most movies of the year. Movies that actually make me feel something are few and far between for me this late in my understanding of life. There's a lot of things this movie does that I like and that should make you feel something in a sea of movies that are feelingless.
There's the person-butterfly-effect as I call it. It's the idea that everything effects everything. It's the idea that everything is connected, very loosely, but still connected. It's what gives meaning to good things people do that no one will ever find out were done. It's what gives meaning to lives of lonely people that don't think most things they do matter. It gives life meaning. Unfortunately a lot of critics and reviewers that say this movie is too sad miss this wonderful portrait of everything you do mattering in an otherwise meaningless existence.
Thing(s) I would change: Most people say this movie is way too pretentious to be worth a watch. They are crazy. The movie is pretentious at times which should have been caught and edited out but it's nothing too bad. It's a mild distraction from the monologues that make you think and feel something. There's like 2-3 bad pretentious moments where the diagloue is trying too hard but other than that it shouldn't distract too much at all.
I really don't fully understand Rodrigo's dad left the family. Maybe if I actually believed Rodrigo's mom loved "Rodrigo's uncle" I might see how a good person like Rodrigo's dad would have left but no, it doesn't make sense for Rodrigo's dad to leave. Either show Rodrigo's mom actually falling in love with Antonio Bandera's character or have him die in a olive oil accident or something.
Favorite Line(s)/Scene:
"When critics reviewed . . . Bob Dylan's 1997 release, "Time Out of Mind," the song "Make You Feel My Love" was a source of much criticism. Every track on the album brimmed with unrelenting melancholy and sadness. But there, smack in the middle of it all, sat an unbashedly populist hit song, a love song . . . a song that in years to come would be covered by Garth Brooks, of all people. Critics argued that putting an on-the-nose love song in the middle of an album about despair and tragedy was Dylan's only misstep. Others argued that was his point." This nails what I think is the main point of the movie. In the sea of sad things happening, love is the only thing that makes it bearable.
"Unreliable Narrator! . . . Unreliable Narrators are considered a device, right? Don't answer. They are. They are and they don't get a lot of literary analysis because it's a gimmick. It's a trick. I mean Canterbury Tales gets a shoutout because, you know, it's good but typically it's used for popcorn crime novels and thriller movies (Agatha Christie, Usual Suspects, so on and so forth). But I'm going to argue that every narrator by its very definition is unreliable because when you tell a story there's always an essential distance between the story itself and the telling of said story, right? So therefore every story that has ever been told has an Unreliable Narrator. The only truly reliable narrator would be someone hypothetically telling a story that unfolds before our very eyes which is obviously very impossible SO what does that tell us? That the only truly reliable narrator is life itself. But life itself is also completely unreliable because it is constantly misdirecting and misleading us and taking us on this journey where it is literally impossible to predict where it is going to go next. . . . Life as the ultimate Unreliable Narrator."
The final conversation of Rodrigo and his mother gives a good thought that's probably overdone but the idea that parents pass on themselves and never die if there family tree is still alive (and in this case, loving someone).
Similar Movies/TV Shows: Cloud Atlas, The Road, Stranger than Fiction, Love Actually?, This is Us (because of the feels)
"Side" note:
I don't get it.
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