Tuesday, January 29, 2008

The Depressing Girl

I decided to watch Hallmark’s “The Russell Girl” on Sunday night, not because I am a huge fan of their movies, but because I had seen a decent review of it earlier in the weekend. I also read some positive comments about it from Amber Tamblyn, who I am a fan of. Normally I would ignore an actor praising a project they worked on, since they are essentially required to promote the movie/show. However, in this case I was disappointed.

The movie started out with Tamblyn’s character being diagnosed with cancer, so you know the depressing tone of the movie right away. But “The Russell Girl” was not just depressing because a main character had cancer, it was depressing because everyone shown was way too unhealthy emotionally. It made it uncomfortable to watch – maybe some people enjoy watching characters who are hurting themselves and each other, but I don’t.

Most of the characters appeared to take steps forward towards the end of the movie, and I guess this was supposed to be uplifting. I don’t think the writing pulled this off though. There needed to be a stronger reason that the people were changing, and I just didn’t see that happening. It seemed more like the everyone got to the last third of the film, and decided they needed to act differently to create a good ending, rather then events unfolding organically.

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