Just finished watching “Young Adult” with Charlize Theron. The good news: great performance, solid directing. The bad news: it was free on Amazon Prime, barely 12 months after release. And therein hangs a story….
This movie is a downer. A ghost writer of “young adult” fiction gets a birth announcement for the baby of her old boyfriend. On a whim she decides to return to her small hometown and win back the old beau and in the process gets tangled up with a former classmate who was or was not gay but in any case was maimed by jocks who thought he was gay and now is as physically crippled as she is mentally. Are you laughing yet?
I wanted to see this movie when it first came out based on some trailers showing Theron trying to hide her dog checking into a motel and other deadpan moves. So did 8 or 9 other people but it didn’t work. The plot is incredibly depressing and you do not leave the film with an uplifted morale. So nobody wanted to see it except a very few who told their friends to stay away.
Moral for us copywriters is, nobody’s going to read something that makes them feel bad. Okay to turn on the spigots of negativity, but be sure to transition to that golden shower of redemption before you’re done… AND you need to let them know at the outset that said redemption is in sight. Make sense?
I haven’t screened the movie, but I shall, now that I know I can see it on … oh, wait, Amazon; we subscribe to Netflix. Well, one way or the other; Charlize Theron is not to be missed, not in … hmmm, I forget the name, the one where she’s a Lesbian in Florida who steals a car, et seq; but mostly North Country, which is a Minnesota story, apparently like this one, Young Adult.
Trouble is, I’m probably NOT going to watch this movie because I have a steadfast rule NOT to watch any movies nor read any books or even magazine articles that are writers writing about writing or writers. So this main character, the female protagonist, she’s a writer? I’m outta there.
Really. I don’t get past the first page or scene, sometimes. Barton Fink? I’m outta there. Et seq.
(do you realize how difficult your captcha is? Is that really necessary? I don’t mean not necessary to have a Captcha(TM) or ReCAPTCHA(TM) but it just plain misses the point to have one that is ambiguous to a human. )
You get the prize for most comments in one comment, Richard.
First, I hate Netflix. Do a search for “Netflix” on this blog to see why.
Second, she’s a ghost writer so maybe that’s an exception to the “no writers” rule. But I absolutely agree with your about Barton Fink.
As for the captcha, I find that all captchas are difficult these days. Their other purpose is to solve word recognition problems for computers, as you probably know, and I guess all the easy problems have been solved. I’d love to get rid of it. But according to my dashboard in the past 6 months alone 19,833 spam comments have been blocked. That’s why I can’t.