{"id":26,"date":"2010-08-18T12:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-18T18:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/churchofthemasses\/2010\/08\/fawn-pander-blather\/"},"modified":"2010-08-18T12:12:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T18:12:00","slug":"fawn-pander-blather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/churchofthemasses\/2010\/08\/fawn-pander-blather\/","title":{"rendered":"Fawn, Pander, Blather"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

It seems hugely anti-climactic to end my two year movie review silence for the likes of the new Julia Robert\u2019s soft-focus orgy Eat, Pray, Love<\/a>. (Hmmmm\u2026 I\u2019m a bit out of practice. Have I just tipped my hand a bit here as to how I felt about the film?)<\/p>\n

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The main flaw of the piece may proceed from the nature of the source material itself. The movie was preposterously, stylishly, Hollywood big-budgety, and insultingly banal. And while a scriptwriter always has the duty of making the source material better, still, sometimes, that is an impossible task. I mean, this is a book with a title that could be found scrawled as a caveman grunt on a Stone Age wall: \u201cMe man thing. Me eat, do rain dance, have sex.\u201d (Call me judgmental, but I\u2019m taking the tack that the \u201clove\u201d and \u201cpray\u201d presented in the movie are largely not. They\u2019re kind of pagan perversions of these activities. They did get the \u201ceat\u201d right, though, which has everything to do with the fact that that part of the film was in Italy, where they truly are geniuses with food. All the evidence is to the contrary that India and Bali are geniuses with the Deity and self-donation respectively. )<\/div>\n
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And, I\u2019m not just complaining that the resolution (I can\u2019t bring myself to write \u201canswers\u201d) that the movie offers is lame. The very questions that the film proposes to be asking are banal. <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Eat, Pray, Love<\/i> is not a journey of a woman in search of her soul. It\u2019s really the travelogue of tax deductions of a New York writer in search of a book.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So, granting that the \u201cbig questions\u201d weren\u2019t really the preoccupation of anybody making this movie, it remains to ask, \u201cWhy?\u201d Hummmmmmmm\u2026 What was really driving the making of Eat, Pray, Love<\/span>? Let me meditate for a minute. Hummmmmmmmmmm\u2026.<\/div>\n
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\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


<\/p>\n

Still thinking here. What were they thinking? Hummmmm\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n




<\/p>\n

Are you tracking with me?<\/p>\n

This movie is possibly the most shameless star vehicle since Julia\u2019s self-aggrandizing stint in Ocean\u2019s 12<\/span> in which she played her goddessness self. She pulled a similar thing in Notting Hill<\/span>, \u201cI\u2019m just a girl. Standing in front of a boy. Asking for him to love her.\u201d waves of intense nausea) but that movie had enough other stengths to salvage the project as a whole. (Please Julia, go to healthy irony school. Or, in other words, the anti-Iraq war crowd called. They want their earnestness back.) It was embarrassing to watch so much Hollywood talent go through this ultimately masturbatory exercise in celebration of the god Celebrity. Particularly painful because of the lack of irony that took in a movie purporting to be about a spiritual quest. <\/p>\n

At its core, Eat, Pray, Lov<\/span>e relates the tedious pilgrimage of a selfish, immature narcissist (don\u2019t think of that as a redundancy as much as an emphasis) who manages to evade true spirituality (in the sense of sacrifice and repentance) true connection with other persons (in the sense of sacrifice and repentance) and plot points (in the sense of sacrifice, and well, repentance\u2026. Note to self: There\u2019s a great new talk on the core of the successful transformational story arc there\u2026.).<\/p>\n

Thoughts that ran through my head while viewing\u2026. \u201cHer poor husband!\u201d\u2026\u2026\u201dWe have seen this scene already. Three times.\u201d\u2026..\u201dWhen people reject the good God, they always make themselves a bad one.\u201d\u2026..\u201dI never thought of chanting loudly as a way of drowning out the voice of your conscience.\u201d\u2026. \u201cShe\u2019s a succubus.\u201d\u2026\u2026\u201dDid she just say that awful bad dialogue or was I dozing?\u201d\u2026\u2026\u201dNeed pasta.\u201d\u2026..\u201dSomething is wrong with a religion that leaves you toothless and unable to use a copy machine.\u201d\u2026.\u201dGetting your friends to write checks is not a selfless act.\u201d\u2026..\u201dHer husband should be glad he is rid of her.\u201d\u2026.<\/p>\n

Should I talk about the false religion exemplified in the line from the film, \u201cGod is in me AS ME.\u201d No, God is in you to draw you to Him. We are not the Godhead. We aren\u2019t even headed for losing our identity in the Godhead because he loves us as individuals. When Oprah interviewed Julia for the movie she asked her, \u201cSo, what\u2019s your favorite food? What\u2019s your favorite pray?\u201d as though every kind of prayer is fine as long as it makes you feel, what? Heard? Validated? Sated \u2013 the way the movie characters sate themselves with food and sex? My dark side had me imagining Julia answering, \u201cOh, well, I like to torture little animals while playing the soundtrack to Tommy.\u201d And Oprah would surely have responded with her wide eyes, \u201cAnd does that work for you?\u201d<\/p>\n

See, your \u201cfavorite pray\u201d is not neutral. It is good if it leads you to lay down your life for your friends. It is bad if it leads you to \u201cforgive yourself\u201d for abandoning your son, or your husband, or if it leads you to justify fornicating with a virtual stranger, or into concluding that basically you can do whatever you need to do as long as it floats your boat. God, please tell me I will live to see this Boomer lie scorned in the popular culture!<\/p>\n

This movie is plodding, repetitive, and anti-climactic. There is an artificial inciting incident \u2013 the main character\u2019s festering narcissism erupts and makes her regurgitate her marriage vows \u2013 there is no character establishment \u2013 they seemd to think we woud be on the character\u2019s side because she is Julia\u2026note to producers: ref. Mary Riley <\/span>\u2013 there are no sub plots \u2013 there is no imagery \u2013 there is no suspense \u2013 there is nothing surprising \u2013 there is no ending, the audience torture just stops. Thank God, but really, inexcusable.<\/p>\n

In summation, Eat, Pray, Love<\/span> is a bad movie in terms of it\u2019s storytelling and in terms of what it says. Or, um, what it doesn\u2019t say. Or, um, that is, what it says really badly. Oh, just eat, pray, pass.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems hugely anti-climactic to end my two year movie review silence for the likes of the new Julia Robert\u2019s soft-focus orgy Eat, Pray, Love. (Hmmmm\u2026 I\u2019m a bit out of practice. Have I just tipped my hand a bit here as to how I felt about the film?) The main flaw of the piece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nFawn, Pander, Blather<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It seems hugely anti-climactic to end my two year movie review silence for the likes of the new Julia Robert's soft-focus orgy Eat, Pray, Love. 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