I was contemporary to the characters in that movie and though it is pretty cartoonish as well, I felt it captured a set of very real archetypes for young people in the city at the time.īonus Seattle movie: Parallax View has an political assassination that occurs on top of the Space Needle. It just has the word Seattle in the title.įor films of the same era, Singles rang a lot truer to the town at the time for me. (cf Fraisier which is set in Seattle because that is a long way from Boston.) So really it doesn't have much to do with Seattle. That's Seattle's purpose in popular US culture. I think Ephron just set part in Seattle because she was looking for a place super far away from New York. Seattle was picked for this movie for the same reason it is almost always picked as a location in TV and movies - it is really, really far from everywhere else. On the whole Seattle thing, it is, in fact, somewhat silly to consider this much of a Seattle movie. It can feel like fate even if it isn't, and I guess that's true. She said, yeah, the movie is ridiculous and unlikely and has this dumb "fate" aspect, but in real life when you finally do find the person that you love and marry, everything about finding that person feels incredibly unlikely as well. Otherwise, I'm not that keen on it because it is so ridiculous, but at some point, I read a interview with Ephron that gave me a kinder view of it. You don't see that in movies very often, and it is a big part of life, so I thought that was great. The one thing I did like about the movie when it came out was the fact that a fair amount of the movie was about grief. This is at the heart of this movie and very much rings true. It's really, really hard to do the right thing, or know what the right thing is. Though in this case it is clearly taken to cartoonish extremes, it speaks to a common experience. As long as these people aren't actually stalking, meh. People "stalk" to some extent each other in life from afar and online, and wonder how they might achieve the impossible task of bringing themselves together with someone they are infatuated with. Yes, Meg's character is pretty stalker like, but I recognize this all around me. I recognize a lot of things in that movie that I see in real life, though the movie is pretty cartoonish. I have contempt for no one engaged in this struggle. Lots of people make the mistake of settling with someone they don't really love, and a bunch of other people make the mistake of constantly chasing some perfect passion that they will never find. Relationships are really hard to figure out. It's easy for her, but it isn't really fair to that guy.īut also being an adult with a dating history, a long one, and long and successful marriage, I'm not inclined to blame anyone for this sort of situation. You might argue that Meg Ryan's character is more morally repugnant before she breaks it off with her boyfriend because she's coasting along in a relationship where someone loves her, but she doesn't love him back. (If I remember correctly, when the boyfriend gives up without a fight he says as much in the film.) Who wants to be the person another person settles for? No one. Say what you will about knowing that relationships require and time and effort, but it doesn't change the fact that there is nothing morally redeeming about marrying a guy because he's adequately nice and you can get a long with him more or less. I wasn't a big fan of the movie when it came out, but I don't think it's as morally repugnant as you make out.įundamentally it's a movie about not settling for a passionless relationship. All because she wanted to feel butterflies in her stomach or some shit. By the end of the movie she leaves the fiancé dude sitting by himself, on valentines day, with his mother's wedding ring in his pocket, staring at the empire state building lit up with a big red heart, where presumably Meg Ryan is banging a dude who will probably wake up a few hours in the middle of the night in a cold sweat screaming for his dead wife. Meg Ryan starts off with a pretty healthy perspective on long-term relationships, treating them as something that require time and effort, only for the movie to spend an hour and a half shitting on that very idea. Tom Hank's redeeming quality was that he had deep, clinical depression and was doing nothing to manage it, yet thinks jumping into a relationship will somehow fix things. Tom Hank's girlfriend's character flaw was that she had a slightly annoying laugh and flicked her hair too much. And it pissed off! Meg Ryan's fiancé's character flaw was the fact that he had allergies.
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