One Day Review

Hello All. Its Jacqui. I am back from vacation and a slight break from movie going.

Today I went to see "One Day" starring Jim Sturgess ("21", "Across the Universe) and Anne Hathaway ("Princess Diaries", "Devil Wears Prada"). The basic summary is they are two friends who almost hook-up after the college graduation. The movie is a snap-shot of their relationship that occurs every July 15 from the year they met. The viewer is treated to not just a flashback of fashion and music but also where Dexter (Sturgess) and Emma (Hathaway) are in their lives. We see how Emma struggles while Dexter succeeds and vice versa throughout their 20 year friendship.

I went into this movie expecting something like 2000's "Love and Sex" starring now-action director Jon Favreau  and Famke Jannsen (and also one of my favorite movies of all time because of Favreau [yes I have a crush on him, lol]). The background of that movie was two people meet randomly and then it took time for the "timing" to be right for them to be together. Possibly combined with the classic "Same Time, Next Year"(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078199/). "One Day" seemed like it didn't know exactly where on that spectrum it wanted to be. If anything, it was like a nasty hybrid of every single romantic movie ever made. It had your unrequited love, the anti-climatic get together, and the tragedy that occurs once the main characters finally get together.

Overall, I am not a fan of this movie. I felt the movie was very choppy among its many issues (Hathaway's inability to do a consistent English accent, for example). I came away feeling that something was missing from this movie and its story telling style. Whenever the vignette shifted, it seemed like as a viewer I lost out on something. For example, one scene where Dexter and Emma discuss something that happened in between one of the prescribed days. I feel that would have been a pivotal scene that explained everything else that followed. But no, the event is hinted at, talked about but you never see it.

While the books are usually always better than their adaptations, this one really fails to even partly live up to the book. I feel it left too much just "floating out there". I will give this movie one of the lowest ratings I have given a film since we started the blog... 1 out 5 stars

(Gerard asked me about where this ranked on the "Tree of Life" scale, I said slightly higher because I sat through this one.)