Oh God, oh God, Anne Hathaway’s awkward face is burned into my retina….
Please Note: This is NOT a review, it’s a rant.
First of all, I think it is vital to point out that the only reason I went to see the film ‘One day’ is because i read and loved the book. I do not like rom-coms, in fact i despise almost all ‘Hollywood’ romances. Consequently, I was acutely aware of the distinct possibility of disliking the film. (Un)Fortunately having grown up in a household where trash TV, rom-coms and ITV game shows have swamped my living room TV screen, I have built up quite the tolerance for TV shows and films i do not enjoy. I can bare ‘this morning’ (some might even accuse me of enjoying it on rare occasions- a claim I neither deny nor admit to), I can [only just] tolerate ‘legally blonde’. I have even just recently learned how to sit through an entire 15 minutes of Loose Women without literally pulling out bits of hair or bursting into tears at the idoiocy and human error displayed on a show which appears to brand itself as a light hearted ‘woman’s hour’, which I in fact believe is a sad but nonetheless important display of skewed social priorities and human faults. The show feels apocalyptic in the sense that every time I watch it, i’m genuinely frightened that i might wake up tomorrow and the world is like loose women. If i had the opportunity to form my own government, i’d use a five minute snipped of these so-called ‘loose women’ to highlight the necessity to impose my ‘liberal dictatorship manifesto’ immediately before the whole of humanity slides into an irrecoverable state of stupidity.
Ok, so maybe i’ve veered slightly off track, but it was necessary to prove my point that, despite a high tolerance of utter trite on Tv and in films, i surprised even myself when i left the cinema before ‘One Day’ had even finished.
It became almost immediately obvious that a purely literary device- returning to the story just one day a year - does not translate well to cinema. This, however, was the very least of its problems. The acting was amazingly shocking. No really, i was genuinely AMAZED at how rigid, awkward, and stifled the acting was, the characters of Dextor and Emma seemed as if they had just met each other for the first time in every scene. It was just awkward and didn’t convey the close, intimate and natural friendship that was evident in the novel between them.
Ugh. I knew things were going to be bad when the scene started with music which sounded like it belonged to a 70’s american soap opera about posh-and-rural New England, USA, coupled with a swirly font title taken straight from word-processor (quite possibly ‘french script’)
I left the cinema about half way through (and we only stayed this long because there were so many awkward silences in the film and i had taken some rather loud rustly bags, that we had to choose our moment wisely so as not to disturb the other 4 or so people in the cinema, although i question their motives for staying, and perhaps even believe our walk out may have sparked a mass walkout afterwards, it’s what i like to think happened at any rate. Whoever didn’t leave had probably slipped into a comma, perhaps even self-induced to make the pain go away and the minutes pass quicker).
The only thing i regret is that i didn’t stay long enough to see Anne Hathaway die and Jim Sturgess cry his silly posh tears out, who can only cry using the infamous tweezers-in-the trouser-pocket-with-the-hole method and presumably is only capable of crying out gold, dollar bills, or his own sexual fluids. He’s that robotic, horrid, and overwhelmingly in love with himself.
I hated it so much i cannot stop thinking about it. Like those awful songs that you hate but can’t help yourself from singing, Anne Hathaways ridiculous dumb face is ingrained, no, burnt or scratched, into my brain. So much so, it still hurts even though the physical scars have long since faded. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, it just hurts.
I just want to save anyone from having to experience what i experienced on a cold monday afternoon, and quite possibly changed my life forever- it was the day i saw quite literally the worst film ever.
