I saw previews for all three of these films in the same sitting and jotted them down as ones to look for. Well, the trailer creators earned their keep (or would have, if I had actually paid for any of these movies – instead I saw them all on my premium movie channels), making these pedestrian, predictable movies seem charming and fresh.
On a Clear Day: Another banal mediocrity about “quirky” Englishmen. I adore Peter Mullan, and he’s fine here, but the utterly predictable story – about an unemployed, middle-aged man who sets out to swim the English Channel – with its stable of one-dimensional characters and generically uplifting plot line swamps him.
Imagine Me and You: This story of a woman who meets and falls for someone else (the trendy twist is that the someone else is also a woman) on her wedding day actually isn’t terrible. The three leads are appealing enough – you feel empathy for all of them, which is a dangerous situation when, for the story to conclude, at least one of them will inevitably have to do something detestable – and the friendship that arises between the lesbian and the husband’s womanizing buddy is endearing. But it feels like a TV show, too slick and shallow and dragging even at its 90-minute running time, and the ending is unimaginative and cheesy.
Likewise, Something New isn’t the worst movie to spend time with; Sanaa Lathan is appealing as a buttoned-down career woman searching for the perfect (black) man, and the (white) man she falls for, played by Simon Baker, is charming enough to keep my interest. But it covers pretty familiar ground – woman finds perfect guy, lets her own insecurities get the better of her, then has Moment of Clarity™ and gets guy back just in time for smiley, happy ending. There’s the hook of the racial issue – he ignores it, she can’t let go of it, and of course eventually they find a happy medium – but it seems to just sort of melt away. (And I do have to point out that the character in the film used to back up Lathan’s assertion that she has to work twice as hard to be accepted at work – he keeps bypassing her to get advice from her white male coworkers – could just as easily have been sexist as racist.) In the end, it’s a standard romantic comedy, no more, no less.
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