Days of Wine and Roses, Pride and Prejudice, & Bride and Prejudice

Days of Wine and Roses reminds me of a completely serious The Apartment, mixed with a touch of The Lost Weekend. Except just really depressing. I didn't realize that both Requiem for a Heavyweight and this were remakes of live tv dramas. Weird. Just that coincidence, nothing about the movie. Which was just really depressing. I didn't expect it to be this type of movie at all. I have this tendency to forget almost all but the very simplest plot summaries when I watch a movie. Well, especially when it's a movie I put in my queue maybe years ago. It can be years since I put a lot of movies in it. I need to watch more movies more often, clearly. Anyway, the only parts of the movie I didn't care for were the parts at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It doesn't really have a completely non-religious aspect to it. It's all about replacing alcohol with a "higher being". I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that always annoys me when it's brought up by them. Other than that, it's a very good movie.

Pride and Prejudice was the Mormon version. It's actually not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Probably a result of the not way too much Mormon stuff in it. But it actually had a lot of the same plot points as the book, even if the parents didn't really exist, the Bennett's weren't sisters, and Charlotte Lucas didn't really play a part in it. As much as it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, it wasn't actually a good movie. The use of quotes from Pride and Prejudice to attempt to tie the book to the movie was very distracting. Just accept that anyone who cares will not need to be reminded. It's also not like the movie needs the reminders. Character names are basically right. The lack of adult characters was pretty annoying, as Mrs. Bennett was replaced with a book called The Pink Bible, as annoying as that was. I kept getting this feeling that the entire movie was sort of making fun of feminism, which is really not the point of the book at all.

Bride and Prejudice, on the other hand, sucked ass. The worst of Bollywood along with the worst of remakes. The dancing and singing was... Jesus. How the hell can this sort of movie have been created? How could Naveen Andrews signed on to do this crap? Or more accurately, why does Bollywood exist? I haven't seen one single movie that was remotely good from it. Long bad musicals are about the worst type of movie that exists. Even worse than overlong craptacular Scientologic sci-fi epics. Yeah. At least that just had bad acting and bad editing and bad everything, but was so bad it was enjoyable. There was nothing I enjoyed about Bride and Prejudice. Not even with the very attractive Aishwarya Rai, Indira Varma, or even Alexis Bledel (and what the hell was Ashanti doing in it?). Just two hours of almost constant pain. Maybe if the music weren't so horrendously bad. Why did I watch it? Because I'm an idiot? That's actually not that far off. But I was told it would be bad, and I still watched it. Every time a song started, though, I regretted that decision. The London montage in this wasn't nearly as exciting as the Mormon one. Beh.