Tonight I saw "The Last Kiss." I expected my first feeling afterwards to be "That rocked!" because Zach Braff and Rachel Bilson were in it and the screenplay was written by London, Ontario native Paul Haggis. Well, my first response was initially quite different. "That was nuts!", "That was painful to watch", "Man, I liked Garden State better... it was a nicer movie"... and so on... but then we started thinking about it more... this movie was FANTASTIC.
My friend Yaron and I started talking about the movie and how it applied to our lives, what parallels we saw in our own lives and so on and so forth. This movie sparked so much conversation and interesting social issues to discuss that we just went to Pixar for like 2 or 3 hours to sit at a table and drink some Tea and talk about the movie and discuss some of our personal philosophies about life and relationships we've had. It was freakin' awesome to have a movie inspire this much discussion and conversation and thought. Fantastic and awesome.
So as expected the movie was totally depressing. It was about a bunch of relationships which are all falling apart at the seams, and pretty much everyone in the movie is really quite flawed in some way. These people do a whole bunch of terrible stuff to the people that they love and it's really quite hard to watch and crazy.
But... it sure made me think a LOT. I am going to keep this general cause I don't want to discuss the personal details on here, but I came out of a 3-year relationship last summer, so I definitely had plenty of things to chat about. I think these are just a few of the things I was thinking and talking for hours about tonight... the philosophy of how a man should act in a relationship... the kind of regret people can feel if they have a one-sided relationship where they are always putting their girlfriend first, so much so that they actually start regretting doing that... how someone can be a good match for someone else, but that might not be enough somehow... how no one is actually perfect, despite what usual romantic films make us feel like... how if you are dating someone, they might do a whole bunch of super annoying stuff, but you never really focus on the bad stuff, and you always seem to make excuses for the bad stuff and justify it... how when you come out of a long relationship, you stop justifying the bad stuff and realize that those things about the girl actually did bother you, and you have to do this to survive the change and make peace with yourself... whether or not people in a relationship should acknowledge that they are somewhat attracted to other people, or totally ignore or block out these feelings to maintain a stronger commitment to their boyfriend/girlfriend...
And then these ideas lead to more broad questions like "How do you know if a decision you make in life is the correct decision?"
At school, life is so planned out and every minute in scheduled and busy and stressful. But you have a defined schedule. You know for 4 or 5 years you'll be basically doing the same thing. The crazy part is that when you finally finish school, life kindof becomes a bit of a guessing game. You can't see into the future of course, and if you're hard-working and motivated you'll often have several choices to make in life, all of which will seem to be good, solid decisions. All of these decisions are probably "good" decisions. But how do you know which is the "right" decision? How do you know which decision will be the "best" one? If they are all good, or potentially good, how do you possibly choose one? I suppose the only way to do this is to weigh up your options at the time and try to balance what you know at the current time to make your decision. It seems like there is no way to know if you're making the best choice, so you sometimes just need to go with whatever you feel is best at that moment. It seems crazy but I guess that kindof how life rolls. You can't logically determine which choice is best when you have too many good choices. One will probably be much better than the others, but you'll never know which one it is until you've chosen one of them and followed through with it. At that point it's often pretty hard to change your mind, so you have to decide, hope it's the right choice and then just go with it.
So if you're interested in going to "The Last Kiss" because it looks like it might be something like Garden State and seems like a good romantic comedy, then maybe it's not the best choice for a date movie. But if you want to see a movie that's kindof hard to watch, well acted and will send you into a 5 hour, super interesting, thoughtful discussion... then I definitely suggest you check it out.
Cool that Rosh Hashannah is the time of year in the Jewish calendar when you are supposed to think a lot about your past and your past year and what you want to do better in the upcoming year.
All in all I think the biggest issue in "The Last Kiss" was that when people in relationships are too scared to bring up issues or talk about things, these things snowball until they are blown to huge proportions and can be very upsetting to both sides.
I guess it all comes down to being honest in all of your relationships with people, whether it is friends, family, boyfriend or girlfriend.
