acrappywebsite.com

Johnny Depp is in danger of losing my respect. For years he picked great, interesting movies I actually enjoyed watching, but lately...nothing. His latest, "Finding Neverland", an allegedly inspirational movie about what a crazy old bastard J.M. Barrie was, reeked of high-society bullshit and the usual pompous Hollywood crap about how anything is possible "if only you believe."

The thing I don't understand about movies like this is they purport to show what a special person they were in life, yet they totally ignore that any normal person who acted like that would be thrown in a crazy house. This is all, of course, based on the premise that Hollywood showed some semblance of what Barrie was in life. Hollywood has a knack for fucking these things up, but for the purpose of this review, I'm granting them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Within the first five minutes of the movie, you can see how fucking crazy he is. He spends all his time playing with these four boys and their widowed mother, and he has what he claims to be a vivid imagination, which is really no more than serious problems deciphering and coping with reality. Here we have a grown man who spends all his time playing make-believe, and we applaud him for having a child's spirit. The only reason he was able to get away with that is because he wrote one shitty play that somehow became a classic. If he weren't such an accomplished writer, he would have been committed for his childish behavior. Think about it people. If some regular forty year old man spent all his time playing pirates and cowboys and Indians and pretending that his dog was a bear, people wouldn't praise him for his youthful spirit, they would call him immature, childish, or outright crazy. You can play with your kids, that's fine, but when a grown man spends literally all his free time playing with someone else's kids, something's wrong.

And that brings me to my next big problem with this movie. Barrie spent all his time with Kate Winslet's character, the widow, and her children, totally ignoring his own wife, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him. He spends all his time with this woman, invites her and her kids to a cottage where he and his wife used to spend summers, spends practically no time with his own wife, and he doesn't see a thing wrong with this situation. Now pardon me, but I think if you're married, that is the family you should be concentrating on, not somebody else's family who adopts you as the substitute husband/father. I guess I'm just old-fashioned like that. Then one day Barrie comes home from frolicking around with this widow and her children, and sees that his wife has a man at their house, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him? Mind you, it was never made clear whether Barrie and this woman ever had any sort of physical relationship, but they definitely had more of an emotional relationship than he had with his wife, and when you're married, I would say that's just as much cause for concern as physically cheating. So then his wife tells him things need to change with him, he needs to spend more time with her, and if he doesn't, she'll leave. So of course he doesn't come home when he said he would the next day, and she leaves. And again, we're supposed to feel sorry for him. When I'm married, if I spend all my waking time with another woman and her kids, if my wife doesn't leave me, then she's fucking stupid. This is the kind of shit I hate about so many bullshit movies, they portray characters who mistreat other people, and when they are themselves hurt because of that mistreatment, we're supposed to play the violin for them because it's just so damn sad. God it pisses me off. If anybody acted today like Barrie did, and he wasn't famous, his wife would leave him. And the situation wouldn't even arise, because frankly, what woman with four kids wants another forty-year-old kid running around? Nobody. Single mothers have enough shit to worry about without having to put up with shit from a childish boyfriend. God Hollywood pisses me off. A bunch of pompous ass clowns telling us what we should admire about people and what we should despise about them.

And the most disturbing part of the whole movie was the whole idea that your imagination is more important than the reality of the situation. You know what, a dog is a dog, it isn't a bear. That's just the way it is, no matter how hard you try and imagine, it's still a fuckin dog. I understand the importance of creativity, but there is a distinct difference between being creative and being crazy. When the widow mercifully keeled over toward the end of the movie, here comes uncle Jim telling her grieving sons not to worry because his mother will always be alive in Neverland and all he has to do to see her is go there himself. No asshole, she isn't alive. She's dead and she's rotting in hell, and you won't see her again until you're in hell too. She's fucking dead. Stop being a pussy and trying to hide in your imagined fantasy world because real life is a bitch. I should be an inspirational speaker.

back to reviews