“This one, like the book it’s based on, didn’t hit for me because I felt like it was grounded in reality, but it needed just a hint of surreality to be believable. Which is a weird statement.
It’s a family drama, nothing too wild there, but then each character does at least one somewhat outrageous or unexpected thing, and it would’ve helped if the movie had a more expect wackiness vibe going in.
Pet peeve from movies that people should know by now? Fire sprinklers are activated based on heat, not smoke. Smoking in a room won’t activate fire sprinklers. There’s a very small vial of something, you can see it on most sprinklers, it’s usually a red tube, and heat will cause it to burst, which activates the sprinkler.
Second pet peeve: if a woman vomits, she’s pregnant.
Third pet peeve? I don’t know if I’ve got one from this movie. Gimme a minute.
The movie ends up feeling pretty overstuffed. I think there was too much stuff in the book to fit into a movie, and what happened is that vibes were sacrificed for incident. So by the end, it’s just a bunch of things happening, and you don’t care too much about what or why, you just get lulled by the constant drum beat of thing happens, thing happens, thing happens.
The resolution between two boyfriends happens SO fast. Like ridiculously fast. We don’t get to savor a pretty big fuck you prank.
I think perhaps cutting some stuff would’ve given what remained more space and made the movie overall more effective. But what do I know?”