Have you ever wanted to hammer a few nails into your eyelids so they would stop opening? I figured if I did that I wouldn’t have to watch the rest of the The Last Kiss starring Zach Braff. It was Saturday night and my girlfriend and I just wanted to relax and see what was On Demand. We came to The Last Kiss, and we both said we wanted to see it when it was in the theaters. The minute I clicked “watch” I was having second thoughts.
Upon seeing the trailer for this a month or so before it opened, I actually thought it looked pretty good. I didn’t really like Garden State, but I thought Braff turned in a good performance. The trailer was Rachel Bilson heavy, unlike the movie. The trailer also seemed like it might have been a romantic comedy, which is more tolerable than just a romance. What the movie turned out to be was completely different.
The Last Kiss was a film that explored Michael’s (Braff) feelings of apprehension about spending the rest of his life with the same woman. In the film, he described marriage as being “final.” His girlfriend Jenna (Jacinda Barrett) was pregnant with his child but they weren’t married yet. All of Michael’s friends were having issues with their girlfriends also. One of them, Kenny had a romp with a new girl he met and then bounced when she was about to introduce him to her parents. Naturally that’s the knee jerk reaction. Chris (Casey Affleck) couldn’t deal with the pressure of fighting with his girlfriend and taking care of their baby so he decided to leave her. I couldn’t stop thinking “what a downer this is!”
Michael needed to explore life away from his girlfriend and Kim (Rachel Bilson) was very cute, in college, and ready to slip her panties off. They meet at a wedding and they hit it off. Michael visits her at college and they eventually wind up having sex. (*To make matters worse Bilson doesn’t even get naked) Of course, Kim gets clingy for a moment. Michael claims he needed to be with someone else to realize how much he loved his girlfriend who caught him in a lie. After Jenna found out Michael was banging Bilson, she wouldn’t let him in the house as he pleaded her forgiveness. What a pansy. The End.
Who wants to watch a movie about a guy who gets caught cheating and gives up on life to sleep at her doorstop until she lets him back in? That’s the suckiest idea for a movie ever! The subplot was even worse. You have Jenna’s mom Anna played by Blythe Danner who is depressed about something. We find out that it’s because she thinks her husband is cold and uncaring. She’s also wrestling with the fact that she cheated on him with Egon Spengler a few years prior.
I can’t stand this trend of people cheating on each other in movies. There’s so much divorce and infidelity in real life I don’t care to watch it on screen. Movies are supposed to be escapism! It’s pretty sad. With all the negative stuff in life, wouldn’t you think people would want to watch a strong relationship depicted rather than have the burden of watching a couple with problems? The Last Kiss isn’t about infidelity, it’s about Michael’s struggle dealing with the status quo. Michael was scared of the long haul, but sleeping with another girl isn’t going to make Michael figure out what he really wants in life. Even if he marries Jenna he’ll still have those random urges to sleep with that piece of ass college girl who’s flirting with him.
