The View From Scranton

Sappery

I'm a sap. An unmitigated sap. Jelly-hearted and teary-throated, like all the other sad saps out there in Sapland. Yes, me. The long hard ex-con. Who's stood up and got over and made due with some of the nation's meanest, ugliest incarcerates. The man of back alley brawls and club cons and fist-in-the-face candor. The cad. The cadge. The cat. That me. A sap.

It's downright pitiful.

Like this glad aft at Just Like Heaven. First off, the fact that I even went to see Just Like Heaven should tell you how much of a sap I am. It's peddled as sap. For saps. And I went anyway. But I didn't even make it through the previews before I started sapping out. It happened during the trailer for North Country, when Charlize and Sissy and Frances stood their ground, and father Sean broke down and stood his too. And it happened again through the view of Elizabethtown, when Orlando Bloom gets with Kirsten Dunst. I welled. Not into a weap, mind you. Nor even a tear. But a welling that could've been a hair trigger from either. Both. It had that much swell. I tell ya, had someone said pull, I would've lost it.

Yeah, that sapped.

I get why the sappery might of happened from North Country. It's causal, and I do still so wanna be part of a cause greater than me. I mean, it'd sure beat being the cause of all wrong. And I kinda understand (though I'm a bit reddened to admit it) why the sap happed in Elizabethtown. Kirsten reminds me of Karen, my gal of once upon a Chicago, and I do still so secretly want a next last chance. I hurt her. Hurt there. Hurt. The well helps the heal.

But getting and understanding in now way mitigates the sap. I'm too close to the surface, my laugh and my cry and my smile and my sigh are too near reveal. At breaking's tipping point, at collapse's door. Submerged in The Singularity.

Makes me wanna take a sap to my head.

And yes, I dug the movie. Not that it was named for a Cure song (though there is that), or that Katie Melua did a credibly cinematic job of covering it in the opening credits (though there is that too). No, I genuinely dug the flick. The quick cut character reveal, the slow creep of closeness, the warm and fuzzy feel of it's fullsomeness. Script-slingers Peter Tolan (Analyze This/That, Rescue Me) and Leslie Dixon (The '99 Thomas Crown Affair), and lenscrafter Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) did a swell well of a job with Marc Levy's If Only It Were True. And if the sappy Happy Ending was a given, it can be forgiven.

posted by John Hood. @ 7:37 PM