Serendipity

It’s always snowing in New York. No summer, no spring, no warmer climbs spanning the breadth between. Its always winter in New York.

Serendipity stars John Cusack as Johnathon Trager and Kate Beckinsale as Sarah, to perennially involved people whose stars cross one night in a twist of fate. They part, leaving their futures to the tides and winds of fate. Years pass, lives change, and on the eve of commitment to others, they begin to wonder what might have been. Its not as romantic and exciting as it sounds.

You see, in reality Johnathon and Sarah are not two hopeless romantics, but a pair of cheating, untrustworthy, airheads who spend more of their lives wondering if the grass is greener on the other side than watering the little patch in their own back yard. Both are so eager to find someone other than the person they are with that after only a couple of hours drinking coffee and ice skating they spend the next seven years wondering where the other person is. But they aren’t bright enough to simply exchange numbers so that they might engage in the traditional late night “booty call” when they tire of their current love interest. Instead they decide they are so deeply in love they’ll just walk away and see if another dumbass accident brings them back together.

Generally, a romantic film should be about two characters the audience cares about and roots for to get back together. John and Sarah are the biggest twits on the earth, so it’s hard to do much other than to pray they both fall off the edge of the earth. Or perhaps they can slide off on a sheet of ice, since like every film set in New York these days, it always seems to be butt ass freezing cold. What ever happened to those scorching New York summers you hear about? Just once I’d like to see a New York movie which featured women wearing Daisy Dukes and drinking 7-Eleven Big Gulp’s just to stay cool in the hot city sun.

And am I the only person in the world who knows that you can’t see the stars from the dead center downtown of one of the biggest cities in the world? The town I grew up in is a cow pie, but under the city lights I couldn’t have sat with my girlfriend and stared at passing airliners let alone pick out constellations and compare them to warts on my arm.

In short, Serendipity is just like John Cusack’s last movie, America’s Sweethearts. Another story about two basically stupid and despicable people who would be better suited to a mental institution than romantic interludes and supposedly comedic films without any real jokes to speak of.

Maybe they were shooting for Sleepless in Seattle, a film filled with longing and anticipation. A film less about romance than the act of finding it. A film about discovery and finding true love. I guess someone screwed up and made sleeping in Seattle instead.