The Wicked Truth About Love

I just saw the movie Crazy Heart, the one that won Jeff Bridges the 2010 Academy Award for best actor. In the movie, a single mom named Jane falls for Jeff Bridges’ character, Bad Blake. Bad does his best to live up to his name – he’s a slovenly, irresponsible, drunken, washed-up musician/song-writer but cute, together Jane falls for him anyway. Why? I think Jane is a special case of the BFF type, which explains why she falls for a bad boy musician and then why she dumps him. Jane doesn’t learn to love bad boy musicians from her friends exactly, at least that’s not what the movie shows. The movie shows her learning to love Bad Blake from his fans. His reputation turns her on – she imitates the desires of all his diehard fans the way BFFs imitate their friend’s desires. When she drops him like a hot potato the movie wants us to believe that it’s because Blake loses her son at the mall for a little while, which, let’s face it, is pretty horrible. But let’s also face it that when she let’s Blake babysit her son for the afternoon everyone in the audience is screaming inside, “No! Don’t do it! Are you crazy?” We all know that Jane is making a big mistake, but she blames Blake for the whole thing rather than take responsibility for her part in it. So she dumps him as part of her own cover story to herself, that he’s the bad one and she is the totally blameless and good mother, but there’s another factor, too: the way the mall security guards look at Blake. They see him for who he is and now instead of the looks of admiring fans to imitate, Jane is influenced by the looks of disgusted mall guards. Jane tells herself she’s leaving Blake because he’s bad, but that’s why she fell in love with him in the first place, isn’t it? That reason doesn’t hold water – what makes more sense is that Jane’s love is dependent on imitating what others feel about Blake’s badness. Her crazy heart can’t make up its mind.

What does it look like when two Super Hero types fall in love? A lot like the volatile lead couple in Noël Coward’s play, Private Lives, which I saw Saturday at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre on Navy Pier. We meet Amanda and Elyot, a divorced couple, on their honeymoons with their new spouses. Unfortunately they have chosen to honeymoon in the same place, in the same hotel, in adjacent rooms that share a balcony. Predictably, they “fall in love” again, unable to resist imitating the new spouse’s love for their old partner. Read the rest of this entry »

The first week of my freshman year in college two hunky football players wandered up to the fourth floor of our girls dorm (yes, we lived in a gender divided world back then) and settled on the bed in one of our rooms. Like water flowing downhill, my hall mates and I poured into the room and arranged ourselves at their feet in adoring, tidy rows. Read the rest of this entry »

Movie Review by Suzanne Ross

Directed by Robert Luketic

Screenplay by Nicole Eastman and Karen McCullah Lutz & Kirsten Smith

Released by Sony Pictures Digital, Inc.

(Spoiler Alert!)

The new romantic comedy The Ugly Truth challenges gender stereotypes and romantic fantasies by setting them up and then knocking them down. Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler) proclaims his creed of primitive, irredeemable manhood with tent revival fervor. He is a man-bashing man who wants women to understand that they can never have the mature, mutually loving relationship they want. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to The Wicked truth About Love! While you’re here, feel free to leave a comment.