If I Stay Review #IfIStay
The perfect movies for girls who wish all boys were anatomically Ken dolls (and the guys who agree with them).
Ho hum. We are now in the dregs of the season movie wise. Too late to be a summer blockbuster, too early to be a Christmas release. This is where movies that the studios know don’t have the chops to compete in with the big boys surface like a bloated corpse in a dank bog. The movies that really couldn’t deal with going to school like a regular kid but hopes they can be the coolest kids on the short bus. You know, big fish in the little pond.
If I Stay is a perfect example of that, as well as a few other lame movie phenomena. It is another attempt to capitalize on the Young Adult book market (I keep seeing other reviewers abbreviate this to YA, which I find infuriating, but will use as long as I can follow it with “, it was a crappy movie”) only without any of the gravitas or imagination that makes other YA book/movies (BMs?) successful (eww. I just implied that Twilight has some imagination. Time to go flagellate myself for an hour (and if you think I just said something dirty you need to go back to high school)). Not that the more successful YA BMs are particularly imaginative (being almost all rip offs of other, better stories or just lore) but at least there was the hint of something interesting in vampires glowing in the light.
No so this film. It rips off pretty much every mediocre ghost/invisible story ever and merges it with a really dumb young love plot. However if you are in the market to see a dull movie I will say this film is particularily economical: for the price of a single boring movie you actually get three! It is a boring ghost story, a really boring teenage love/angst story, and an astounding exciting story about a girl learning to play cello (I hope your sarcasm detectors are working). Such a value!
I have often frequently lamented the fact that Hollywood is seriously trying create a new class of male that is in all respects save name female and never has it been more true. The main dude Adam (played by Jamie Blakley. Note-no grown man should ever have a name that ends in a “y” sound IMO. No one cool has ever been called Stevie, and if you really want me to hate you call me Davy. I once saw my dad punch out a guy for calling him Georgie (back in the 70s you could get away with random violence like that). Johnny is the one exception assuming the dude is manly enough to pull it off) has nary a sign of a Y chromosome about him. His character is literally a chick but you know what drove me nuts throughout the movie? I was absolutely convinced that he was wearing lipstick from his first closeup. It turned into the one thing I couldn’t not notice, like a cut on the roof of your mouth or a spotlessly clean white sidewalk that a homeless man has defecated on in one spot. Even after it is scrubbed clean you can’t help but look at the spot every time you walk by. This guys lipstick was like a bizarre magnet for my eyes.
However, the thing that I most despise about this film was the music and how much BS there was surrounding it. The dad was supposed to be this ex punk rock band drummer and the main kid a huge fan of all these old punk bands, but with the exception of 30 seconds of The Passenger by Iggy Pop whenever it came time to play music they went straight to the most blandastic hipster garbage ever. I hate to burst your bubble, kids, but if you are under the age of 28 you totally got screwed as far as music goes. Modern music sucks. Adam is like a nuvo punk rock fan but he has the typically hipster hair, clothing, and plays the same formulaic Death Cab for Cutie regurgitation. Seeing him stand in front of an Exploited poster was an insult, and I truly believe that all the bands he named while disussing great punk rock drummers would have happily beaten his ass. It got to where I was looking forward to listening to the main character play her classical if only because it wasn’t derivative crap.
Even the background music was horrible. Heavy handed and manipulative. Ironic that a film trying to be about music would be so bad with music. It’s like a doctor about to perform a life saving operation accidentally stabbing himself in the face with a scalpel and drowning the patient his own blood and saliva.
I supposed I should talk a bit about Chloë Grace Moretz. I used to say I was a fan of hers. Now I think I am going to have to change that to say I really WANT to be a fan of hers but she is making it very difficult. I can’t hold her accountable for the mediocrity of Kick Ass 2 and no one in their right mind would pass on the opportunity to work with Martin Scorcese, but Dark Shadows sucked, Carrie sucked, and this movie sucked. She is a very talented actress and I see great things for her in the future but she needs to learn how to read a script and not jump on the latest bandwagon.
Finally this film was done as a series of layered flashbacks. That is a lot lamer than it sounds. There were flashbacks upon flashbacks, with some flash sideways and flashes to parts where the main character wasn’t even around. It was all framed with the bane of all good movie making: the voice over monolog. Basically three separate movies were shot then cut together and taped with Chloë‘s voice. If the story had any kind of complexity it might have been hard to follow but no danger of that happening. Instead it was just annoying, like a kid sitting on the plane behind you lightly kicking our seat for five hours while you wonder if it’s enough to say something to his mother or if you will just look like a big jerk.
The very brief story recap. Mia is a talented cellist who is in love with a man/girl who plays lead guitar in a “rock” band while trying to decide if she will go to Julliard. Her “punk” rock family is all killed in a car wreck and she wanders about as a ghost (or out of body spirit) while deciding if she is going to live as an orphan or shuffle off this mortal coil.
That was shockingly succinct and more or less covers it. I did have a couple questions, mostly surrounding Mia’s status as a ghost. Was she capable of interacting with the world or not? She seemed to need someone else to open doors for her and could hear fine (implying she was absorbing the sound vibrations in the air) but other then that never touched or did anything. It bugged in that instead of having someone walk through her (a la Ghost. Ghost image courtesy of the Movie t shirt category) everyone managed to just walk around her. The slightest explanation in the form of a scene where she walks through a door would have gone a long way. Oh well. Also there was a lot of talk about how it was Mia’s decision to stay or go, but she seemed to not have a dook of an idea how to do it. Also everyone else seemed to want to tell her it was her choice but does that mean a guy who just had his brains evacuated with a bullet made the choice to die too? Very namby pampy and missing a lot of details.
Anyway, If I Stay. Worth seeing? Naw, not really. Even as a chick film it is three boring smaller films. Nothing happens ever (unless you find people standing around looking at someone in a hospital bed exciting) and eventually the pattern of heartwarming scene-hospital death-teenage love angst-music-heartwarming scene repeated ad nausum will grind on you like a sandpaper jock strap. It sincerely lacks depth and gravitas. If you really want to see a tear jerking teenage love story go see the Fault in Our Stars. Otherwise give it a pass.
Thanks for reading. Talk to you soon.
the Infamous Dave Inman
@Nerdkungfu
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