The Accidental Husband 2008 (Movie Review)

Dir: Griffin Dunne
Starring: Uma Thurman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Colin Firth
Dur: 1 hr 30 mins
Genre: RomCom
Rating: 1.5/5
PG: One expletive, few kisses and a make-out scene that is not explicit.

We are all looking for love and most of us still hold on, sometimes obstinately to the love we find in fairy tales. We’re in search of or passively waiting for our Prince or Princess Charming to come along and sweep us into I-don’t-know-where land. The Accidental Husband hits out at this dreamy kind of love and forces us to get into the not so pleasant task of searching for the hitherto indefinable, ‘Real Love’.

Dr Emma Lloyd (Uma Thurman) is a self-proclaimed love expert, dishing out free advice to people over her radio show, (mostly women, not surprisingly) on how to get over their love troubles and find true love. She’s convinced she has struck truth and has committed herself to share her convictions with other needy women. She and her show are catapulted to fame until one jilted man decides to give her a taste of her own medicine. Patrick Sullivan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was on the verge of marriage until his fiancé acted on Lloyd’s advice and broke it off. He gets his young neighbour and tech-genius, Ajay, to enter into the Government system and enter Lloyd as his wife. Lloyd and her fiancé, Robert (Colin Firth) are nearing the day of their marriage and are surprised to find that the official document shows Lloyd’s status as married. Lloyd sets out in search of her so-called husband and tumbles into a world where love isn’t as she thought it out to be. She is pushed, shaken, thrown and broken (metaphorically, of course) to breaking point. She finds herself fighting a losing battle and is forced to come to terms with her inner feelings.


The Accidental Husband walks on a familiar track. It appears hasty and dissected. It’s taking us toward the goal, i.e. True Love, but on means that aren’t in keeping with true love (maybe I’m giving it a Christian look?). I found it a bore. If you like the idea of the film, I would suggest you watch The Ugly Truth, for a better and stronger portrayal. Colin Firth was the only stand-out performer. The rest were mediocre. The message though came through clear: Love is not an analytical reality and has no fixed laws. It flows with the tide of each one’s personality, likes and dislikes, and is rarely ever the same for any and every one of us.     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great Grand Masti 2 (2016) (Movie Review)

Image
Dir: Indra Kumar Starring: Vivek Oberoi, Riteish Deshmukh, Aftab Shivdasani, Urvashi Rautela Dur: 2 hrs 10 mins Genre: Comedy Rating: 1/10 Comment: The jokes, gestures and costumes are sexually suggestive. An absolute waste of time. “What an opening line”, you might think. But to say otherwise would be an absolute lie. This film is in fact, a great grand waste of time. It’s horrible whichever way you look at it. The story is weak and thrives on cheap thrills and sorry jokes. The actresses are no doubt eye-catching but the rest is all a blur. The comedy is in fact tragedy and the film attempts to play on the basest desires of man. It’s unbelievable that actors like Riteish and Vivek would do such a film. I am not a big fan of bollywood but I still feel bad when I see bollywood making films like these. All of a sudden, I see that sex is being propagated through Indian cinema. The views of sex are changing and filmmakers and actors are not hesitating to take on unconvent
Read more

St. Joseph: A Father after the Father's Heart (Book Review)

Image
  St. Joseph: A Father after the Father’s Heart , Hyderabad: Don Bosco Publishing House, 2021, Rs. 150, pp. 240. The book is a compilation of articles from various authors writing about qualities of St. Joseph. They have used the litany of St. Joseph as an index and have put together articles on each of the invocations. All the contributors are Salesians from different parts of India but there a couple of contributors from abroad as well. The book lends itself to be a souvenir of the Year of St. Joseph that Pope Francis declared. Let me start out by commenting on the quality of production. The paper is of good quality and so is the design and layout. It is neat and has an attractive cover. Coming to the content, it gets rather repetitive but that is understandable considering that there is so little Biblical foundation for an exposition of St. Joseph. The articles often reference Pope Francis’ letter Patris Corde and extensively utilize Pope St. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortatio
Read more

A Day with Don Bosco

                              Don Bosco was declared the Patron of Youth by Pope John Paul II in 1989. He received his mission: to be Father to the young, in a dream at the tender age of nine. He nurtured this call throughout his life and never wasted an opportunity to gather boys and direct them to God. He did not do this as a spiritual director, (at least no at first!) but rather as a friend, a companion and a seminarian. As a young boy, he would attract youngsters with his magic tricks, tightrope skills, games etc and then get them to recite the rosary with him or recount to them the Sunday sermon (which he remembered thanks to his prodigious memory). Already then, he had ingeniously found a way to combine religion and entertainment. His entertainment was necer for entertainment sake but rather a façade or an advertisment for religious instruction. Even as a young priest, boys would long for more than just a wekkly encounter with him. They loved him and found in him a friend w
Read more