Another One Down

Watched another Oscar movie this weekend: Atonement. Aside from being soooooo slow and Keira Knightly being generally annoying, the movie was pretty good. Interesting story – kind of reminded me of the finale of "Roseanne".

Here there be spoilers, in case you were planning on watching this movie. Or "Roseanne".

So, the “twist” is that in order for Briony to be able to make this “autobiographical” book come to be, she had to take some creative liberties and bend the truth. She royally screwed up the lives of her sister, Cecilia, and her sister’s lover, Robbie, by accusing him of raping her cousin. This was untrue, but at the time she didn’t recognize the consequences of her actions. Robbie gets sent to prison and then to war. In her book, he comes back and reunites with her sister and Briony is able to apologize and correct her mistakes. In reality, Robbie dies during the British evacuation from France and Cecilia dies in a water main break in an Underground tunnel bomb shelter. Briony never speaks to either of them, doesn’t have the chance to apologize or make things right, and therefore spends the rest of her life wallowing in her guilt. Uplifting it’s not.

Similarly, during the final episode of "Roseanne", the viewer learns that the whole series was the invention of Roseanne Conner and her writing. Things didn’t really happen the way we had been seeing. Roseanne wrote “revisions” to make it how she thought it should have been. Becky really married David while Darlene married Mark, but Roseanne explains that she always thought they would have been better suited the other way around, and this is how they were presented throughout the show. Dan had a heart attack in the previous season and in the show, he recovers. In reality, he died. But Roseanne didn’t like that so she changed it. There are a few other bombs dropped in the final minutes of the series. This is kind of like the “it was all a dream” cop-out used when a plot-line spirals out of control. But in these cases, it’s so final hour that its impact is much greater. Every time I see a re-run of "Roseanne" (and it always seems to be on – kind of like "Saved by the Bell" and "Seinfeld") I think of the finale and how everything changed after seeing it.

This is also similar to "Dawson’s Creek". Once you see the finale and find out Joey ends up with Pacey, the whole back and forth, endless struggle between Joey and Dawson loses something.

Anywho, this ended up being a lot longer than I had intended. Bottom line, not as horrible of a movie as I expected. I also watched The Other Boleyn Girl. I’d been meaning to see this one for awhile. It was what I expected. I like both female leads and although I don’t know how historically accurate it was, it was still entertaining to watch.