I should have posted about this movie when I saw it, but I’m a lazy blogger lately. Ah well.
I took my wife to see this movie because it looked like a good chick flick. That term sounds a little derogatory, but I think it well defines a genre my wife likes. I took her first showing opening day, and she thought it had already come out, so she didn’t suspect what we were seeing. I also didn’t tell her we were going until the day of, so it was a nice surprise day.
As for the movie, I really enjoyed it. I had thought the previews made it look fairly good, but I liked it much more than I expected.
For one thing, it was pretty plausible. She was newly divorced, and got some money from that. She got to go on a trip to Tuscany because some friends couldn’t go at the last minute. The friends were a lesbian couple that had decided to have a baby, and one of them succeded, and hence couldn’t fly. I thought that was an odd strut in the plot, but it works out later.
She goes to Tuscany, and buys a house because it feels right, and the adventures begin. The house is a wreck, the fixit guys are characters, the neighbors are interesting, local town people are even more interesting.
Something I didn’t expect was that while there was some romance, it was short, and used as a tool in the larger plot, which was not about romance. The movie was about growth, and change, and dealing with all change, good and bad. There are lots of movies with the blatant message that you can take charge of your life and make it better by doing something very different and unsual. In this movie, that act was more incidental. It’s really about growth.
I’d suggest it to anyone.
