On Saturday we rented two movies to take to our cabin: Chris Rock's "I Think I Love My Wife" and Helen Hunt's "Then She Found Me".
I liked Chris Rock in "Head of State" and thought we would have quite a chuckle with this one. In "I Think I Love My Wife", Rock comes across as a nice, well-meaning guy with a good job. His problem is that his wife is only interested in sex when she wants to have another baby; they already have two children. Then Nikki appears from his past, sweet talks him into signing a recommendation letter that he didn't even read, and persuades him to have lunch with her. Over lunch she starts asking lots of personal questions, including about his sex life. Cut!
"Then She Found Me" is about a school teacher who marries at 39 to a guy who turns out to be gay and leaves her. Her grousing adoptive mother dies, and another woman appears who claims to be her birth mother. The birth mother invites the school teacher to lunch. The mother starts asking lots of probing questions while bubbling over how glad she was to find her daughter. Cut!
Why cut? It was the manipulation. In "I Think I Love My Wife", we just knew that Nikki was going to draw him into deeper and deeper trouble at home and at work. In "Then She Found Me" we wondered if this was some scam being played on the school teacher or if it wasn't just a bit too cloying. Enough!
Oh, the advantage of renting DVDs, especially at senior rates - $1.08 each. If we had been in a movie theatre or had rented them from Netflix, we would have sat through to the bitter end. Oh, well, there is probably a happy ending in both cases, but it would have been a tense wait for the happy ending.
