My Basic Ramblings: Those of you who are regular visitors to the Hole and the Abattoir are probably aware at this point that I've written a screenplay, Boy Wonder. Allow me to provide a link to it, right here. Anyway, I was vaguely disturbed after watching this movie, because they are more similar than I'd like to admit. Wacky kidnappings that end with main characters falling in love, the final scene being wedding-related. My movie doesn't have angels in it, it has eco-terrorists, but still....they're closer than I'd like to admit. (And let me state for the record that I wrote Boy Wonder in April of 1997, and that I didn't see A Life Less Ordinary until May 1998. I didn't steal the idea.)
This movie, in case you didn't know, is from the Trainspotting crew of Danny Boyle (director), John Hodge (writer) and Andrew MacDonald (producer). Trainspotting is the first movie I ever bought on laser disc. It is a fabulous movie. A Life Less Ordinary is not a fabulous movie, but it's not horrifically bad. It's loopy and goofy and weird and certain scenes just do not belong in the movie, but it's not horrifically bad.
The movie seems to be all over the place, swinging from drama to screwball comedy and back, often in the same scene. I don't know about anyone else, but Cameron's monologue about her previous kidnapping and the pints of blood just stopped me completely cold. I actually thought "Why did they leave that part in the movie?"
Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter play the aforementioned angels whose job it is to bring Ewan and Cameron together. They apparently have some of the supernatural powers one would expect angels to have (Holly Hunter falls off a cliff and has a truck land on her mid-section, but all she suffers is a broken arm), but their powers are strangely skewed. Take, for instance, the scene where Cameron goes to visit Ewan in the bar with the poem he supposedly wrote. She reads the poem aloud, at which point Ewan says "I didn't write it." One of the angels (I forget which) says something like "Tell him it's his handwriting", then Cameron says "But it's your handwriting", which leads you to think that the angels can control what Cameron and Ewan say. Why, then, didn't the angels tell Ewan to say that he wrote the poem? I dunno.
Then there's Ewan's hair. It's so frickin' goofy-looking! (Except for the dance sequence which will be discussed later.) He goes from buzz cut in Trainspotting to 70's/Flowbie reject in this movie. Makes me wonder what he'll look like in the Star Wars prequels.
Anyway, on to the coolest part of the movie, for me. The karaoke/dance sequence. This part was absolutely wonderful. Ewan can sing! (Cameron can't, but she has admitted it!) He's got cool hair! They both look cool! They both dance well! It's unexpected and romantic and oh-so-cool! More movies need to have daydreamed dance sequences.
(The Claymation part during the credits was cool as well.)
Shortly after this movie came out, I saw the novelization of it in a Waldenbooks somewhere. It was written by John Hodge, though, so it might have been okay. (Does anyone actually read novelizations of movies? Are they anything like the movies? Are there novelizations of movies based on books, and if there are, are they the same thing?)