"My First Mister": most disappointing movie ever? (Spoilers)

Was this the most disappointing movie ever or what? It started off so wonderfully (even if we were all drawing comparisons to “Ghost World”), as he and she begin to like each other; it was unlikely, but it was also unforced, and we’re watching it, delighting in it just the way they are, and then, in the scene when he goes out for a jog, you can actually see the screenwriters give up!

The movie was doing so well at being honest and non-phony, and all of a sudden it’s “Boo hoo, why didn’t you tell me you were sick?” and “I’ll reunite him with his wife!” and “Oh, he’s being sooo noble about dying!” and Jesus, I just need to go have a good cry now. :rolleyes:

That was so frustrating! Halfway through, it suddenly and inexplicably changed into a totally predictable Lifetime movie-of-the-week with manufactured melodrama and even the cliched ending where she gets the hot guy, even though she just met him and doesn’t know him half as well as she knows the Albert Brooks character. Bleah, I can’t watch this kind of thing; I’m diabetic.

And by the way, is it just me, or is Leelee Sobieski actually Helen Hunt’s clone?

(I was going to put this in the Pit, but I went through and took out all the profanity, since I’d like to hear from Dopers who felt the same way. Or who felt differently.)

I agree that the story is pretty phony, but I appreciated the film for its performances (my writeup).

Well written, Cervaise; you’re right, the performances are astonishingly good, so good that it wasn’t until after I finished watching it that I realized how awfully a good premise had gone wrong.

And in my defense, I said in the OP that you can see the screenwriters give up; everyone else involved did a great job with the material at hand. Great performances all around that, as you noted, made the ridiculous plot contrivances easy to swallow until we had time to think about it for a moment afterward.

i totally agree, jackelope. It seemed like they chickened out in the second half of the movie. Ghost World was so much better.