Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Saw it last night–for awhile I thought we were going to be the only people in the extremely crowded theater not there to see “Brave.”

It was cute. A little slow in spots, but I thought the ending was sweet and I was surprised that it actually made me cry a little (I’m usually impervious to chick flicks–though this wasn’t quite your typical chick flick).

I’d never seen Steve Carell in anything, and I thought he did a fine job playing this rather ordinary, sweet, sad-sack kind of character (I guess that’s what he does, but I’d never seen it before). The dog was very cute and really added to the movie for me. And the cameo with William Petersen (Grissom from CSI) was unexpected–I almost didn’t recognize him at first even though I knew he was going to be in it somewhere, until the spouse poked me and whispered, “There’s your William Petersen cameo!”

There was only one thing that took us both out of the movie: a massive, glaring error so big that it was impossible to miss because it was one of the centerpoints of the movie. I hope somebody can give me a plausible explanation for this, because most of our post-movie conversation was about how utterly stupid this error was. I’ll spoiler it:

Penny (Keira Knightley’s character) was trying to get home to England to be with her parents when the end hit, but all commercial flights were grounded. Dodge (Carell’s character) promised to find her a plane to get there. They end up at his father’s house. She falls asleep (it was established early in the movie that she sleeps really deeply and is very hard to wake), so he carries her out to where his dad is readying a plane. It only has two seats, so he puts her in it and waves to his dad and they take off.

Buh-WHA??

This plane is tiny. And old. A little bitty 2-seater prop plane. They’re flying out of somewhere on the East Coast (New Jersey? Delaware? I didn’t quite catch the location of his dad’s house). And they’re gonna get to ENGLAND? Spouse said, “I thought he loved her–why did he send her off to crash into the ocean?” We looked it up when we got home, and a similar plane would have about a 500 mile range. It’s a lot farther than that to England.

Aside from that, it was a fun movie and I enjoyed it. I also saw something I’ve never seen before in all my years of moviegoing: an R-rated trailer. It had a red card in front of it instead of the usual green or blue one. And oh, yeah, the trailer was R-rated. It was for a movie called “For a Good Time Call…” and it had F-bombs, graphic depictions of anatomically correct (albeit huge) dildos, phone sex…it quite surprised us.

2

What kinda end of the world are we talking about?

“And then Thelma and Loiuse died trying to jump a canyon in a car, how did they expect to make it?” :slight_smile:

3

A 70-mile-wide asteroid is going to crash into the earth and destroy it in 3 weeks from the beginning of the movie. Right at the start is a news report saying that the space shuttle that they sent up to try to deal with it had exploded, and that it was their last hope of destroying it before it hit.

4

I saw the movie today and I had much the same reaction as the OP, except for the fact that I’m not up on my airplane knowledge and the error just went over my head. The only thing that I didn’t like was that I wonder what was on the note that Dodge left for Olivia. Maybe that he knew the ship had sailed with their relationship and that Penny was his last love? I cried on the drive home for the doomed couple.

5

Just saw it and quite enjoyed it. Several moving moments, with varied human responses to the situation - suburbans mowing their perfectly maintained lawns, etc.

6

I had the same reaction to the plane, mostly thinking about how much gas it would need and how little room there was to store it (although then I thought of Lindbergh and thought it maybe wasn’t so implausible…).

I also thought the week-ahead jump was entirely implausible–astronomers would have the moment of impact down to the second–there’s no way the time clock could just jump ahead a week. (Rewrite smoothing? Why not just push the earlier part of the script back a week?)

But despite those things, I found it quite touching and enjoyed Keira and Steve separately if not together. Melanie Lynskey’s cameo was fun. I’m glad they didn’t wuss out on the ending too much (even if I found the mutual abandonment of their previous objectives–Olivia and family–rather silly)–they went full Melancholia with the thing!

7

Mm, I just figured he thought he could refuel in New Brunswick, then in Greenland, then in Iceland.