Thinking About Seeing “Before Midnight?” Don’t Bother

Movie review time. I finally make it to the movie, and wouldn’t know know it- boring beyond belief.

I saw this overrated, self-absorbed, talkathon called Before Midnight when I went to the cactus convention in Austin, so it has been nearly a month since I endured  this third installment of the main characters’ lives, and I see it is now out of theaters, so my warning is woefully late for those of you who have already made the fateful decision  to go see this waste of time and money. The only reason I am even bringing it up now is that I am still coming across these wonderful, glowing reviews of the movie, which irritates me and makes me wonder if I saw the same movie the critics did, or if they all slept through it and were too embarrassed to admit they couldn’t review what they had not seen.

The friend I went with thought it was just wonderful and was positive that if I had seen the first two, I would have appreciated this one more. If the first two were anything like this one, I would have just gone to the dentist instead.

It seems it all started with Before Sunrise, followed by Before Sunset, following the two main characters, Jesse and Celine, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and the changes in their relationship. If this movie, in fact, portrays the “gorgeous imperfection of family life in the digital era,” as Nathan Heller fawns in Vogue magazine, then the digital era family is in trouble. Of being bored to death.

Nothing happens in this movie. All they do is talk and whine and ramble and insult each other. And they don’t come across as pleasant people to me. And I don’t know why they fell in love in the first place. Delpy is pretty, but bland, and has nothing new to say that women haven’t discussed ad nauseum before. Hawke needed a hair cut or at the very least a shampoo, had ugly teeth, and walked around as if his very body was whiny and nondescript, with droopy shoulders and wispy gait.

And- nothing happens in the whole movie. I go to the movies to watch a story unfold, to want to know what happens next. The issues discussed may have been relevant, but the movie came across as one long therapy session that should have stayed in therapy,  and as far as I could see by the end of the movie they had solved nothing, just grown weary of bickering and finally given up. And if that is the point, that is all well and good for those of you who like to watch people wallow in self-pity, but don’t tell me it is this wonderful movie. All the positive reviews remind me of The Emperor's New Clothes. No one is willing to call it the fiasco that it really is.