Wake

Cinequest 2009

Well, sleeping on things didn’t make Wake better.

I’ll start by saying that the movie wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t great. It gets a solid Good for being entertaining enough, and I heard a lot of laughs from the audience, and my teenage kids really liked it. Bijou Phillips is funny and engaging and has GREAT hair in the film (I TOTALLY WANTED her hair!). Danny Masterson is great in person, but didn’t have a great part written for him. I think the problems mostly fall with the story itself.

The film revolves around Carys, a troubled woman who is unable to feel emotions after the death of her sister. In order to try and feel something she attends funerals, the more sad and tragic the better. While at one funeral she meets the dead girl’s fiancé, and after accidentally stealing the dead girl’s engagement ring she becomes hopelessly entangled with the victim’s family and her web of lies. Eventually, of course, she falls in love with the fiancé – but will her lies bring an early end to their new happiness?

**Spoilers Ahead** …not that I think you’ll ever get to see this movie.

1. Since when was assisted suicide legal? Unless this movie was set in Oregon (it was filmed in LA, but may have been set in Oregon), this small little legality throws a major monkey wrench into the plotline.

2. I may have heard wrong, but didn’t the fiancé put his dead girlfriend’s body into a car and dump it off a cliff in the Grand Canyon?? Maybe it wasn’t the Grand Canyon, but the dead girlfriend looked remarkably great in her casket.

3. We are to believe that a grown woman from a very religious, Catholic family would rather arrange a suicide that will appear as accidental death instead of telling her parents she has cancer so that everyone could say their Goodbyes and get closure. And that the family would be totally okay with this when they find out the truth. I’m not buying it.

4. Six weeks after his cancer-ridden fiancé has her “accident”, the “killer fiancé” proposes to Carys, a woman he met at his fiancé’s funeral. Maybe he wasn’t actually a killer, but that guy had something wrong with him. And women – don’t get engaged to a guy who just lost his fiancé six weeks earlier!!

5. Speaking of Carys, a woman who supposedly has emotional issues after the death of her sister, she seemed just fine to me. I never really saw someone who was having issues, other than we kept being TOLD she had issues.

6. Letting Jane Seymour wear this necklace in the film was a big mistake. Seeing it so prominently displayed around her neck was a huge distraction and I think is a big mistake in a film you would like to get into theaters. I discussed this with my teen daughter, she had never even seen the necklace before but said she couldn’t help staring at it. “I didn’t know what it WAS,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out if it was a Z or a snake or what.” HEH.

7. Did I miss something else or was there absolutely no closure with Danny Masterson’s character?

Aside from the big holes in the story, it really wasn’t a bad film, but it just wasn’t fabulous either – and I just can’t take that many holes in a plot. Catalina was surprised that I rated it a 3, but I asked her “Do you think people would flock to the theater and pay to see it?” She thought for a few minutes, and finally said “No”.

Yes, it’s available on Netflix, DVD and Instant Video.