Bad Cinema Corner: The Other Woman (2014)

The Other Woman (2014) – Nick Cassavetes

Also Known As: Two Female Stereotypes and A Pair of Boobs Forget How to Human in The Span of 100 Minutes

Genre: So-called romantic comedy that has no idea how ‘jokes’ work.

RATING: ★ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰

“I heard there’s a new Cameron Diaz movie out in theaters right now,” my father said one fine Saturday morning, out of the blue, as if some inaudible voice had asked him mid-breakfast what was the most random sentence his mind could come up right that second.

“Oh, OK,” I replied. “I didn’t know.”

“I like her. I really like her. She’s a pretty funny woman!” he continued as if my “OK” had been translated into a “please, develop your thoughts further.”

“I could see how someone would think she’s funny, yes,” was my way of acknowledging the fact he had said something while avoiding voicing my actual thoughts out loud. Fearing the inevitable question father was going to blurt, my fingers unlocked my cell phone without the need of my eyes participating in the event. A concise text message consisting of two words “SAVE” and “ME” traveled from my mobile to Addison’s at the speed of desperation, pleading to be fostered by her day’s planning in any manner whatsoever. But, alas, just as I pressed send, I remembered the physical impossibility that is to get ahold of her before the sun’s position suggests daylight savings time is wrong and the correct time is 12:00. My significant other had forsaken me without even being conscious due to her long-standing relationship with sleep...

“We should go watch this movie together, you know? The whole family.”

“I can’t think of a reason why we shouldn’t,” I answered, unable to think of an actual reason why we shouldn’t.

Free thought. The ability to make decisions on your own based on the principles each and every one holds dear and close to their heart. Nothing but mental mirages taught to us since childhood by people who know far too well that these things have never existed in our society. I was determined to stay in, enclosed inside the old rags that I wear as my pajamas, willing to collect dust for hours on end, mirroring any other inanimate object on my immediate radius. My decision to transfigure into an object did not come as a desire to come crashing down on my father’s dreams of feign normality in front of society. I am not that evil. Not yet. I, instead, had said “no!” to his request due to my years old decision of not supporting the dying artifice that is modern romantic comedies, films that are neither romantic nor comedic. I clearly voiced my concern in a calm, collected, and high volumed manner that would leave no pair of ears in the neighborhood out of the loop. Thus, an hour later I was all dressed up and inside the uncomfortable family van, en route to the one and only movie theater in our city.

Saturday mornings are easily recognizable around this part of the country for their uncanny odor of undigested alcohol and the broken dreams of virgin university students that believe American movies are an accurate depiction of life. Due to this unfortunate reality of life, the streets are an empty space littered with strange puddles of chunky consistencies and nothing else. Such road abandonment allowed us to arrive to our final destination in the city center in a matter of minutes, long enough for me to question my decision of being born. However grim my prospects of trying to rectify my natal mistake by jumping out of a moving vehicle, it didn’t take much from the moment I formed the idea until my eyes were observing how my father’s debit card failed to be accepted by a very old EDC machine covered with stickers portraying characters that were already ancient during the first half of the 90s. Just another lost Saturday in the series of uneventful days known as my existence.

For the first time since the incident we publicly refer to as “my sister’s high school graduation” for security reasons, my entire nuclear family, all four individuals stuck together by a series of legal documents and blood inheritances, was attending a public event as a single unit. Never in my entire life would I even dare to think a Cameron Diaz flick would be the one thing that managed to get the family back together, but many a witness can attest of seeing us there, about to enter a matinée showing of The Other Woman, a movie which we knew nothing about despite having watched the trailer in numerous occasions during the ride to the multiplex. The visual information in the theatrical ads on our phones had failed to enter our brains through our eyes. It had been merely reflected back to the screen from whence it came, like useless light beams that were created just to showcase how light can die if its contents are not worth the energy needed to create it. That’s how good the movie looked from the get go. That’s how interested we were in witnessing Diaz’s latest cinematic effort despite my dad’s wishes. Deep down, we just yearned to spend some time together, I guess. The quietest, the better, though. If we wanted real memories we would’ve gone to the park, or some other place that forced us to interact using our words to recount our thoughts, feelings and all that emotional B.S.

Once inside the cinema, the usual cacophony of routine took a hold of us. After failing to accept my father’s debit card, the person behind the counter asked, as politely as her lack of interest in being part of the multiplex’s task force let her, to pay the full ticket price in cold hard cash. This led to the curved silhouette of my dad hopping angrily in place before the ticket booth, asking to speak with any form of manager, as a popping vein on his forehead followed the rhythm of his heart. He argued with the counter girl about the ever-increasing prices of tickets, despite knowing very well that the issue had nothing to do with the underpaid job of a high schooler whose face was being devoured by acne (“but she’s still the face of the company as far as I’m concerned,” he said). My mom, trying to escape the embarrassing moment our father was starring in, ventured to the concession stand like a robot following a tracking device. She ditheringly tried to choose the “flavor” of pop-corn she wanted to gulp down by herself in spite of being unconsciously aware that the word “flavor” was just a diplomatic way of saying more or less “extra salt” in the end. My sister and I were happily ignoring each other through our smartphone screens in spite of sitting right in front of each other in the unnecessarily large cinema lobby, right next to the selected arcade games that had been disconnected for years and the massaging chair that had been functional for a total of one week before being broken by drunken underage students trying to impress girls who mistook hormones for feelings. In other words, we were enjoying some good old family time, the one you remember fondly on your death bed before smiling like a moron who doesn’t know any better.

If I had been out of character that day, if I had decided to give myself the opportunity of admiring the highly capitalistic world around me instead of focusing on the miracle of technology between my stubby fingers, I would’ve been able to see her for the first time, black blouse over white pants, red hair flying discordantly through the indoor stale air, waiting patiently behind my mother in the concession stand. She ordered a large mango Icee, which would have been the perfect conversation starter, not only because of her impeccable fruit taste but also because of her gall to go for the largest available container of oversweetened frozen beverage. Predictably enough, the conversation would have soon turned to the serendipitous occurrence that she, in fact, was about to enter the exact same showing I was. She was braver than me, though. She had decided to go see this film alone and by her own accord instead of being dragged by 50% of the reason one is alive. However, not only did I not notice her existence by this point of the family journey, my self had been created without the necessary hardware installations that make regular human beings capable of socializing with other human beings, let alone flirting. Maybe the fact I had a girlfriend might have been a good reason my mind would come with to not approach this person with any sort of romantic interest. But we will never know for sure.

Nevertheless, once each one of us had completed our God-given parts inside this Hollywood charade of a functional family for enough time to activate the time validity of our tickets, we were let inside the projection room. As per usual, on our way to our chosen seating, the soles of our shoes had to recollect all sort of sticky substances littered on the floor, substances that, sometimes, on full mooned weekends, attained sentiency on their own accord. The fact that the room showing The Other Woman hosted only six other human beings besides our group should’ve been a dead-ringer of the movie’s quality. But we had shelled our patriarch’s hard-earned money to be entertained by mindless Hollywood shtick and entertained we would be! As such, we sat, turned off our brains except for the “keeping the heart pumping blood” and “remembering that the body needs oxygen to survive” parts, decimated our mom’s popcorn way before the ending of the final trailer, and hoped for the best.

The lights started dimming out.

I noticed the presence of a gorgeous redhead sitting right next to me thanks to the infatuating smell of the mango Icee.

The logos of the production companies paraded in front of our uncaring eyes.

My mouth started watering at the thought of how the Icee would tickle my taste buds.

The screen went black to prepare us for the first frame that would communicate exactly what we were about to experience.

I considered breaking down my usual anti-social behavior in order to ask for a slurp of my neighbor’s beverage and, as such, give her an indirect kiss via the red straw, but was stopped by the self-consciousness of finally being seen by my parents as a sexual being.

Then, the film opened to two people having sex.

Whatever interest I might have had in my current endeavors left my body in no more than what it takes to roll the eyes.

“This is what I get for forcing myself to come to watch a movie every single week, I guess,” my neighbor mumbled to herself.

My heart stopped for one second.

After precisely five minutes and twenty-one seconds, the exact amount of time I decided to give this movie a chance by giving a crap, I averted my eyes from the screen to rest them on the redhead’s profile. During the time I actually saw the film, every single effort to convey a joke via dialogue started feeling as if a random extra, or just an insane passerby who security couldn’t handle, was adamant of looking directly at the camera, blurting out a throwaway line that sounded funny in their heads, and proceeding to print the screenshot of said moment once the DVD had been released as the highest point of their lives, to be framed on top of their useless college degrees, for the world to see. In other words, I was not amused. I could’ve grunted by this point, but I stopped my instincts when I realized that action would mean I was granting the film enough importance as to make me react in any way whatsoever. But while I groaned internally via a silent protest, the redheaded girl decided to heed her intuition and emit a low guttural sound in response to the events depicted on screen. Were there actual lights on the room, someone might have seen my eyes glinting with interest at the prospect of knowing this bitter person a bit better. I thought of saying “hi,” but was unable to break the most basic rule of cinema etiquette. Thus, I just turned my head back to the screen.

As the minutes came and went, as the scenes occurred, slapping my face with their dreadful rhythm, appearing and disappearing as if this was an experimental movie satisfied with itself for not following a traditional plotline from beginning to end, content with becoming nothing more than three or four improvised sketches, stretched too thin and sewn together, I found myself unable to feel a single emotion. The film was failing to elicit even the most basic reactions out of me. No joy, no anger, no laughter, no boredom, no nothing. I merely existed on this plane of reality. As the film reel kept spinning and spinning, I found myself slowly losing the “living” part of the “living thing” aspect of my reality. The seat and me were but one object, symbionts in the search of eternal fixedness by the halfway point. The events happening right in front of my eyes might as well not be transpiring at all. It started feeling like my sight was eternally affixed to an empty screen, since neither my soul nor my senses could register the actions or dialogues portrayed by these actors. My breathing was the only indicative hint that kept reassuring me that no black angel of death had come for me yet.

Both the trailer’s description box and the information booth near the entrance of the cinema billed The Other Woman as a comedy. Comedies, in their broadest sense, are supposed to make people laugh, entertain them in a very superficial level at the least, and, still, in that cinema, on that day, not a single giggle obfuscated the generic music score the sound editor bought off of a Creative Commons website simply because he couldn’t be bothered to invest any sort of effort. Not for this. The rhythmic air influx of the audience’s snouts doing the most basic to maintain their owners alive was audible beneath every dialogue spoken onscreen. It never changed to reveal even the slightest hint of a possible chuckle, or, God forbid, a wretched piggy snort of appreciation! I started suspecting the director of this piece never intended it to be a comedy as the marketing department had led us to believe. If I had to put my life on the line, I’d say the director was attempting to make an urban drama about living as a single woman in New York city, but was thwarted by his own lack of social experience, honestly believing human beings talked like this on a regular basis. I’m not even sure any part of it was even meant to be a joke. If the people behind cameras giggled during filming it had to be due to an abusive influx of alcohol or drugs prior to showing up to work, if anything.

I turned my gaze towards my left side in an effort to avert my consciousness from this torture for a split second and avoid yet another guttural response I was harboring inside of me. By doing that, I inadvertently caught the redheaded girl mirroring my sentiments and the way I decided to make them visible. We made eye contact. She said “I know, right?” I blushed. She giggled. I turned my face back to the screen in a snap.

The premise of the film we were watching lends itself, in theory, to some amusing – yet a very far cry from being described as “hilarious,” let alone “mildly funny” – situations. Why no one took advantage of them is anyone’s guess, but my money is on “utter laziness.” According to the nameless intern the movie theater “hired” for school credit to write down the synopsis of the films they’re playing, The Other Woman’s goes like this:

“After discovering her boyfriend is married, whatever-the-name-of-the-character-Cameron-Diaz-is-playing tries to get her ruined life back on track. But when she accidentally meets the wife he's been cheating on, she realizes they have much in common, and her sworn enemy becomes her greatest friend. When yet another affair is discovered, all three women team up to plot mutual revenge on their cheating, lying, three-timing S.O.B.”

Granted, it sounds awful. Borderline misogynistic, even. “Not worth anyone’s time” for sure. But with just a little bit of creativity and imagination, nurtured with care for one’s craft and an honest interest in telling stories for the entertainment of the masses, it’s quite an easy task to imagine all the possibilities this relatively unimaginative synopsis can bring to a functioning human mind. They’re, decidedly, not that many, but they are latent possibilities, nonetheless. Someone could grab one of them, expand on it, and create an averagely enjoyable film that would be shown once every other year, past midnight on a Tuesday, in an underfunded local TV network that is looking to fill up the schedule with whatever crap was cheapest to buy the rights to.

The people responsible for this movie, as fate would have it, decided to take the route known as “wing it, wing the whole thing so we can get over it as soon as possible.” Also known as the good old “I’m just doing this because of the money, not because I care” method of plowing through life. As such, I was left stuck following a dry and undeveloped main character that, despite explicitly stating that she was taking part in a serial dating situation where she was sleeping with about seven men at the same time, feels heartbroken when she is merely “the other one” for a man. But I was supposed to sympathize with her for the simple reason that she was a successful, hard-working person capable of buying herself a black slave to file her files in a two-digit story office.

When the film hit the ten-minute mark, just about the moment the mistress and the wife meet up and start bonding, the precise instant I started noticing that the background characters and their lack of response to watching two women screaming out random words, hitting each other, or practically dancing in the middle of a room for no apparent reason, were more interesting than the actual plot itself, I shed a single tear. With that tear, came a realization. I knew why this thing failed so horribly.

“I know, right? It is too late to ask for a refund for our tickets,” the redheaded girl said. In my sterile anger, I ignored her.

The idea behind this film was to offer women a movie version of the centuries-old joke that states men, as a species, are intellectually surpassed by slug mucus. Innovation at play, I know. They wanted to strengthen the idea that men’s dumbness is as extreme as their vile. #IndependentWomen #WeDon’tNeedAMan. As such, it was planned for women to utilize this movie as rejoice fodder for their inner feelings. Female audience members who were old enough to understand hook up culture and the complexities of work life could finally be told, via moving images and subpar sound, that they are the superior version of mankind. They would be reassured through these three one-dimensional characters that they’re a cut above everything else, because, unlike the sad creatures known as men, they do not spend their whole lives thinking about sex and trying to copulate with as many moving targets as possible. “That is why God created women second, because he knew he made a mistake on his first try,” and so on and so forth. To prove this, The Other Woman shows us female people are capable of getting together with like-minded women-folk to band together and beat the wickedness known as “men” … by spending about a month of their lives (100 minutes of ours) talking about nothing but men, their lack of men, what to do to their men, or how men shape their lives. Progress!

“That’s why I stopped dating men, you know?” my neighbor sarcastically commented.

“Same here,” I responded. She thought it was a joke and laughed. No need to correct her.

Women, in this strange universe where logic exists not, can have high-paying jobs, and are allowed to engage in whatever activity they so desire – given that their whole lives, conversations, and thoughts revolve around members of the opposite sex. Regardless of the fact that men have been established to be irksome and gross, the attaining or releasing of one specimen of this gender must be the sole force that drive a lady’s life. Every single line of dialogue uttered by these caricatures of mankind is about guys. Their whole self, their purpose in life, as well as their social positioning hinges on the ownership or lack thereof of a guy. Cameron Diaz is not “the brilliant lawyer that hasn’t lost a single case and that is the head of a successful law firm.” She is merely “the mistress of a guy.” Period. That’s how shallow the movie is. The wife character, just to prove that point further, is simply “the woman that is too stupid to realize his husband married her only because of her… something undefined due to the fact that she is not particularly trophy wife material in any sense of the word, neither physically, nor mentally, monetarily or anything.” That is her whole character. She cries. And knows not how to maintain herself alive. That. Is. It. Audience, please laugh.

I felt so hollow I had to ask myself one question in order to maintain my ever-fleeting sanity. “What is even the point of watching a film?” Why are we so persistent on investing our time and money in order to sit through a continuous array of fictitious events flashing before our eyes upon a screen? Are we trying to learn something through cinema or do we, instead, aim to forget? Does it even matter what kind of film we’re watching? Many a soul will have the answer pouring out of their tongues in a matter of seconds: “Entertainment.” But is that it? Is that all that movies mean to us? Simple entertainment?

“Yup,” said my neighbor as if she was able to read my mind. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. Also, I haven’t got the slightest clue, either.” Then, she crumpled the empty Icee cup and threw it to one side. If not for the fact that I was, supposedly, already in love, I’d fall in love with her at this point.

And, if the notion that maybe, MAYBE, all this feminism backtracking is meant to be a satire of our society, that MAYBE it is played out as a deadpan commentary about how unequal gender “equality” is around us, in comes the entity known by Google image searches as Kate Upton. Her whole purpose in the movie is boobs. She does nothing at all to advance the story, she provides no insight into these characters, nor does her presence affect the plot in any way whatsoever. She’s just here so we can see her boobs. She is also a terrible actress. To put it simply, her breasts are far better thespians than she is. Ever seen one of those dreadful kindergarten pageants where little Suzy, the less bright student in the whole school, recites her lines about the importance of religious holidays as if an invisible alien was transmitting the words she utters, letter by letter, via a telepathic gun? Yeah, worse.

Of course, Kate Upton gets a scene where she runs through the beach wearing an almost nonexistent bikini in slow motion. And, of course, the redheaded girl sitting next to me decided to lay her hand upon mine ‘by accident’ in the middle of this scene. “Don’t do anything weird with your fingers,” she said through a smile. “You’re still in public.” I had to reclaim ownership of my appendage given the fact it was sweating like an Equatorial summer after hearing this. She merely limited herself to mumbling a simple “sorry” that was obviously been said through a humongous smile of complete proudness. I am surprised no one in the room was able to hear the accelerated and high volumed beating of my heart. Indubitably, some “scenes” later, one of the characters meta-mentions how Kate’s presence brings absolutely nothing to the table, because telling the viewing public you’re aware how awful your script is always gets the people going.

Did I mention this thing was directed by a guy? Maybe I should’ve started with that and saved us all a couple blocks of text and time. A man, who, by the way, has no sense of comedic timing. He proved this during the many (many, many, many) dialogue-heavy scenes where nothing of value is said. In them, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the silhouette of a veiled attempt at a joke hidden amongst the endless outburst of words, but when it’s finally the moment to turn the spotlight on a gag or a jocular comment in order to surprise the audience, it just goes past everyone until it hits the wall of blandness and becomes one with the nothing. The thought “was that supposed to be a joke?” became a mantra the longer the film went on. One would imagine that Hollywood producers should’ve learned by this point of the XXI century that a screenplay’s first draft is not the definite version before shooting.

Throughout a particularly long and drawn out scene where nothing of interest was happening – which is how I would accurately describe 100% of the film, I decided to try my luck and give the classic yawn and drop arm maneuver a stab with the redheaded girl. Halfway through, when my arms were stood in the air for more than six seconds and counting, I realized how stupid the whole scenario I was trying to force myself into was. Not only did I become aware that I knew next to nothing of this person, I was also forcing myself into a relationship I wasn’t invited to and couldn’t even dream of maintaining. My self-consciousness being as colossal as it is, after hearing my brain get to this conclusion, decided to show up and take part in the process of taking over my every move. It didn’t let me just lower my arms as rapidly as a human blink and move on with my life. Instead, I had to slowly and painfully move them from the north position to the south position, doing nothing but make my socializing attempt as obvious as it was pathetic. If second-hand embarrassment was a weapon, I would be death by now, victim of the redheaded girl’s stares and the contempt she was expelling from every pore. And to top it all off, she heartily snickered throughout the entire process. Only by being the director of the film I was watching would I feel more ashamed of myself.

How bad is The Other Woman? It’s the kind of film that would dare use Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” splattered over a revenge montage showcasing “women having fun” by plotting petty retaliation moments that would make any elementary school kid feel embarrassed. It’s the kind of film where we have to suffer a lengthy sequence focused on watching a man acting out he has diarrhea, followed shortly by a scene inside a restaurant where Asian women are treated as sex objects and no one bats an eye. It’s the kind of film where a whole section of the story transpires in a foreign country just because the director wanted to enjoy a couple weeks of all-inclusive vacations for him and his family fully paid upfront by the production company. It’s the kind of film where the main characters traverse no arc and basically stay the same from beginning to end, managing to learn absolutely nothing out of the experience and being rewarded by becoming as shallow as they described men to be. But the three female leads do hug in a beach at sunset in the most pandering scene to ever be recorded for a female audience, because the illusion of women bonding together despite having nothing in common supersedes actual character building.

It’s, in short, the kind of film that is incapable of eliciting an emotion from rational human beings. I felt nothing through and through. I just let time walk past me by.

Even if you’re holding out your breath for the ending, in the hopes that the vengeance casted upon the depraved representation of men’s debauchery will be equally outrageous and funny, you risk yourself of being disappointed. While, yes, it is true that witnessing a man give in to fear and forget intelligence is a thing a handful of unused brains would find titillating enough to release a small dose of dopamine throughout their host bodies, his comeuppance is just not worth the previous 99 minutes of expectancy. Especially since we decided “add laxative to his coffee” is a far better solution to “he’s cheating on me” than “divorcing the hell out of him while taking half of everything he owns and taking back control of my life.”

Through the corner of my eye, lighted by the end credits and its awful sampling of Diana Ross by the dated-by-the-moment-she-became-known celebrity once known as Iggy Azalea, I saw the redheaded girl bite her lip as she directed her gaze towards me, took out a piece of paper and started jotting out something on it. I could only imagine what it was due to the subdued blushing taking possession of her cheeks. Before I could go on any sort of angry diatribe against the time wasted on this family outing, as a lowbrow and direct way of impressing my neighbor and showcasing my intellect (however limited it might be), my father decided to summarize his feelings about the whole event out loud “Wasn’t that fun? I had a lot of fun.”

And he meant it.

As such, my excuse of a heart, being pumped up by cuteness-reinforced blood, required my vocal cords to expel the words, “Me too. I liked it,” in order to not break my progenitor’s heart. I was not prepared for the answer I received. Next to me, the redheaded girl soundtracked the eyeroll she gave me with a hearty grunt that unequivocally signaled the end of the relationship we never even started having. As she paced away in the direction of the main entrance, I saw the minuscule piece of paper she wrote on, falling from her seat into the sticky floor. It contained what I must suppose are the first four digits of her phone number. Despite losing something I never even had in the first place, nor was I, technically, allowed to, I was certain of one thing. This had definitely been just another lost Saturday in the series of unfortunate events that is my life.

A text from Addison appeared on my phone screen. “I was asleep, but don’t forget I love you.”

Highlight of the Movie:

That one moment when Nicki Minaj’s whole body is shown on profile and my mother couldn’t help but ask dumbfounded to the top of her lungs, “Are those things real?!” when she noticed the size of her butt, eliciting the only laugh out of the paying audience. It says much when the best part of your movie is the rather average acting of a rap artist who plays a stereotypical valley girl, outdated and annoying accent included, incapable of emoting, whose only purpose in the movie is… now that I think of it, I don’t really think there WAS a purpose to her character.