Film: Take This Waltz

I try to be artsy and studenty, I really do. I love independent cinemas - I love their quirkiness, I love that they all seem to have an attached bar, I love their events and I love that I feel like I'm making more of a difference. But every time I watch an indie movie, I always come out feeling like this:

And Take This Waltz was a perfect example of that. I get that it was trying to be subtly overwhelming and an accurate reflection of life and blah blah blah, but I just - very simply - didn't enjoy it. The IMDb page for you - this film doesn't have a TV Tropes page, which - frankly - would have told me all I needed to know...

I mean it wasn't actively bad - I liked the realism edges it had, and I really liked the alcoholic sister-in-law character (Sarah Silverman). But frankly, I would much rather have watched a film about her than the story which actually unfolded.

The main character - whose name I hadn't picked up on until two-thirds of the way through the film, and have since forgotten - was just really, bloody irritating. The plot doesn't work unless you sympathise with her, and frankly I just wanted to give her a slap - at least it would shake some of the sappiness out of her. The guy she has an affair with is equally irritating, not having any definable character outside of mysterious-and-sexy-stranger, whereas I actually liked the husband who got thoroughly shat upon. All the sort of coupley-quirks between the protagonist and her husband might have been supposed to be cute, but personally I just found it weird and uncomfortable - as I think is a pretty normal reaction to being outside of the couple with the quirks. Maybe that was deliberate, but I still didn't like it.

*

Basically, the whole film just frustrated me...I thought the characters were bland, the plot slow and irritating, the ending very much a "...whut?" sequence and...yeah, no. Indie, artsy and clever it may have been, but I didn't get it and I won't be watching it again.