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I did it. I went to the theater and saw He's Just Not That Into You (HJNTIY). This might seem like a normal thing to do, but I don't go to the movies all that often. And when I do go, it's usually because there's something playing that I really want to see (or, ahem, because there's something that someone I'm with really wants to see). I had no intention of paying to see HJNTIY in the theater until I started reading all the reactions about it in the blogosphere. After reading about 50 posts (no lie; there's a lot of them out there), I knew that I had to see what all the fuss was about.
I didn’t hate it. I knew in advance that I wasn't going to hate it. However, if I hadn't been so curious to see what all these women have been talking and writing about, I would have been perfectly happy waiting until the movie was released on video. I mean, I watched Sex and the City on HBO for years, but I didn't get around to renting the movie version until just recently -- I didn’t rush out to see it in the theater.
Some people have said the female characters in HJNTIY put women in a negative stereotypical light, and I can understand that. But the thing is, I’m sure there are women like that out there, and these are the personalities that the producers chose to go with -- if the characters were more “normal” and less obsessive, it wouldn’t have fit in very well with their story line.
I’ve never read HJNTIY the book, but the titles of the chapters speak for themselves. He’s just not that into you if: he's not asking you out; he's not calling you; he's not having sex with you; if he only wants to see you when he's drunk...etc. Yes, I do think that even the strongest, most put-together woman might need to be reminded of one or two of these things -- once in a while. But in the movie, there’s a character named Gigi who takes obsession to an extreme.
Although there were other characters in HJNTIY who bothered me (like the married woman who looked like she was about to turn into the head-spinning demon girl from The Exorcist when she accused her husband of smoking cigarettes), Gigi was the only one who made me physically squirm in my seat. I mean, she went to a restaurant, hoping to “randomly” run into a man there who wouldn't return her calls; she stared at her phone, hoping it would ring; she left rambling voicemail messages; she would pick apart every little thing that a man would say to her, trying to figure out if there was any hidden meaning behind his words.
When it comes to stereotypes, I would hope that Gigi is an extreme example of how women act in dating situations, but I'm sure there are people out there who act like that. One of the biggest things that bothered me was that her friends seemed to encourage her behavior. Even though they’d sometimes look at her like she was nuts when she did something embarrassing (like when she chased after a guy who’d given her his business card, asking if she should call him or if he would call her), they didn’t do a good enough job of trying to talk sense into her. Seriously, if I had a friend who acted like that, I would tell her to get a grip.
In other words, if I was a guy and I met someone like that, I just wouldn’t be that into her.
Another common complaint was the movie's cliché’d tra-la-la happy ending (with few exceptions, everyone ends up smiling, happy, and in love). I was expecting that ending, though, so it didn’t bother me so much. In a way, it made sense. Look at Obsessive Gigi, for example. It seemed much more likely that she’d wind up with a guy at the end, rather than suddenly having an “I am a powerful, capable single woman”-type epiphany. Subsequently, if everyone had ended up NOT happy, viewers would have said, “Ooooh, that's so realistic. But how depressing."
People who watched this movie and wrote about it had reactions that were all across the board. Some people thought it was lighthearted and
