10 Things We Should Do Before We Break Up

The gods of alphabetical Sky movie watching decided that "10 Things We Should Do Before We Break Up" should be the next film I watch. A romantic comedy(-ish) starring Christina Ricci and Hamish Linklater.

Abigail (Christina Ricci) meets Benjamin (Hamish Linklater) on a blind date and despite both their acknowledgements that their relationship wouldn't work, a fact they detail at length on their first date, they spend the night together and Abigail becomes pregnant. Abigail already has two children from her first marriage and is unwilling to allow the childish and petulant Benjamin any further into her life, but eventually she relents and tries to manage their unusual backwards relationship.

So, I put comedy in the opening paragraph, but I'm not sure that's really right. There are romantic elements, and there's the capacity for a few of the scenes to be charming or humorous, but it's not really a comedy. It might have been, if for a small tonal shift in the Benjamin character, but really he's just too awful to be considered a comedic character. Self-sabotaging his relationship as he bumbles through a failed life, acting as if calling himself on his behaviour is in any way comparable to dealing with it. Ricci's performance alongside him is fine, if occasionally a little unlikely that she'd tolerate some of the earlier behaviour prior to it coming to a head. Overall, it's a reasonable, if slightly dull indie drama.

But there also are several bizarre scenes with Abigail's best friend that feel like coded lectures on anti-abortion themes, so much so I wondered if this was a Christian movie at one point during them.

I'll be honest, I didn't expect much when I dared to watch this film, in fact, from the very first scene I thought "Gosh, this seems like one of those cheesy and nonsense Lifetime movies" (and it's kind of like that), but even though I would not say this is the greatest movie ever, I would neither say it's a terrible one; "10 Things We Should Do Before We Break Up" is an actually interesting movie for a good hour, seriously though, I'm the most impatient person and I didn't feel like "OMG, end up already" since it's in fact a pretty short movie. Talking about a deeper manner, characters are not great though and a lot of people say they're actually unbearable, I might not disagree but at least I'd say they're not perfect but human.

The plot is simple but slow for almost an hour, the final stage of her pregnancy goes very fast and we, as an audience, just feel really cold about it, the finale is just "meh", I'd say is unpredictable because I never thought they would dare to end it just like that like I get the fact they're not meant to be, but there's no catharsis, neither an evolution of the characters. By the end, I was just like, "Really?"

Anyway, I'm giving it a 4 since I liked the first part, only that.

With a 70 minute running time you'd think this would be on the short and lightweight side, but the opposite is true. Two very fine lead performances and a grown-up approach to its subject give us a poignant snapshot of a relationship. Things may not work out the way we want them to, but that's what happens when a film maker tries to give us a slice of life instead of crowd-pleasing cliches. And Galt Niederhoffer deserves particular credit for telling the story with economy. It would have been easy to pad it out with another 10-15 minutes to give it a more conventional running time, but that would have detracted from an intelligent, worthwhile movie.

This is a terribly depressing movie Not because of its earthiness and refusal to sugar coat But because the lead Male character is written so poorly that it's actually hard to stomach the scenes in which he is central A tired, old, 'I'm afraid of commitment but need to grow up. I want to learn how to love,' narrative that made me want to sit my daughter in front of the screen and say 'NEVER allow a grown man spouting this ugly rhetoric into your life,' it was stale and painful to endure and yet I wanted to see if the story might lift somehow beyond the anodyne. It didn't What do we learn? The mother is fine Being a single mother is fine The kids are fine There is no room for scope with such a cliche of a Male character (manchild) as a lead Nothing to learn from this movie It's an insult to evolved men and to (single) mothers Bad, bad bad movie taking us back in time instead of propelling us forward to conversations that actually matter

It seems many negative reviews are here because viewers wanted it to be a different kind of movie. Taken for what it is my wife and I found it worthwhile. Not great but worthwhile. Probably a 6 of 10 rating.

The two main characters, each near 40, arrange to meet at a bar, he has a girlfriend, she is single with two kids, a boy and a girl about 7 and 9 respectively. They get along OK but drink too much that initial meeting and not long after she finds out she is pregnant. Much of the story is "what to do?"

To me it plays on a concept that I learned back when my wife and I started dating, you really need to give a new relationship four seasons, a year at least, to see if you are genuinely compatible. Things will happen, holidays will come and go, through the process each will discover the true other (hopefully). We dated almost 2 1/2 years and last month we celebrated our 30th anniversary. We knew what we were getting into back in 1992.

The two in this story decide to stick together after only a few weeks and predictably it causes a number of unforeseen problems. She was already a mother with a career, she had developed responsibility, he was somewhat the opposite.

We enjoyed it for the relationship issues, we watched it at home on Amazon streaming.