There were a lot of titles that would have indeed enticed me earlier in the year, when the new movie release year was exciting in and of itself because it meant I could start building my new list. Those same titles I now reject because there are more important priorities, and at this point, who wants to watch a movie that has no better hope than landing in my bottom 50 films of the year? Unless it's a glorious misfire, which has its own delights -- but for the most these are just milquetoast movies I will forget 15 minutes after watching them.
One such milquetoast movie I clicked into on Wikipedia, a Netflix original, was called Lonely Planet, an interesting enough title to bait me into the extra click. Seeing that it starred recent Oscar winner Laura Dern, I began to wonder if it might break out and claim one of my final available viewing spots for this year.
Until I read the plot synopsis:
"The plot centers around a successful female novelist who finds love with an unlikely person in an exotic place."
Please excuse me while I stifle my giggles.
I know what you're thinking, and you're right: Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced website, and not everything you see on there is completely ready for its close-up. While that is correct in a certain sense, it is far common to find entries that are surprisingly detailed and consistently styled, even if the thing in question could not have been on Wikipedia for more than a couple weeks. The site remains, quietly and unobtrusively, one of the most miraculous miracles on the internet.
The point, though, is not who wrote the plot synopsis for Lonely Planet and what their intentions were. Clearly it is some sort of placeholder until someone who has actually seen the movie can come along and give us an actual description of what happens in this movie, with actual character names.
The point is that this is a hilariously succinct and hilariously generic template for, essentially, every romantic fantasy ever committed to film.
I do quibble, though, with how unlikely a person Liam Hemsworth is for Laura Dern. Yes he's 23 years younger than she is, and the alleged unlikelihood certainly stems from that. (Which does not make it very dissimilar to 2024 films like The Idea of You and A Family Affair, both of which I did see because they came out earlier in the year, thereby proving my personal proclivity vis-a-vis new releases that I mentioned earlier.) Still, far more interesting if the unlikely person were a 78-year-old nun or a 22-year-old Ethiopian skateboarder, if such people exist. (Now those are movies I would watch.)
The thing is, nobody will ever make a movie in which Laura Dern is paired up with those people. The people Lonely Planet is being sold to have very specific expectations for the sort of film they will click on, and they don't include habits or skateboards.
They do, however, include female novelists, love, and exotic places.
I'm almost inclined to watch Lonely Planet just to see if this plot synopsis accurately distills the extreme laziness behind this movie's creative impulse, or if it's actually something worth watching. After all, you'll find The Idea of You a lot higher on my 2024 rankings than you might expect.
And who knows, maybe I could remove the placeholder and write the long-term plot synopsis myself.
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