Slap in the Face

I've just finished My Best Friends Wedding. The overly large cellphones Julia and her gay best friend speak on at the end used to strike me as so sophisticated when I first saw this movie - I was most likely seven at the time. Now twelve years later (yikes) my own phone is about a fifth of the size, and my hair is shockingly alike to Ms. Roberts in that movie, and I even have a handful of gay friends with whom to dance the night away. This movie has been one of the only chick flicks I will watch repeatedly, and the only that comes to mind that I actually respect as a piece of cinematic magic, not solely based on the fact that my life has weirdly come to resemble it.
Back when I was seven and first watched this movie, I thought that Julia would end up with the debonair English man, who nearly always strikes me as the more pleasant choice between Mr. Clingy and himself. Back when I was seven I also really didn't comprehend what it meant to be "gay". I watched the movie again at ten (ish) and realized that I loved it.
It wasn't until later in life that I knew I loved it for being reality. I loved it for the lack of suger coating, I loved it for the moment when Julia Roberts realizes the man she loves has married someone else because sometimes you don't end up with the person you want, sometimes you end up alone with only a gay best friend. That's life.
It seems that everyone right now is obsessed with the idea of the happy ending, of the bright side. Everyone wants to live in a dream world. Don't get me wrong, I am technically a dreamer. I scheme and plan and have crazy scenarios that I want desperately to happen. I want to make the impossible possible constantly. I have this one friend whose purpose it seems is to pop my proverbial balloon, but I love him anyways because he is the person-version of My Best Friend's Wedding.
What gets me is the sugary outside of all these movies and plot lines and fantasy lives that everyone seems to want to lead. You've got girls singing about they're happy endings all over the radio at fifteen and middle-aged women falling all over themselves to get a man in movies. And what's more is that these stories all have the happy ending. They get the guy, get married and drop off into the sunset. The groundbreaking days of the Sex and the City reality are over. We've officially regressed.
There is nothing wrong with a happy ending. It's just from the moment I was ten, when I understood why My Best Friend's Wedding was so revolutionary to me, I've understood that it can be foolish to pursue one straight out of Hollywood. These ideas of perfection are the "lies our mother told us", the fairy tales that we are supposed to be guarded against. When popular fairy tales were first conceived they were grisly and often harsh. Cautionary tales. My personal favorite Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast, was a story girls were told before they're wedding night. Think about it, though I try not to. I really love that movie.
Outside of the realm of Disney, I am of the belief that a cold, hard dose of reality is needed. The movies that I love are the ones that are realistic, that end the way life does. I understand that hope is something that keeps us going as humans, but where does the line between hope and foolishness end? The player is not going to fall for the sweet girl and ultimately change his ways as we would be left to believe, even by a cynical series such as Sex and the City. Fundamentally, people do not change, people do not follow a script. Unpredictability is the best hope that we have, it's exciting and it's life. Who needs Hollywood?