KAREN KINGSBURY'S THE BRIDGE
A woman reunites with an old flame while trying to save a beloved bookstore.
We begin with the touching and heartfelt story of Charlie and Donna, two passionate folks who share a love for literature. They meet, fall in love, marry, and prepare to welcome their first child into the world. Tragedy strikes when Donna miscarries, and in an effort to save their marriage the couple relocates to a small town in Tennessee to realize their mutual dream of opening a very special community bookstore, the kind of place that feels like a home to the customers, the kind of place that makes the customers feel like family. Their bookstore won't just be a bookstore, but a bridge between the pain of the past and the hope of the future. And so they name their special little world "The Bridge" and open their doors wide to the people of Belmont, Tennessee in the waning days of the 20th Century, finding themselves happily embraced by the caring community, their shared dream of an extended family they longed for finally becoming a reality.
That's the prologue of Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, and it is a delightful little vignette not entirely unlike the opening sequence of the Disney/Pixar animated masterpiece Up, a story that deftly . hits all of the highs and lows of quality drama. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie shoves Charlie and Donna into the background, instead focusing on two bland young people whose names I couldn't bother to remember as they meet while enrolling at the local university, fall in like, fall in love, then are torn apart by both a meddling father and a simple misunderstanding that spirals out of control, and it's not terribly exciting.
The young man (I'll just call him Billy) comes from local peasant stock and loves music and wearing tight V-neck shirts, and the young lady (let's call her Wally) lives in Seattle, has a rich daddy and a smarmy wannabe boyfriend with a snooty name like Kensington Billington III, and she's attending college in the American South because she wants to get away from her controlling father for a little while to figure out who she really is. Our lovebirds-in-training take several of the same classes, smile at each other a lot and take frequent study trips to The Bridge, where Charlie and Donna dote over them both, and Charlie makes a bet with Donna that the kids will fall in love and get married and all that jazz, because he has a sixth sense about these things.
A whole lot of nothing special happens over the next several months, then Billy and Wally make out in the children's reading room at the bookstore and things get awkward when an impressionable kindergartener walks in on them while looking for some dumb book about a very polite pig that wears skirts all the time because it thinks it's people. So they're in love, and it's just fucking amazing. Then Wally's not-boyfriend Jefferson Wigglesworth, Jr. calls her right before Christmas and tells her that they are meant to be because her daddy already promised he would be the one to take her maidenhead on their wedding night, and she goes home to Seattle during the winter break to set things straight with her old man.
Back home, Wally's father calls Billy and tells him that his daughter is promised to the young man's romantic rival Waddington Burlyshanks, VII, and then he plays the doubting boy a doctored recording of the slimy little prick's conversation with Wally, one rearranged to sound like Wally has agreed to spread her virgin thighs for this inbred snake in the grass under the Christmas tree, and Billy cries himself to sleep that night because he's a gullible sap.
So Wally's back in Seattle, and her father gives her an engagement ring, at which point I'm taken aback because this story has taken a truly bizarre turn, until he clarifies that the ring is actually a family heirloom and she is destined to wear it when she assents to Bennington Shirleybains XIII's marriage proposal. Wally feels sad because this isn't the way she pictured her future in those glorious, long and lazy afternoons spent in Billy's arms at The Bridge, and Billy is sad because he thinks the girl he loves is going to marry some trembling blueblood mutant with a made-up name, and that's the end of the movie.
That is how Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge ends, because it's actually Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, Part 1. And part 2 of the story isn't going to air until this time next year. It's already been filmed, and it's ready to go, but Hallmark Channel has decided to wait until late 2016 to actually broadcast the damned thing. This is half of a movie, and it feels like half of a movie. That little synopsis at the top of the post isn't actually the plot of what I watched, but rather the plot of what is going to air next fucking year.
While watching the movie, I kept waiting for the story to skip ahead, to show the two romantic leads drifting apart and coming together years later for a happy ending, because the vast majority of this story is pure filler following the uneventful exploits of two barely-there characters played by two barely-there actors unfolding lazily over the course of a few pathetic months in small-town Tennessee. This movie takes two hours to poorly tell half of a story that I've seen many, many other movies on the same fucking network tell 200% better in half the time, and I simply wouldn't have bothered to watch this truncated garbage story if I'd known in advance that I was going to be tricked by an overzealous network.
Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge is not some epic story deserving of a multi-film, multi-year treatment. It's not Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, or even Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy. It's a mediocre-at-best, bloated beyond any measure of good taste adaptation of some middling Christian fiction author's cheaply sentimental novel that is not worthy of this sort of presentation. What were the decision makers at Hallmark Channel thinking in delaying the (I can't stress this enough) already finished second half of their merely okay Christmas movie?
This is offensive to me. There's no other way for me to describe it. I was offended by the conclusion of this incomplete movie, throwing a "to be continued" in my face followed by a blurb telling me to stay tuned next Christmas for part two of their made-for-television masterpiece. Where do these pricks get off pulling shit like this? I'm fucking furious about this. I know I shouldn't be. Life's too short to let something this inconsequential get to me. But it's under my skin, and it's festering like an infected wound.
I watched Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge early this morning. Since then, I've gone to my local theater to watch the "Thor fucks a whale" movie In The Heart Of The Sea, and not the latest installment of the Star Wars saga because I'm not one of the cool kids and didn't want to wade through the crowds of drooling nerds to deal with any of that shit. I wanted to forget about the awful half-movie I watched earlier today. I wanted to stop being pointlessly upset at this stupid fucking thing. Obviously that didn't work, because I'm still so fucking angry at this pointlessly-split apart shit show of a made-for-TV movie.
I might have given the damned thing a pass if it had bothered to cut out all of the fat and tell a complete story in less than two hours like any other self-respecting paint-by-numbers holiday-themed family-oriented movie. I might have actually even been more understanding about the split if the movie had bothered to focus on the more fully realized and endearing characters of Charlie and Donna, played with charm and heart by veteran TV actors Ted McGinley and Faith Ford instead of this pair of anonymous mouth-breathers with no screen presence whatsoever. But no, Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge has offended me by acting too big for its frayed britches, and is, in the final analysis, a complete waste of time.
VERDICT: BURN THE BRIDGE
We begin with the touching and heartfelt story of Charlie and Donna, two passionate folks who share a love for literature. They meet, fall in love, marry, and prepare to welcome their first child into the world. Tragedy strikes when Donna miscarries, and in an effort to save their marriage the couple relocates to a small town in Tennessee to realize their mutual dream of opening a very special community bookstore, the kind of place that feels like a home to the customers, the kind of place that makes the customers feel like family. Their bookstore won't just be a bookstore, but a bridge between the pain of the past and the hope of the future. And so they name their special little world "The Bridge" and open their doors wide to the people of Belmont, Tennessee in the waning days of the 20th Century, finding themselves happily embraced by the caring community, their shared dream of an extended family they longed for finally becoming a reality.
That's the prologue of Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, and it is a delightful little vignette not entirely unlike the opening sequence of the Disney/Pixar animated masterpiece Up, a story that deftly . hits all of the highs and lows of quality drama. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie shoves Charlie and Donna into the background, instead focusing on two bland young people whose names I couldn't bother to remember as they meet while enrolling at the local university, fall in like, fall in love, then are torn apart by both a meddling father and a simple misunderstanding that spirals out of control, and it's not terribly exciting.
The young man (I'll just call him Billy) comes from local peasant stock and loves music and wearing tight V-neck shirts, and the young lady (let's call her Wally) lives in Seattle, has a rich daddy and a smarmy wannabe boyfriend with a snooty name like Kensington Billington III, and she's attending college in the American South because she wants to get away from her controlling father for a little while to figure out who she really is. Our lovebirds-in-training take several of the same classes, smile at each other a lot and take frequent study trips to The Bridge, where Charlie and Donna dote over them both, and Charlie makes a bet with Donna that the kids will fall in love and get married and all that jazz, because he has a sixth sense about these things.
A whole lot of nothing special happens over the next several months, then Billy and Wally make out in the children's reading room at the bookstore and things get awkward when an impressionable kindergartener walks in on them while looking for some dumb book about a very polite pig that wears skirts all the time because it thinks it's people. So they're in love, and it's just fucking amazing. Then Wally's not-boyfriend Jefferson Wigglesworth, Jr. calls her right before Christmas and tells her that they are meant to be because her daddy already promised he would be the one to take her maidenhead on their wedding night, and she goes home to Seattle during the winter break to set things straight with her old man.
Back home, Wally's father calls Billy and tells him that his daughter is promised to the young man's romantic rival Waddington Burlyshanks, VII, and then he plays the doubting boy a doctored recording of the slimy little prick's conversation with Wally, one rearranged to sound like Wally has agreed to spread her virgin thighs for this inbred snake in the grass under the Christmas tree, and Billy cries himself to sleep that night because he's a gullible sap.
So Wally's back in Seattle, and her father gives her an engagement ring, at which point I'm taken aback because this story has taken a truly bizarre turn, until he clarifies that the ring is actually a family heirloom and she is destined to wear it when she assents to Bennington Shirleybains XIII's marriage proposal. Wally feels sad because this isn't the way she pictured her future in those glorious, long and lazy afternoons spent in Billy's arms at The Bridge, and Billy is sad because he thinks the girl he loves is going to marry some trembling blueblood mutant with a made-up name, and that's the end of the movie.
That is how Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge ends, because it's actually Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, Part 1. And part 2 of the story isn't going to air until this time next year. It's already been filmed, and it's ready to go, but Hallmark Channel has decided to wait until late 2016 to actually broadcast the damned thing. This is half of a movie, and it feels like half of a movie. That little synopsis at the top of the post isn't actually the plot of what I watched, but rather the plot of what is going to air next fucking year.
While watching the movie, I kept waiting for the story to skip ahead, to show the two romantic leads drifting apart and coming together years later for a happy ending, because the vast majority of this story is pure filler following the uneventful exploits of two barely-there characters played by two barely-there actors unfolding lazily over the course of a few pathetic months in small-town Tennessee. This movie takes two hours to poorly tell half of a story that I've seen many, many other movies on the same fucking network tell 200% better in half the time, and I simply wouldn't have bothered to watch this truncated garbage story if I'd known in advance that I was going to be tricked by an overzealous network.
Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge is not some epic story deserving of a multi-film, multi-year treatment. It's not Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, or even Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy. It's a mediocre-at-best, bloated beyond any measure of good taste adaptation of some middling Christian fiction author's cheaply sentimental novel that is not worthy of this sort of presentation. What were the decision makers at Hallmark Channel thinking in delaying the (I can't stress this enough) already finished second half of their merely okay Christmas movie?
This is offensive to me. There's no other way for me to describe it. I was offended by the conclusion of this incomplete movie, throwing a "to be continued" in my face followed by a blurb telling me to stay tuned next Christmas for part two of their made-for-television masterpiece. Where do these pricks get off pulling shit like this? I'm fucking furious about this. I know I shouldn't be. Life's too short to let something this inconsequential get to me. But it's under my skin, and it's festering like an infected wound.
I watched Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge early this morning. Since then, I've gone to my local theater to watch the "Thor fucks a whale" movie In The Heart Of The Sea, and not the latest installment of the Star Wars saga because I'm not one of the cool kids and didn't want to wade through the crowds of drooling nerds to deal with any of that shit. I wanted to forget about the awful half-movie I watched earlier today. I wanted to stop being pointlessly upset at this stupid fucking thing. Obviously that didn't work, because I'm still so fucking angry at this pointlessly-split apart shit show of a made-for-TV movie.
I might have given the damned thing a pass if it had bothered to cut out all of the fat and tell a complete story in less than two hours like any other self-respecting paint-by-numbers holiday-themed family-oriented movie. I might have actually even been more understanding about the split if the movie had bothered to focus on the more fully realized and endearing characters of Charlie and Donna, played with charm and heart by veteran TV actors Ted McGinley and Faith Ford instead of this pair of anonymous mouth-breathers with no screen presence whatsoever. But no, Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge has offended me by acting too big for its frayed britches, and is, in the final analysis, a complete waste of time.
VERDICT: BURN THE BRIDGE
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