If you're a fan of TV talkfest Gilmore Girls, Post Grad is probably as close as you're ever going to get to a GG movie. Lorelai is nowhere to be found, but Alexis Bledel is basically playing Rory and she's surrounded by a clutch of oddballs right out of Stars Hollow. If you've never seen Gilmore Girls, you'll only be able to tolerate this mildly amusing and terminally predictable film until it wears out its welcome, which it does in a very big way.
Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) is a young and ambitious college graduate who's on the verge of getting the job she's dreamed of her whole life. But when that job goes to her lifelong scholastic rival, Ryden has to move back in with her parents and deal with her father (Michael Keaton), who's like a combination of Ralph Kramden and Norton from The Honeymooners. When not preoccupied by her dad or her futile job search, Ryden also falls in like with the handsome foreigner next door (Rodrigo Santoro) and remains an indifferent bitch to her best friend (Zach Gilford), who is totally in love with her while she treats him like a gay foot stool. Some funny things happen, many of which don't involve Ryden, and then screenwriter Kelly Fremon pulls a major plot point and two big emotional moments completely out of her ass and gives Ryden a weirdly anti-feminist happy ending that the character has done nothing to deserve.
Bledel is a pleasant and attractive presence on screen, though her eyes are so blue that there a moments when she resembles one of the Na'vi from Avatar. Michael Keaton and Carol Burnett as Ryden's live-in grandma use their comedy chops to breathe a lot of life into shallowly drawn roles. And at only 88 minutes long, Post Grad moves along at a good enough clip to hold your interest for a surprisingly long time, given the extraordinarily ordinary story its telling. And unless you've been dying to see Rory Gilmore say the S-word, that's about all the positives to be found in this production.
The negatives of Post Grad aren't that bad, but there are just so bleepin' many of them. To start with, Ryden is not all that sympathetic a girl. She starts out kind of charmingly arrogant and presumptuous, then falls back into just plain arrogant and self-pitying. When that's compounded by the exploitative nature of her relationship with Zach Gilford's character, where she knows he loves her but she's content to keep him around as a platonic sidekick, you're left with the extremely likable Bledel playing someone you wouldn't miss if she got hit by a truck.
Then there's the consistently poor writing. There's a subplot involving Ryden's dad and her little brother that, and I'm not joking, consists of not much more than 5 or 6 lines of dialog and maybe a minute or two of screen time but leads up to one of those big emotional moments Fremon pulled out of her ass. I didn't even realize it was an actual subplot until it got to that out-of-left-field climax. Jane Lynch as Ryden's mom is also given nothing to work with. Her character couldn't be more unformed if she were warm Jello and couldn't be more generic if she had a bar code on her forehead. And then there's a whole scene where Ryden literally does nothing but stand around while the story suddenly becomes all about the career frustrations of the foreigner next door.
By the time the ending came around and Ryden gave up all of the dreams she ever had for her life to fly across the country and be a girlfriend to Zach Gilford's character, after showing as much sexual or romantic interest in him as Barbara Streisand would have for Rush Limbaugh, I only wanted this movie to go away. Which is unfortunate because Post Grad started out rather engaging, but the plot is so badly conceived and structured that I felt like my intelligence was being deliberately insulted.
Alexis Bledel could be the star of a really smart and funny film about a young woman trying to make her way in the world. This ain't it.
Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) is a young and ambitious college graduate who's on the verge of getting the job she's dreamed of her whole life. But when that job goes to her lifelong scholastic rival, Ryden has to move back in with her parents and deal with her father (Michael Keaton), who's like a combination of Ralph Kramden and Norton from The Honeymooners. When not preoccupied by her dad or her futile job search, Ryden also falls in like with the handsome foreigner next door (Rodrigo Santoro) and remains an indifferent bitch to her best friend (Zach Gilford), who is totally in love with her while she treats him like a gay foot stool. Some funny things happen, many of which don't involve Ryden, and then screenwriter Kelly Fremon pulls a major plot point and two big emotional moments completely out of her ass and gives Ryden a weirdly anti-feminist happy ending that the character has done nothing to deserve.
Bledel is a pleasant and attractive presence on screen, though her eyes are so blue that there a moments when she resembles one of the Na'vi from Avatar. Michael Keaton and Carol Burnett as Ryden's live-in grandma use their comedy chops to breathe a lot of life into shallowly drawn roles. And at only 88 minutes long, Post Grad moves along at a good enough clip to hold your interest for a surprisingly long time, given the extraordinarily ordinary story its telling. And unless you've been dying to see Rory Gilmore say the S-word, that's about all the positives to be found in this production.
The negatives of Post Grad aren't that bad, but there are just so bleepin' many of them. To start with, Ryden is not all that sympathetic a girl. She starts out kind of charmingly arrogant and presumptuous, then falls back into just plain arrogant and self-pitying. When that's compounded by the exploitative nature of her relationship with Zach Gilford's character, where she knows he loves her but she's content to keep him around as a platonic sidekick, you're left with the extremely likable Bledel playing someone you wouldn't miss if she got hit by a truck.
Then there's the consistently poor writing. There's a subplot involving Ryden's dad and her little brother that, and I'm not joking, consists of not much more than 5 or 6 lines of dialog and maybe a minute or two of screen time but leads up to one of those big emotional moments Fremon pulled out of her ass. I didn't even realize it was an actual subplot until it got to that out-of-left-field climax. Jane Lynch as Ryden's mom is also given nothing to work with. Her character couldn't be more unformed if she were warm Jello and couldn't be more generic if she had a bar code on her forehead. And then there's a whole scene where Ryden literally does nothing but stand around while the story suddenly becomes all about the career frustrations of the foreigner next door.
By the time the ending came around and Ryden gave up all of the dreams she ever had for her life to fly across the country and be a girlfriend to Zach Gilford's character, after showing as much sexual or romantic interest in him as Barbara Streisand would have for Rush Limbaugh, I only wanted this movie to go away. Which is unfortunate because Post Grad started out rather engaging, but the plot is so badly conceived and structured that I felt like my intelligence was being deliberately insulted.
Alexis Bledel could be the star of a really smart and funny film about a young woman trying to make her way in the world. This ain't it.