There is a fascinating human psychology that I will not attempt to explain or understand. But it is easier to complain, whine, kick and scream…and people tend to enjoy it more anyway. More to the point for me, I can justify not re-watching the movie right before writing about it. So, this seems a fitting place to start.

There’s something that fascinates me about this series I will try to write. I’ve often joked that I’m going to start ranking my friends and assigning point values based upon if their movie recommendations, in the past, have been accurate to my tastes. It’s not that they are wrong for liking certain movies, but it sometimes boggles my mind that they can recommend 10 movies in a row that I adore, and then something will come up that is such a far cry from good, to the point of being downright unwatchable, that I am left puzzled as to what is wrong with me.

So without further ado…to all of you who liked What Dreams May Come. What did I miss?

The cast and characters, I wanted to like. Robin Williams can do the serious thing as far as I’m concerned, including parts of Good Morning Vietnam, One Hour Photo, and to a certain extent Insomnia. I’m ok with this path in his career, though I’m growing weary of all of the funny men of old trying their hat at serious. Whatever floats your boat, I suppose. But I can’t handle him in this movie, and considering he’s on-screen for 99% of it, that did NOT bode well. I don’t know if I can put my finger on what bothered me though. I guess for what was written, he did well enough, but the plot and bothered me more than its actual execution. Cuba Gooding Jr…he’s never wowed me, but never detracted from a movie. I find he did more of the same for me here. His character seemed wholly drawn out and unneeded for a majority of the film. It’d be bad enough to call him a device, but if he was a decide, what the heck was he a device for?

Plot wise…it felt like it was trying to be deep, but it never accomplished being deep. It was asking these greater questions of things beyond humanity without actually arousing me at all. But it wasn’t in a pretentious “We want an Oscar” way, it was more a matter of “Look at these characters, they are so deeply in tune with their spirituality,” and yet by the end of the movie, it was hard to tell. And again, I’m ok with ambiguity, but I felt I’d been trying to buy into something and never got anything in return. Love also played out as a huge overarching theme…and yet I just found no reason to vest in the characters. Kinda spoilerish, but only in a “you read the back of the box” sort of way, death is a hugely profound altering circumstance. Maybe I needed to like the wife more before I could care. Maybe the surreal-ness that was supposed to make me feel real just never quite clicked. But I didn’t care. There was no sorrow or joy about the thoughts of this loving couple. I know that makes me sound cold and callous, and I can be, but movies usually make me a sucker for the sentimental. This film just failed epically in doing so. You can’t whiplash me around and go over-the-top to grounded in reality and expect me to like it.

The settings were good, that I will concede. Everything was larger and brighter than life. Extra vibrant when it should be, extra gloomy when it should be, kudos to the art department on this one. And I’m out of praise.

So please, take your cheesy dialogue, your tortured protagonists, your weathered spirituality, and remake this. I wanted to like it, I did. But all I got was a big disappointment.