The Princess Diaries - Thoughts

Since I first saw a preview for Disney's "The Princess Diaries" I was very excited about the movie coming out. It looked like it was going to be a really cute, exciting, positive movie. The only thing I didn't like was that in the previews, they showed how the "geeky dorky" girl ended up looking after a makeover -- which was absolutely stunning... Aside from that though, I thought it will still be an interesting flick.

Well.... sorry to spoil it for anyone else who is dying to watch this, but I have to say it was a BIG disappointment. I had so many expectations, and was simply let down. First of all... the movie was 2 hours long when it should have been a 90 minute movie. There was a lot of fat that should have been trimmed. The story went all over the place, and the message was not clear except that looking good is all that matters in this world, not building one's inner beauty.

I think without the two main characters, played by Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews, this movie would have absolutely no chance. But even their great charisma and performances could not save this ship from sinking. The writing was terrible, the plot extremely predictable, the characters were bland, underdeveloped and way too stereotypical. Everything that happened was nothing that you've never seen or thought of before. It's as though they cranked a movie out of the Disney Movie Generator Machine and didn't even take a moment to watch the movie before releasing it. I think another main problem was that the movie was made to be a G rated movie so nothing really exciting happened in the plot. Even though many critics say that young girls (age 10-13) will probably enjoy it, I seriously doubt they'll get much entertainment from it. I think that if I were that age again I would have fallen asleep through this movie... it didn't move quick enough, and it was far from making your mind seek such a fantasy. Nothing was believable.

Both Chris and I anticipated watching the movie with the same amount of excitement, but once we started watching it, I could clearly tell Chris did not enjoy it at all. Not only because it was more of a girly movie, but because it wasn't a well done girly movie. It dragged on and on in all sorts of directions and left too many questions and subplots without closure.

I wish I could have redone the movie or at least been an editor for it... It's such a shame that such a potentional classic of a movie ended up being such an embarassingly disappointing flop.

It's really sad that movies have become so cliche and uninspired. It's hard to tell which movie is going to stand out above the rest without having to go watch them all first. Previews show too much and too little at the same time. Sometimes word of mouth from trusty resources is the only way I'll go watch a movie. We're at the age where we've seen it all before, done it all before, and movie producer's have run all out of new ideas. Creativity, good writing, and interesting plots are now the last things they seem to worry about... just creating hype and making big box office numbers seems to be the goal.
By the way... here's a review of the movie I enjoyed reading.