Under the Tuscan Sun: Movies about Writing

This is a great movie to watch when you’re going through a big, unexpected change in your life. But also understand that this has very little to do with the travel memoir of the same name. SPOILERS HO!

Frances (Diane Lane) is a writer, teacher, and book reviewer who finds out about her husband’s infidelities by an angry author whose book she gave a poor critique. I get that the dude was upset but I can’t imagine being so upset that you’d reveal to a person you barely knew that their husband was getting read to leave them. To break her out of depression after the divorce, her best friend Patti (played by everyone’s favorite Sandra Oh) sends Frances to replace her on a gay tour of romantic Tuscany since Patti can’t travel with a new pregnancy. Patti states that Frances needs to get her life back on track and start writing again.

Frances does get a kitten out her her misadventures.

The first inspiration she has is when one of the men she hangs out with on the tour asks her to write a postcard home for him. She crafts a beautiful paragraph full of metaphors and onomatopoeia. The owner of the postcard declares that he can’t send it now. His mother would never believe that he wrote it! Ingrate!

Anyway, her second inspiration comes in the form of a villa. The majority of the film is about Frances buying, refurbishing, and living in an old Villa. As she lives there, she makes friends with her neighbors, the Polish contractors fixing the house, and Katherine, a fabulous local eccentric played by Lindsay Duncan who once acted as a muse to Fellini. I like the bond Frances forms with one of the Polish workers, teenage Pawel, which is like an aunt and nephew and explains why she supports when he falls in love with the neighbors daughter. That is to say, her time is not just platonic friendships and make-shift family. Frances has a romantic encounter with the handsome Marcello, who is charming and adorable, but has no patience. He can’t handle when a very pregnant Patti shows up and is in need of Frances’s time. By the way, the way Frances and Patti talk is very natural. You can believe that they’ve been friends for years.

In the end, all of Frances’s depression and feeling like she’ll never have all she wanted are cured in various, unexpected ways. She has family and life all around her. She finishes a book (called “Under the Tuscan Sun” - What? Who saw that coming?). AND she meets another fellow writer named Ed who she wrote an other unkind review of. He is healthy person and tells her it was the “best bad review” he’d ever gotten and he used it to help write his next book. So they end up together at the end. Full circle.

*Note: I feel bad for the real Ed (Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes). He’s Frances Mayes second husband and in reality they fixed up the villa together. But no. He became the “reward” at then end of the movie. I don’t know how I’d feel about that if I was Ed.

Christmas Getway: Movies about Writing

This is not meant to insult anyone, but Hallmark Christmas movies are not my cup of tea. Sure, they were a cute, guilty pleasure to watch with the moms when this trend first stared WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. But it’s now been twenty years of the same formula being released under twenty-five different titles each year. I get that they are mindless, non-anxiety causing entertainment, but come on! No one needs hundreds of these things. Calm the hell down, Hallmark! Also, when are they going to start incorporating some other December holidays like Kwanzaa and Hanukkah? Where’s “Have a little Imani in Me” or “The Man who came with Dreidel ”? I want one completely based around Yule where the characters fall in love while burning crap and dancing naked in the snow! But no. That’s not Hallmark’s demographic. I’m not Hallmark’s demographic. So… this will probably be painful.

I was already off to a great start when I was only two and a half minutes in when my boyfriend heard the music and dialogue from another room and accusingly shouted, “Are you watching a Hallmark movie?”

I picked Christmas Getaway because it’s about a travel writer (a subject I haven’t explored in this blog yet) and it stars Bridget Regan who I remembered from “Legend of the Seeker”. The plot involves her going to write about an old fashioned American Christmas in a town called Pine Cove. Pine Cove appears to be a mountain town where affluent white people in perfectly fitted winter coats. At the same time, a widower/divorcee (maybe I should have been paying more attention) played by someone named Travis van Winkle has come to Pine Cove in order to give his daughter and mother a special Christmas. I know these characters must have names, but I haven’t learned any except that the single father is Dad.

The movie got an ominous feel when the little girl goes to play outside and her dad calls out that he loves her. He says it like it’s a goodbye! Is she coming back? Don’t go out that door, little girl! Your father has clearly set up rabbit snares to get out of the way! And then he will have all of the Christmas cheer to himself (insert evil laugh). Oh wait, the kid survives.

And then, oh no, the two main characters have been accidentally booked into the same cabin and there are no other places available! Who could have possibly seen that coming? Anyone who saw any other Hallmark movie. That’s who.

The writer tries to start on a book she’s been playing with about her travel experiences and all of the world traditions she’s experienced, however she is distracted by the warm glow of family bonding created by the father and daughter. She decides to use them as the central point of her “old fashioned Christmas” article. They go to cut down their own tree at a farm that let’s people do that. . . without signing a waiver first.

This followed by ice skating, decorating, cookies, making snowmen, gingerbread house building, and other montage worthy events set to generic holiday music. Like one song would stop, then another would instantly began. I started to have retail PTSD. The idea of all this happy memory making is that the writer has worked every Christmas on assignment (which she technically still is so. . . what was the point again?). I guess that she’s with people? But honestly, I’d imagine a travel writer who knows so many traditions from other countries probably got invited to a few strangers’ holidays before that. I seriously can’t imagine that she was in a place like Italy at Christmas and didn’t get awkwardly invited to someone’s house for dinner.

The travel writer’s boss/best friend says that the writer and the single dad clearly have a thing because “you can’t fake chemistry”. This quote made me laugh out loud as it feels like what the director of every one of these movies has to scream at the actors on set.

Eventually all of this jaunty public domain music and holiday sap inspire the travel writer to. . . you know . . . write. Personally, if I had a paid vacation to a cabin the woods with hot chocolate I might get some writing done too. That is, if my allergies don’t try to kill me like the last time I tried writing in a cabin in the woods. I think I did more dreaming about writing in my antihistamine haze, but we saw a bear!

Okay, back to the movie. The writer expresses how shThers feeling inspired to finish the book by settling in one place for a while. Of course, she tells this to the eligible single father before they (gasp) nearly kiss. Side note:They still haven’t kissed! There’s 30 minutes left of this thing? uggggg, but my squirrel instincts want to look at interesting shinies. Bored!

Therefore, let’s wrap this up. Guy loses girl through misunderstanding. Girl decides to get guy anyway through magic of Christmas. I think a car had the safest spin out on an icy road EVER. Blah blah blah. Back to the writing stuff. Turns out the trip was a ploy by the main character’s boss/best friend so she could take a break and get some emotion back into her writing. That was nice, but the rest of unbelievably sap-tastic and I’m going to go throw up now. It will be festive. I promise.