The movie for this is a little obscure in that it's a Lifetime movie from the 2000s. You can get it on DVD from Amazon. I did actually watch it; pretty much the only time I watched Lifetime in the last 15 years.
The book I had picked up from the library for...reasons. Honestly I don't remember. I read just about the whole thing while sitting around in the room for jury duty. I never got called to sit on a jury but I had to spend two days sitting around in that room feeling like a fucking prisoner because you couldn't even go to the bathroom without permission and an escort. Hurm, I wonder why people try to get out of jury duty and ignore the notices?
Anyway, the titular event is this girl Carrie's boyfriend dives off the pier into a Wisconsin lake. But he hits the bottom and breaks his neck. The thing is, Carrie was going to break up with him before the trip but now she's forced into being the supportive girlfriend first when her boyfriend is comatose and then afterwards when he wakes up and tries to recover from being paralyzed pretty much from the neck down.
But eventually she gets sick of this and bolts to New York. She makes some quirky new friends and starts going to fashion design school, which she seems to have a knack for. There's a mysterious (and of course handsome) stranger named Kilroy she hooks up with. But eventually she goes back to Wisconsin. Will she get back together with her boyfriend?
The movie is a decent adaptation for the most part. It's the kind that hits all the main points for the book, but it's sort of a watered-down, Cliff Notes type version. The only black mark I give them is in the book her New York friend Simon is gay but in the movie they cut all of that out. Because I guess a gay guy was too racy for a Lifetime movie. HBO probably would have done a better, higher budget adaptation, but it wasn't bad.
I wouldn't have read the book as quickly as I did and might not have liked it as much if I hadn't been stuck in a cage where the only other entertainment was The Tony Danza Show. This was before we had iPhones and tablets and stuff too Anyway, while I guess it's "women's fiction" or maybe even the dreaded "chick lit" the book does a good job of not falling into too many romance-type cliches. And it manages to effectively convey the moral ambiguity involved in the scenario. This is one of the few cases where the book is probably a lot easier to obtain than the movie, so you're probably better off with that.
As a Fun Fact, the movie stars Michelle Trachtenberg, whose prior claim to fame was starring in the crappy Inspector Gadget live action movie as his niece Penny. Her other notable credit is as the scream queen of Robot Chicken. In one sketch she voices a Gummy bear that gets caught in a bear trap and has to eat its own leg to escape and when the bear gets caught in the trap she unleashes this ear-piercing scream that probably shattered the sound booth glass. Really they should have gotten her to play Black Canary on "Arrow" because she could have just done that scream instead of needing a special collar. I'm just saying.
3 comments:
Sounds interesting. I've thought of that scenario before where one person in the couple is paralyzed. A young person would have to give up their life to become mostly a care giver. In most cases, that isn't going to happen.
You know she was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right?
No. I never watched that show. But it explains why she's on Robot chicken since Seth Green was also in that.
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