He's Just Not That Into You

 What a beautiful movie title. Sometimes people need to hear this but nobody tells them, and it's good that this movie tells it to your face like a slap, and then you just have to take it like a champ. Of course, I wasn't going through a time I had to hear this when I heard it---because obviously I am a big girl and I had faced this fact on my own already (like a real champ). 

I watched this movie on a plane. Well, it was already on my list and then when I saw that it was available, I decided to watch it. Why was it on my list? I saw a scene from the movie in a reel on Instagram, which, in fact, I haven't seen in the movie when I saw the movie. On Instagram they often write the movie name wrong. Oh well. Still, I am glad I watched this movie. 

At the beginning of the movie, everything was going well for me. They were showing all these idiot guys and asshole types. And I felt good because I was like "yeah, I know that one!", "oh yeah, of course!", "yeah, if he does that it means he's garbage (checkmark)", etc. However, I must admit, I also thought "where was this movie before? I had to learn all this stuff by myself. If I knew, I would just watch this movie and learn!". Anyway, as they always say in education: hands-on experience is the best way to learn(!).

But then, things have started changing (in the movie). I am pretty sure the movie was giving the message 'there are no good guys out there' in the first part (and also they made this woman who was still searching for someone look like a hopeless case). Now, when things started changing in the movie, they started showing stuff that implies something like 'good guys exists too and not everything is so bad in life'. Of course, I was extremely skeptical watching these parts. But they did get to me by the end. Oh well. 

So, after the movie I was a completely changed person who then started to believe that there is maybe a 0.001% chance that not all guys are idiots. Okay. I don't mean to offend anyone personally here--it's just a general statement, and let's put aside all those who are already 'taken' (okay, maybe only a subset of them too), but there is a lot that goes under 'idiot' when I say it and it's my own definition, so hopefully no-one gets offended.

We must send thanks to Ben Affleck for facilitating this metamorphosis of mine. I am also not used to seeing him as such a good guy. But, you want to know what happened for the rest of my flight time? I ended up watching two more Ben Affleck movies! By the time I reached my destination, there was nothing but Ben Affleck's face in my head. Thankfully, I shook it off pretty quickly---mostly because of my great talent of being really bad with faces.

Now, you might be wondering why my mind being full of Ben Affleck's face and nothing else is a bad thing, right? Like, what's there to shake off, and perhaps one could always live with an image of Ben Affleck's face in one's head. But...unfortunately, life is never that simple. Ben Affleck's face reminds me of at least two people from my past and I really don't like the association. The association was not so strong, but still. So you should be really careful when you're gonna go on a movie spree like I did.

Jokes aside and continuing reviewing the movie, I should say the following. The movie indeed started well and was going well, but then I do think they messed up and as a whole it gives mixed signals (oh wait, that reminds me of something...hmm so meta!). So in fact, when they showed that Ben Affleck's character was not actually a douchebag, they are giving this idea to women to have hope that maybe their douchebag partner is also not a douchebag and will change one day. And they really shouldn't do this. Well, okay, more broadly, the message was that "there are no rules to this and everyone's story is of their own" but then the movie doesn't really teach you anything new either. In any case, perhaps one positive thing I can say is not exactly about the movie but the movie came out in 2009 and I watched it in 2025, and it looks like the stuff about romantic relationships were the same when there were no smartphones or social media like today. Okay, how is that even a positive thing? It's not. It's just an observation.

When I started writing this review I was thinking I would give it 8/10, but I guess that's just parallel to how I felt in the first half of the movie, and if I really go back to what I thought of the movie at the end of the movie, I cannot give 8/10. I have to take off more points...I mean, at the end of the movie, Ben Affleck's character even agreed to give up on wearing cargo pants for the woman he loved, who even does that, right? So, in the end, perhaps the 0.001% change in my beliefs was actually due to Justin Long's character Alex, but they didn't offer any of his other movies on the plane, so I watched The Accountant movies instead. 

I give 6/10. 

The Last Duel

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I was at the theatre waiting to see another movie. The trailer didn't catch my attention until I noticed Adam Driver. I have known him after his Ben Skywalker performance in the contemporary Star Wars series. Not that I like him very much, it was just about recognizing a face, hence getting my attention to the rest of the trailer. At that point, I thought this movie was going to be about King Arthur. 

Second time I saw the trailer for this movie, I was at the theatre waiting to see another movie. This time I remembered that I had seen this trailer before and this time I watched it more carefully. Then understood the story more correctly this time---it had nothing to do with King Arthur, my bad. From the trailer, one can deduce at least two things, it is a period movie and there is a woman to whom nobody believes she's telling the truth about something. This is something I can empathize with. 

Finally, the movie came out and this time I went to the theatre to see the movie itself, not its trailer. Along the way, I had learned that the movie is based on a book and the book is based on a real story. Knowing this made the movie much more intense---it was already going to be an intense movie. 

I have already mentioned Adam Driver. His performance was not bad. He played a bad guy. If he keeps playing bad guys in movies, I am afraid it might stick to him. Oh well, not my problem. Matt Damon looks very different in this movie. Not only he is older now but also the beard style and the hair they gave him makes him hard to recognize. His acting performance in this movie was definitely fantastic. Jodie Comer, you might remember her from Free Guy. Who knew she is gradually becoming a big actress. Her role, specifically, was a role that is tough to undertake. Ben Affleck looks very different in this movie, too. I had a hard time recognizing him even though I knew he was going to be in the movie (I know I am bad with faces but, I mean, they made him blond). I definitely wouldn't want to be friends with Ben Affleck's character---he is a horrible person.

The story of the movie takes place in 1300s. Right, you get to see how daily life was in those days. How their houses were, how their clothes were, etc. All that is good. But you also see how their understanding of science was in those days and how their understanding of justice was. This struck me the most. Of course, we all know science developed over the years so it was expected that they didn't know much in those days. Still, seeing them talk that way, was sad (and funny---because we know the right explanations now). It was extra painful to see the place of the women in that society. How hard they attacked the woman in the trial with such personal questions stupefied me. 

You may wonder, well, this movie is called The Last Duel, but is it really the last duel? Yes, in fact, it is. The duel that takes place in this movie is the last judicial duel in France. Normally, it wasn't going to be the last duel, because the last duel had already happened---trial by combat was discontinued in the country. But there was an exception in this case and they were allowed to do trial by combat when the court hearing was inconclusive. So, here you go, you can watch the last officially recognized judicial duel at cinemas now. Of course, the person who allowed this duel to happen was King Charles. Speaking of which, maybe not earlier in the movie but later in the movie, the actor who plays Charles (Alex Lawther) performs spectacularly. Especially, you should pay attention to him when he is watching the duel.

The movie starts with the set up of the last duel, then takes us back to show the events that led to this duel, then concludes with how the duel went and who won. I must say the director is showing off with this movie. Ridley Scott is really a talented director. You may perhaps remember him---he was the director of the movie Alien. Let's look at "then takes us back to show the events that led to this duel" closer. It shows us the events in three chapters. No, not by breaking the timeline into three, but by breaking the perspectives into three. In all three chapters, the timeline and events are the same. Same scenes shot again and again. Each chapter is how the events took place in a main character's eyes. Things happen very differently in some instances and they are only slightly different in other instances. The last chapter is how events happened through the eyes of the woman. And they show it to you the last because only she knows the truth (and so you wait very anxiously till the end to see the truth---at least I did). 

Now, you may wonder, wasn't it boring to watch the same events over and over again? The answer is no. It is true that the events were essentially the same but seen or interpreted by someone else each time so there were some differences. The first chapter is how Jean de Carrouges perceived the events and the second chapter is how Jacques Le Gris perceived the events. Since they were at war and at other places together, the first two chapters had many repeated events. But in the third chapter, when we are seeing the events from the eyes of Marguerite de Carrouges, things change up a bit since technically she was at home while the men were at war and she wasn't in the story until she married Jean. If the third chapter had repeated all the same as the first two chapters, I think it would probably have been boring but this wasn't the case so boredom was successfully avoided.

This method of showing the events was a nice touch on this movie. I had thought, since they were called 'chapters' on the movie screen too, that this was how the book was written. But, no. I checked the book and so this must really be the director's idea. Or, perhaps it's the writers of the movie which, I must add here, includes Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. In any case, the praise goes to the movie.  

I give 8/10.