A Study in Mediocrity: My Sister's Keeper

I'm not sure how people come up with these ideas. These horrendous stories that they think people might like. I haven't read My Sister's Keeper. And I don't intend to. For the same reason I haven't read The Notebook or A Walk to Remember. It's not just that they are sad. It's like the author has to drag you through every possible sadness that could happen and then rubs it in your face. It's like when I make 10 pounds of mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, when 5 pounds will clearly do.

Here's the story: The parents (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric) have a daughter and a son. The daughter gets cancer. She's very sick and the only way she'll live is if they manufacture a child to match the cancer daughter exactly, so that the healthy child could donate bone marrow, blood, tissue, etc. to the sick child. So the parents do - they manufacture Abigail Breslin. Her character grows up and decides that she is tired of donating herself to her sister and she hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to help her become medically emancipated from her parents.

So we already have a heavy-handed story - ripe for manipulating the audience into squishing out a few tears, or a lot of tears, depending on your sensitivity. You pretty much know the outcome of the movie from the start and anytime the subject of a movie is a dying child, well, it kind of ruins any hope of enjoying your Friday night.

Then we get the cast: Cameron Diaz as the mother. Okay. So you can't see my pinky finger from where you are, but if you look at it real close, you'll see that it has more of a motherly instinct that Cameron Diaz. She is not believable for even two minutes as a mother. She exudes no compassion, no love, no sensitivity. I don't know why - it's just her.

Then we have Jason Patric, whose performance was not noticeably good or bad, he just was. Alec Baldwin, was painful to watch in his performance as the attorney. The script was poorly written, the lines predictable and lazy. One scene in particular made me cringe, when Abigail Breslin yells at her dad in an argument: "What about me dad? What about me?" I'm pretty sure I wrote that line into a civil war romance story I wrote when I was 12.

It was rather like watching a bad high school play - the acting was THAT good. It's not even worth the tears that you will probably cry because you will have had to pay $10.50 to watch Cameron Diaz try to be a mother, which she utterly fails at. She's pushing and pushing and pushing, but no baby/child/performance ever comes out, just air and a lot of dumb show. (Please note that I have chosen pictures which showcase her trying to act. It's noticeable, even in the stills.)

See it? Only if you like overly sentimental stories playacted by people masquerading as actors.

Opens everywhere Friday, June 26th. (That's tomorrow, in case you are buying your tickets in advance.)