thoughts on Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Okay, so I almost always blog about new releases because the simple fact is, I don't really have the attention span to watch rented movies.  You all know I love going to movies at the theater, but, as I may have mentioned before, at home I tend to want to get up every five seconds to unload the dishwasher, or put away laundry, or maybe I'll be reading something at the same time or messing around on the Internet.  TV is better because commercials make it possible to do this and still (mostly) keep track of what you're watching.  However, post-Dallas Buyers Club I realized that not five years ago Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner were in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past together and that I'd never actually seen it, so I added it to my Netflix queue. 

Matthew McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a high-profile photographer who has slept with what can only be described as a comically large number of women (and by "comically large," I mean "disgusting.")  There is a scene where he has to walk past all of his past conquests, and it's RIDICULOUS, how many women there are, and how many women who seem totally happy to sleep with him even knowing what he's like.  Hey, remember the show Party of Five, and how it was so shocking when Charlie (Matthew Fox) revealed that he'd slept with something like thirty-six women?  Apparently it takes a lot more than that to be shocking these days, which is kind of sad. 

Anyway, early in the movie, Connor is reminded that he's supposed to attend his brother Paul's (Breckin Meyer's) wedding.  No one besides Paul is that happy to have him there; he's slept with most of the bridesmaids (including his first love Jenny Perotti, played by Jennifer Garner), and he keeps (mostly by accident) doing potentially-wedding-ruining stuff like knocking over the wedding cake, letting it spill that Paul once slept with one of the bridesmaids, and hitting on the bride-to-be's (Lacey Chabert's) mother.  At the rehearsal dinner, he also drunkenly goes off about how marriage is an antiquated institution and love is a myth.  That night, his dead, womanizing uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) visits him to tell him that over the course of the night, he'll be visited by three ghosts who will show him the error of his ways.

It all sounds pretty silly, right, which is probably why I didn't want to see it when it first came out.  However, I found it to be surprisingly funny and sweet.  I enjoyed the trip through Connor and Jenny's romantic past (guided by Emma Stone in crazy '80s hair and braces as the Ghost of Girlfriends Past and the girl he lost his virginity to in high school).  Though their relationship partly failed because Connor decided to take womanizing Uncle Wayne's advice, there were also plenty of really normal missed opportunities and missteps caused by fear and pride over the years.  Jennifer Garner's Jenny is pretty cool as a love interest, as Connor himself realizes; she's the only person in his life who's ever really called him on his crap and told him how things needed to be.  It also doesn't hurt that their journey is set to a pretty cool/fun '80s soundtrack (REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Loving You" is pretty much their love theme for the movie).  Basically, Connor is reminded what he lost by looking at the past; learns how much he's hurting people in the present; and is scared by the future, which is pretty much par for the course for a play on A Christmas Carol, I guess...but the characters are pretty likeable (even when Connor is being skeezy), and it's all pretty cute and fun.  I dug it.