Mr. Unhappy's Movie Blog: Lost weeks...

So I've had a trying couple of weeks and it's been hard to get on here and just to watch movies in general. They are my cure all but grief and the pain of losing someone close can't be healed quickly. You'll walk through life and love a few and when one of those people goes, it can blow up your life. Suddenly writing a blog is not as important. Sometimes you just have to circle the wagons and be with your loved ones until the storm passes. I am moving in a positive direction but loss forces you to take a hard look at the life you lead and I found myself doing that today while watching a YouTube video on the movie Groundhog Day. The reviewer said and I agree that the movie is about life for an extremely unhappy man. You go through the motions and do your routines but it is all the same. Days become months and like Phil in Groundhog Day, you just keep reliving the same moments over and over again. It struck a little close to home because I've been doing that for the last 5 years.

I started this blog as a way to do something productive while unemployed. I kept doing it because I liked it and I always come back to the cinema in my times of need. One of those life shattering losses happened when I lost a girl (as so many good films start.) I named this blog Mr. Unhappy's Movie Blog because I once had an idea for a horror movie about a character named Mr. Unhappy who would leave his victims with his last bit of wisdom before killing them. Mr Unhappy sez: Blah blah blah. It seemed like an interesting way to end my reviews. My last bit of wisdom to my reader. So I used it. Funnily enough, at the time I was deeply in love and happy beyond belief with a girl named Kate. I knew that this girl had changed me in ways I wouldn't understand. I was hopeless from the moment I saw her, on the arm of another man, and I knew that I couldn't hope to have her as my girlfriend. So I became her friend. Just another way to keep her in my life.

As happens in romantic comedies, I became good friends to the point that I considered her one of my three best friends in the world. Before I even had hopes that she would like me, I allowed her into that inner sanctum of my heart reserved for family and those special friends you would defend to the death and take a bullet for. So I was happy and content. No unhappiness, no annoyances, just banter, good fun and someone who I genuinely loved as a person. Her compassion, her love of animals, her inner sweetness covered by a layer of hatred for the world. Like me she'd seen too much pain and put up walls to her heart. The night she kissed me and I found out I could have her as my friend and love of my life, I was ecstatic. It gave me hope.

I started this blog as a way to show her how great she made me feel. To want to put myself out there and become something was my goal. I've failed in that and my Groundhog Day's have gone on and on. But the intention was pure. I wanted to give my heart to the world again. I wanted to believe in love and it's magical power to make the world better regardless of how many assholes and jerks there are. I wanted to create something from my knowledge of movies and my love of cinema in general so I could give something back to this one woman who made me feel the happiest I've ever been. And then she broke up with me. Not only broke up with me but left me feeling like she only barely tolerated my existence. This person who I had shown everything rejected me and that broke me in ways I cannot describe. Do you know how hard it is to trust someone so completely as to open up your heart and show a side to yourself that few if any see and to have it so thoroughly rejected that you feel ashamed and petrified to be your true self again because there is something wrong with you. Something to be ashamed of and she saw it. She penetrated your soul and found you so unworthy that talking to you became a chore to be done. And I miss her...to this day. I miss my friend and confidant and a girl who made me laugh or attempt to grow a beard. A girl who took me out of my comfort zone. The type of girl you'd skip anything for just because she asked.

I had a friend once tell me that sometimes a person is just always the brown shoes. You'll put them on and wear them once and a while but you'd never want to just wear those shoes. It's never an easy thing to admit about yourself. Neither is living with the shadow of something that happened five years ago and being miserable and lonely and trying desperately to find someone new so you can forget but having that new person see something wrong with you again. I'm the brown shoes. I'm never gonna be the guy you see and instantly fall for. I'm never gonna be the guy you wanna be with proudly and openly. I'm the dependable guy who you throw away because I clash someway. Maybe I snapped at you in a moment of anger. Maybe there was a misunderstanding or maybe I just never had you. I know this isn't super movie related but isn't any relationship somewhat movie related in that movies are idealized versions of our lives. I've been stuck in a Groundhog Day of my own making trying day after day to get Kate to love me or notice me or simply be my friend. That's cinematic. That's compelling...to me at least. That's the kind of story that leads me to a dark room, with a good friend...to watch the flickering stories and feel their head on my shoulder. To gasp with and hide from the scary moments with. No matter how much I love movies and I do love them (even awful bad ones like Snakes On a Plane or Rocky V or Short Circuit 2) I will always want to share that love with someone I love. Movies will be better, popcorn will taste better and the chattering idiots talking during the movies will seem a little less annoying. Sure you'll still want to stab them with a dull butter knife (as many times as it takes) but you stab them together. Like all couples should.

This wasn't what I intended to write and I don't have the happy ending with the girl coming to me and telling me that she loved me too and that we should be together. I can't have that ending and at 36 you start wondering if you'll ever have the happy ending. It's so much work and when it's not with that special someone (because that takes work too), why bother at all? So while I didn't intend on writing this deep, annoying, pestering, thought that makes me look bad, it's what came bubbling up after seeing my Dad lose the love of his life for the second time. I wouldn't have wished that on him once and if I could have taken that sickness on myself and kept her here I would have because she saved my Dad from loneliness, that's a kindness I can't ever repay and I love her so much for it.

RIP Mimi Griffin.

You were a hell of a woman.

Mr. Unhappy sez: Unhappiness is contagious. Love is too. I wish I had caught the latter.

Some movies you can stream on Netflix...