Never mind two hundred pages of trust, never mind interrupting the momentum with irrelevance--no, the switch has to flip from friendship and support to self-righteous anger. And then, a half-chapter or so later, this is worked out and we get on with the conclusion of the story.
The third-act breakup is annoying even when there's no ex post facto betrayal involved. I accepted it in The King's Speech (2010) only because it was believable as a defense mechanism that Bertie would pick a fight with his therapist when Lionel gets too close to the things that really scare him (and plausibly nasty the way he did it, which I appreciated on grounds of characterization). I wouldn't like it, but there should be at least one film where if you have a stupid fight that drives away someone dear to you, they don't actually come back in the nick of the finale. Because sometimes they don't.
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Date: 2011-12-16 07:49 pm (UTC)The third-act breakup is annoying even when there's no ex post facto betrayal involved. I accepted it in The King's Speech (2010) only because it was believable as a defense mechanism that Bertie would pick a fight with his therapist when Lionel gets too close to the things that really scare him (and plausibly nasty the way he did it, which I appreciated on grounds of characterization). I wouldn't like it, but there should be at least one film where if you have a stupid fight that drives away someone dear to you, they don't actually come back in the nick of the finale. Because sometimes they don't.