Toxic! Julia Roberts, George Clooney in “Ticket to Paradise”

This film lasts 104 minutes and by the end of the second act you’re wondering: What were the screenwriters thinking when they delivered the script? I hope no one notices we’re feeding people a toxic family history? Hopefully nobody understands that the concept of romantic love that we serve to cinema-goers is not romantic at all, but narcissistic and ultimately shameful?

And did the producers of this brainwashing theater say: If we only cast these clothes big enough, then people won’t even register the ideological filth that we expect the audience to have as such? You will laugh and cry with emotion, and in the end the coffers will be full. Was that the idea?

“Ticket to Paradise” presents two of the biggest stars of their generation: George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Ol Parker will direct: Clooney and Roberts have been divorced for years and have a grown daughter. She has just passed her state law exams, but during her vacation in Bali she meets an algae fisherman whom she promptly wants to marry. Clooney and Roberts, the enemies involved in the divorce, travel there to prevent the daughter’s marriage.

The new Cary Grant

For a long time, Clooney was the pretty TV doctor from the series “Emergency Room”. He made the career leap into the cinema and over the years has blossomed into a specialist in the portrayal of self-deprecating masculinity. At the latest when he played the gangster in “Out of Sight” (director: Steven Soderbergh) who, of all things, ensnares a policewoman (Jennifer Lopez in her only tolerable film role), it was clear: This guy could be virile and at the same time amused by himself.

A new Cary Grant was born to the culture industry, and Hollywood cultivated its charm with everything that sentimental dramaturgy yielded. In recent years he has tried to be a serious artist with directorial aspirations. For Netflix he shot the somewhat culturally critical science fiction film “The Midnight Sky”. He played the main role of the intellectual rumpled by disgust with knowledge and culture nui – more bad than right, one has to say.

Julia Roberts is so famous that she was able to play herself in the romantic film Notting Hill, just as a screen character. In this work, which is paradigmatic for her career, she embodies the American Hollywood megastar who falls in love with an English bookseller. The film made it clear that an outstanding actress can make even the greatest kitsch – understood as being touched by one’s own sentimentality – appear plausible and intelligent.

Her face, which is actually not beautiful but striking in a suggestive way, became an icon of sensitive femininity. Moviegoers agreed that when Julia Roberts smiles, the sun and the moon rise at the same time. Cleverness, vulnerability, erotic subtlety: it’s all in Robert’s skill.

Roberts has to go to yoga

After appearing in many acceptable to terrible cinema romances, she shone in two excellent films: In “Wonder” and “Ben is Back” she appeared with her make-up removed and dressed up for her age. She played women who struggle emotionally because of their sons’ problems. Roberts transformed from romance beauty into a major actress in psychological and social emergencies.

In “Ben is Back” she has to deal with her son’s drug addiction, which is not possible because nobody can deal with an active addiction. She played so well that sufferers and psychotherapists alike were shocked. And Hollywood was happy: finally there was a use for this almost 50-year-old – as a mother in the problem cinema tailored to the baby boomer generation.

At “Ticket to Paradise” they seem to have forgotten that role profiles cannot be used forever. Clooney is said to be Cary Grant again, a macho who suffers with a wink at women and their rebelliousness. And Roberts is the self-confident lady who is locked into this self-confidence and has to go out – to yoga, to love, to happiness.

This movie Bali is a paradisiacal utopia where everyone loves each other unselfishly. The indigenous population has gotten nothing at all from the social and mental distortions that capitalism imposes on its actors. The Balinese groom looks like what Hollywood would imagine a George Clooney from Bali to be, only young. Kaitlyn Dever plays the bride/daughter as a girl touched by natural beauty and manliness who forgot her career aspirations the moment the nice beau breathes “I love you.”

Not to mention cultural appropriation

Toxic, to use the buzzword again, is the underhandedness with which the parents break up the couple. Clooney and Roberts are the narcissistic parents who project the failure of their own marriage onto their daughter’s future. The script treats Roberts to a much younger lover, a pilot whose romantic knowledge is limited to mistimed proposals of marriage.

At some point, Clooney is so bored in his fatherly boosted megalomania that you wait for the millennial woman who usually appears, with whom he can then comfort himself a bit. The pseudowoke romance cinema desexualizes the man here and lets the heroine, i.e. Roberts, appear as a neurotic men’s path cleaner – under the pretext of anti-patriarchal self-empowerment. Don’t even start with cultural appropriation – white Anglo-Saxons use an indigenous culture for anti-capitalist detoxification.

Clooney and Roberts should and must get back together – on screen as lovers, for the culture industry as box office magnets. In the film, the daughter’s salvation is just the pretext for couples therapy for two baby boomers who want to overcome their narcissism with the worst narcissistic means (lying, manipulating, confusing the perception of the other). So the film tilts into a pathologically romantic illusion. Is that supposed to be funny? soulful? Then you can also read through the suffering reports of victims of such nasty affairs. Those are terrible too. But at least honestly.

In the cinema.