Hey, happy New Year, everybody, but Josh Rosenblatt ain't having it. Rosenblatt has noticed that our attitudes towards important events in our lives tend to be colored by a template for how those events should look based on similar events they've seen in movies. "Even at my father's memorial service, I couldn't help thinking about Vito Corleone's funeral scene in The Godfather, wondering how ours looked by comparison. (Not too badly, as it turns out. A little light on gangsters and a little heavy on rabbis, but otherwise a perfect, totally depressing scene.)" And as he sees it, New Year's Eve is "when Hollywood really cranks up the fantasy quotient and goes out of its way to create the most unreasonable expectations for what a quality holiday experience – and, by extension, what a quality life – should be. New Year's movies play almost like advertisements: You too can fall madly in love with the perfect girl and commemorate the occasion with a 20-minute dance number set to a Gershwin score, like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris! You too can be blessed with economic and creative freedom at the stroke of midnight, like Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy! You too can find yourself in the middle of the perfect, fleeting romantic moment just by posting a request on the Internet, like Scoot McNairy in In Search of a Midnight Kiss! It's fantasy after fantasy, cultivating in our minds the most absurd notions of what is and isn't possible, of what we should and shouldn't expect from ourselves, on this one arbitrary night of the year."
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