One Day, take two

During my August visit to Cali, I watched "One Day" with some friends and absolutely hated it. To me, it was the opposite of a love story - one party pining away pathetically with unrequited love while the other rubbed flame after flame in her face all the while knowing she was in love with him, only to finally love her back when he literally had nothing else left going for him and her life was just taking off. Plus, there's the bit where she all of a sudden gets HIT BY A BUS and DIES. I felt so emotionally manipulated, even though W had already warned me how it would end.

During this last visit to Cali during the holidays, I picked up the book as my holiday read. Multiple people had told me that the book was really good. To my surprise, I really liked the book - it's not really literature and more akin to fluffy chick lit, but I liked the character development and the dialogue and most surprisingly, I grew fond of Dexter Mayhew, the male character who I hated in the movie (even while finding him super cute). The funny thing is that the book and the movie are more or less exactly the same, but I think in the book you get more of his inner thought process since it is told by a third-person omniscient narrator, whereas in the movie you just see him acting like a complete douche without understanding what he is thinking. The movie happened to be one of the options on my flight back home to HK so I watched it again, and this time, I felt so much more empathy for Dexter. He's still a douche, but a complicated, loveable douche.

I recently watched Crazy, Stupid Love and had a major crush on Ryan Gosling's character in the movie. I've never liked Gosling before, but in this movie, he was charming, complicated, lost, but like Dexter Mayhew, a major jerk. El Hombre pointed out that I seem to have a thing for jerks (at least in movies), and I guess it's kind of true - there's something so alluring about a hot asshole who really is a kind loveable person inside but acts like an asshole because he's hurt/complicated/emotionally messed up and then the right girl comes along and he changes. I know it's fiction, but it's appealing fiction.