Julia Roberts: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

2. Liz Gilbert - Eat Pray Love (2010)

Eat Pray Love - adapted badly from the book of the same name - should really be called Find Yourself By Running Away. It is a disaffected fairy tale for disenchanted rat racers and emotional retards who seek beauty and truth and integrity in lingering, loving shots of foreign countries, where elephants replace ex-boyfriends, and exotic new men comes with so much promise and none of the caveats of ones back home. It's also one of those God-awful films that insists on emotional, philosophical purity, without ever giving up its commitment to being rich and largely unbearable - a horribly insistent gap year from life that misses the point and the empowerment message of the original book. Roberts bubbles in places, but she's swallowed up by a film that thinks - wrongly - that is wonderfully important, and justified in being as long as a Tolkein adaptation without an ounce of the excitement. It would be hard for anyone to really leave an impact in a film that is so obviously an exercise in self-congratulatory masturbation, and unsurprisingly Roberts pretty much fails. It's not really her fault - the film-makers clearly wanted a star to hang their wayward, spoilt richgirl story on - and they chose a big one, and then gave her very little to do and too much negativity to contend with.