From the BLURB: When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes. Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for? This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do ...
* Full disclosure: I wrote this back in 2015. I tried pitching the article to various online magazines and pop-culture websites, but nobody had heard of The Hairy Bird (or its other iterations) so the article went nowhere. Then I saw Jenna Guillaume's Buzzfeed article on her re-watch of the film and I was inspired to go read my own article again. And ... aside from it having some pretty telling condemnations (especially now) of Harvey Weinstein's movie taste where female portrayals are concerned, I found it to still be so relevant - everything Sarah Kernochan told me then still applies today. So here it is. Ejoy. [left to right] Merritt Wever, Gaby Hoffmann, Kirsten Dunst, and Heather Matarazzo. When I was eight-years-old I started wearing pedal-pusher pants, Chuck Taylors and was desperate to drink Coke out of a glass bottle. Because when I was eight-years-old I saw the movie Now and Then for the very first time – a film about four 12-year-old girls growing up ...