'Terms of Endearment'

I read somewhere on the DVD case that this film was a "romantic comedy" and since Debra Winger annoys the pants off of me and Jack Nicholson wasn't going to chase her around an abandoned hotel with an ax, I was resolute in assuming I'd be bored to tears.

Instead, Jeff Daniels steals the show and Winger ends up dying. Now, I want to know what the person thinks about life who said this was a romantic comedy. Far from it. It's depressing as hell. It makes everything seem so small including Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine's romance. It's trivial when you're leaving three kids behind because of cancer.

I found the story development very much lacking. Like, I didn't fully understand when I was supposed to accept and eventually take to MacLaine's character being a total bitch. At some point, I was supposed to learn this is acceptable behavior from your mother. It has to be a mother-daughter thing.

Two, Jack Nicholson looked about as into this movie as Mr. Ed was into getting jabbed in the ass with a cattle prod for an half hour 30 times a season.

The most odd plot twist (that has nothing to do with nothing) is the John Lithgow character. He's a banker, who bails out Winger's character with some grocery money. He can't get laid, she's underappreciated, so they pool their disappointments in life into an affair, which I'm sure was as boring as affairs come. Then, Winger's character packs everything up to move to Nebraska, the affair ends and we see hide nor hair of Lithgow for the rest of the film.

Finally, I never understood the dynamic between Winger's character and that of her film husband, Jeff Daniels. He's a twerp, but an educated twerp, who continually cheats on his wife and is not too concerned with getting caught or talking up a co-ed with his infant strapped to his chest.

Clearly, he's a piece of shit. Even he admits to it. So why is Winger going all around the country following the guy when he doesn't care too much about marriage or being a father, so much that he merely lays down with little fight when the kids go to granny MacLaine.

And who's interested in a swimming pool that you've actually already swam in when you're at your mother's wake?