Eat Pray Love Spew

I had heard it was bad.  I rented it on DVD.  Hoping for it to be good-bad, as it were.  Not to be.  The film Eat Pray Love is a reason to launch war on America.  The smug, laughing, crying, meditating, utterly self-engrossed Julia Roberts, playing self-engrossed travel journalist Liz Gilbert, is insufferable.  To understand the vast gulf between Hollywood-American sensibility and that of, say, the developing and European worlds, watch this film.  Ms. Gilbert has a great job, handsome, charming husband, great friends, and a house in New York.  What she doesn't have is a sense of "herself".  Instead of reading books, or going to a therapist, or even expanding her horizons locally, she dumps her husband, and takes up with a stud of an actor, before dumping him to travel to Italy to gain weight eating (which she sees as liberating), then off to Asia to try and get some mystic insights.  Roberts never actually puts on weight, and her life lessons are vapid.  I threw shoes at my TV set.  Hemingway once observed that there was no way to escape one's self through travel.  Ms. Gilbert should have stayed at home and looked inward.  The depths afforded by wealth and opportunity are only off-set by the surfaces they project.