It has taken me a long time to see this movie. The initial reviews and reactions kept me away for eight months. I read the book by Elizabeth Gilbert a couple of years ago and truly enjoyed it. While I usually love to see movies that are based on books I've read, I also tend to avoid those movies that immediately get such negative reviews. But this weekend, I found myself alone for the evening and decided to go ahead and take a chance and see if the movie was really that bad. I'll save you all the suspense — it was.

As a fan of the book, I found this movie to be a horrible failure as a retelling of Gilbert's insightful and entertaining travel memoir. Had I not read the book, I would have found this movie's main character to be a spoiled, self-centered, heartless, shallow person who threw each relationship away like it was an old pair of shoes.

Since I did read the book, I feel compelled to compare the film to its source material. From the start, we're forced to endure Gilbert's (Julie Roberts) divorce from her husband. One night, after attending a friend's party, her husband announces that he is considering going back to school for his Master's degree. For some reason, unknown to those of us in the audience, this is just too much for Gilbert to bear. She practically has a nervous breakdown, prays to God for the first time (ouch to that scene) and tells her husband she doesn't want to be married anymore. No background story, just lots of cheesy flashbacks of their wedding.

Gilbert then appears to go directly from her marriage bed to a shared hippie-grunge pad shared with David Piccolo (James Franco — what is he doing in this movie?), a lead actor in a bad play written by Gilbert herself. The passage of time is handled so poorly that it's impossible tell how long they've been fooling around, but eventually she can't stand him anymore and has to get away. Never do the writers bother to explain that Gilbert had a book deal to write Eat Pray Love and was able to take the year-long trip using an advance from this book deal. Rather, they make us believe that she is just having a hissy fit and risking every last penny of her bank account so she can essentially take a nice year-long vacation. Rough life this girl leads!

After getting through the 30 minutes or so of set-up to the real story, we finally get to Italy, where we watch Gilbert eat plate after plate of rich, Italian food, seemingly never gaining an ounce (though there is a cheesy scene where she goes "fat pants" shopping with a fellow skinny girl), and learn Italian, though we rarely hear anyone in the movie speak Italian. She makes friends easily and quickly has an entire social circle made up of beautiful people who just adore her to pieces.

Then it's onto India to do some serious meditation. While this is the slowest part of the book, it is the most critical part of Gilbert's story to understand the inner journey she was really trying to make. But as the movie would have us understand, Gilbert did quite a bit of chatting with the other students at the ashram, attending weddings and being a little social butterfly. We got to see her scrub three inches of one floor, otherwise this ashram life seemed like a breeze. No mention of the long hours of silence, battling with the bugs and other unpleasantries of the region, no real explanation of what was going on in her head.

From there, Gilbert darts off the Bali where she would eventually find yet another man to jump into bed with and again, gather a social circle of people to remind her how beautiful and smart she is. Unfortunately, our movie makers just didn't give us anything to like about Gilbert. The entire tale was like watching someone who already had so much good luck and fortune in her life alternate between sulking and gorging herself on the offerings around her until her ego was the size of a hot air balloon. Never did I feel like I was watching a real human being's journey that was part travel story, part self-exploration. This film not only let down the fans of the book, but also added to the vast library of bad Julie Roberts' movies.

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