So I've been taking a few recommendations for movies to watch recently. Most recently, I've watched Love Actually, You've Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally. I don't tend to enjoy romantic movies usually. I often feel like the values are off (I'm not talking about sex, but about how people view life and treat each other.), or that it's taken for granted that you should be rooting for a couple or a person (convince me), or that one person is far, far too good for the other, that the situation is cliche, the writing is lazy, that they don't capture real people or scenarios, or some combination of the above. Is it that romantic movies as a genre are more prone to being intolerably dull and irritating? Maybe, or maybe it's just that, when writers and filmmakers get lazy, they go to romantic movies for girls and action movies for guys, because it will sell no matter how low the quality. That said, when romance makes its way into otherwise non romantic movies, it can be even more irritating (The Great Raid.). In fact, I think the reason that I got the majority of these recommendations was my statement that I don't like romantic movies. I won't get into a review of every romantic movie I have ever seen. I'll just summarize by saying that when I am supposed to be crying, I am laughing, and when I am crying, it's because I fear for the future of a world in which these movies are made and bought.
So I got some recommendations, and, in an exercize in procrastination, I watched them.
Love Actually.
It was ... ok. The premise was decent, a movie about love, rather than about a specific group of people, the different guises love can take, the different ways it can come about, and the different good and bad endings that stories can have, with the general thesis that love is everywhere, even with all the bad stuff that goes on in the world. It could have worked, and it could have made an amazing Christmas movie, but it didn't. They took a decent premise and applied lazy writing and ended up with a mediocre movie. None of the characters were developed enough to really be rooted for, and I'm not sure if there was even one three dimensional character in the whole movie. The situations, too, were lacking in originality, the man in love with his best friend's wife, the girl who's had a crush on a guy for years, the guy who finds his girlfriend is cheating (and goes on to fall in love with someone else), the man who wants to get closer to his son. Even when they hadn't been done before, they were merely reworkings of fairly basic ideas. Granted, there wasn't time in the movie to fully develop what, ten characters? Or to pursue five complex and interesting storylines, and that's why what was in the movie had to be amazing for it to work, and it just wasn't.
When Harry Met Sally.
When Harry Met Sally was better, I suppose it gets a "decent" rating. It wasn't special. It was a little pretentious. It was a little dull. The movie seemed more concerned with stylistic matters than ones of substance, which was a problem. Neither Harry nor Sally was a particularly complex person. They were both likeable enough, but neither one had been developed to the point of being really interesting or someone you could really relate to. I also got a little annoyed with her for getting so upset near the end. I know the movie needed a climax (badum chhhhh), but I thought that was a rather poorly chosen one, or rather that it was done rather poorly. Hate was a rather harsh term, and he needed to do something pretty bad to deserve it. They wanted to end the movie with her saying she hated him but that she actually loved him, and though his acting in that scene was excellent, I don't think the scene, itself, could have worked in any movie. She didn't have justifiable reason to say she hated him, but if she did, the fact that they were in love should not have been reason alone enough to forgive him, so either way, it doesn't work, though the writers seemed to be really attached to that ending.
You've Got Mail.
Excellent. Wait what? That's right, you heard me, excellent. In fact, I'd probably have to watch the movie again in order to list off everything good about the movie, and the bad? Essentially nothing. It's true that some of the emails back and forth at the beginning were a little forced, but that's extremely difficult writing, and for it to be just "a little forced" is actually excellent. From the dream break up scene to a perfect representation of a horrible night, the movie wasn't cliche, and it didn't draw on the standard movie tricks just to sort of get its point across. It was original the whole way through and the premise was amazing. And if you're still wondering about her having closed the shop, she became a children's book author, something she could be remembered for, rather than simply following her mother, her own individual destiny, so that actually worked out for her, too. The writing was tight and well crafted, the characters were human, and you could identify with both of them, you could see why they liked each other, and the problems they faced, and their getting over them were actually believable. I can't think of another romantic movie that I think of as highly as this one.
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