It’s February, which means Hollywood likes to do things like re-release Titanic in 3-D or try to recapture the magic of Sleepless in Seattle without actually remaking it. With a lot of half-assed attempts at capitalizing on our simultaneous desire for and oversaturation in romance that is the month of February, there’s gonna be some stinkers. And I really do want to emphasize the “half-assed” of it all here. You can tell when a studio puts effort into a film generally, but it is even more obvious in a genre like this. It takes effort to both pay homage to and innovate a trope-laden genre. There are some fantastic examples of new good rom-coms, but this February was a bit… light on that.
February’s Trash
Shotgun Wedding (Amazon): JLo has so many skills. She’s a great singer, dancer, glossy nude lip-wearer, partner to sad Dunkin employee Ben Affleck… but after all of those things and maybe way down the list I would put actor. JLo doesn’t sing or dance in this movie and I’m not saying she has to do that in every movie but also like… she should maybe? That’s her big skillset and it feels like a waste of her talents to have her just play a rom-com/action lead instead when she’s maybe not that great at it. She was actually quite good in Hustlers, but that movie drew magic out of everyone and this movie manages to squander the talents of everyone involved in it. Everything about this movie is a forgettable mess, from Josh Duhamel’s cardboard cutout acting to D’Arcy Carden somehow getting zero funny lines. It was originally slated to have Ryan Reynolds and Armie Hammer as the male lead, and I think either or both would have brought more charisma to the role. Jennifer Coolidge plays herself and that’s fine I guess. It’s a lazy movie and I want my 100 minutes back.
Your Place or Mine (Netflix): Nothing drives me crazy so much as wasted opportunity and this movie is 100% wasted opportunity. Example: Ashton Kutcher is literally at his hottest ever in this movie and they somehow found a co-star for him with zero chemistry and then also kept that co-star away from him for all but 5 minutes of the movie. This movie smacks of “the stars schedules didn’t align” getting written in as a deliberate plot device, as Reese Witherspoon and Ashton spend the whole movie in different cities. The plot is fairly cute, but the execution is terrible. Tig Notaro and Steve Zahn steal every scene they’re in, but that basically makes 5% of this movie entertaining. Also as a personal point of pain, there’s a bit near the end where Reese’s character gets a job as an editor at an indie publishing house because… she went out twice with the editor-in-chief of a different publishing house and he was really impressed or something? She is an accountant who likes books but ok sure you can be an editor, only one of the most difficult to get and sought-after jobs in the world which is what I wanted to do for like 10 years until I gave up because the publishing industry is impossible to break into but sure sure. Blegh 1 star.
Recycling:
Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century Studios): Ok, this is not a rom-com. I did laugh at it a good bit and there’s theoretically romantic elements to it, but I will admit it doesn’t really fit with the theme of this post. I want to do a whole post about this at some point, but suffice it to say here that this was not for me. The visuals were pretty stunning, but as one reviewer so eloquently put it the whole thing felt like “a trillion-dollar screensaver.” The storyline was so recycled from the first movie and it has just been so long since I’ve cared about this franchise that I found it hard to engage with. The theatre I saw this in had heated reclining seats though, which really helped with the three-hour run time.