A lesson in love... part un

Hey guys, I am YanJie, a friend of X and Jay’s and a guest-reviewer for When in Rome and Valentine’s Day. Not that I blame them since romantic comedies as a film genre usually fall along the line of super-sweet treats with tons of empty calories that tend to give you a sugar hangover afterwards. But as a girl who eats tons of sweets and started reading romance novels when she was in the 6th grade, I don’t really mind that much.

Even though it often doesn’t seem like it, there is a fine art to creating good romantic comedies and the secret lies in the relatability of the two main characters of the film. One of the major differences between rom-com and other genres of films is that romance HAS to be character driven whereas in action movies, fantasies or dramas, it’s the plot that propels the movie forward. After all, do you really remember any character development in Transformers or were you too distracted by Megan Fox’s boobs and the nonstop robot fighting to care?

That’s fine for Transformers since the main point of the movie is to defeat evil robots, and you only need really awesome robots, not believable characters, for that movie to work. But for a movie whose main purpose is to chronicle the relationship of two people to succeed, the audience has to either (1) like the two main characters or (2) believe that they like each other. If the romance film that you’re watching cannot accomplish either, then there is really no purpose for its existence. Ok, so let’s use that framework to judge the next two movies.


When in Rome – AVOID AT ALL COST

Let me just start by saying that Kristen Bell is one of my favorite actresses of all time. In fact, I probably have a way too obsessive girl crush on her (long live Veronica Mars!!!!!). But not even the presence of the luminous Bell can save this movie from being an absolute train wreck.

The movie starts with the introduction of Beth, a career-driven museum curator played by Kristen Bell. Beth must leave NY for a weekend to go to Rome for her sister’s wedding. There, she meets Nick (Josh Duhamel), the best man whom she becomes attracted to and banters/flirts with throughout the wedding. Later, after a lot of champagne and a classic case of romantic misunderstanding, she climbs into a fountain in a bout of bitterness, and picks up 5 wishing coins. Little does she know that her drunken act would cause the owners of those coins (a magician who sneaks into a Beth’s apartment and wraps himself up like a mummy to hang down from her ceiling, a model who believes a way to a woman’s heart is through his "sick" six-pack, an artist who won’t stop painting nude murals of Beth all over NYC buildings, and lastly a 5 foot tall sausage tycoon) to magically fall in love with her, and manically pursue her from Italy to New York.

As a result, Kristen Bell spends more than half of the movie running away from these crazy people. And every once in a while, a 5th guy would pop up and I would go "huh, who’s that? Oh! That’s Nick, the other lead of this movie that Beth is supposed to be falling in love with." As if having four psycho stalkers is not enough of a plot twist, the directors have to throw another one in there – "let’s make Beth think that the fifth coin belongs to Nick and he might only be in love with her because she picked up his coin."

So with half of the movie resembling scenes from an episode of Prison Break, and the other half with Beth pushing Nick away because she doesn’t think he’s really in love with her, you might wonder when does the couple ever have time to fall in love with each other. And the answer is they don’t. The producers want you to think they do, which is why they put in this one scene where they’re in the Guggenheim and Beth is suddenly opening up and telling Nick that the reason she is so afraid to let him into her heart is because every time she does, she always ends up getting hurt. Meanwhile, I flashed back to being in fifth grade and writing fanfiction for Sailor Moon and coming up with better dialogue than that.

In the end, I felt no connection to the two main characters since the producers spent the entire movie making Beth and Nick into tropes of romantic comedies instead of believable human beings. And I believed even less in their "love" for each other. This movie was a giant waste of my time. Do not watch it. If you need regular dosage of Kristen Bell, please go rewatch Veronica Mars.

Editor’s note: YanJie will examine Valentine’s Day in her next post.