Review: Love and Other Disasters
Jun. 12th, 2008 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishI will admit that I picked up this movie because I know Brittany Murphy and I have a slight crush on her Audrey-Hepburnish dark looks.
Love and Other Disasters seems very much the work of a young screenwriter who took "write what you know" a little too much to heart. The movie divides its time between Jacks the main character and her gay roomie Peter, who breaks the fourth wall to write the screenplay that we see turned into the movie we see before us. Only, not exactly, because the final showing of the film sticks Gweneth Paltrow and Orlando Bloom into the main character's roles and shoehorns a simple happy ending onto it.
The movie is not as clever as it wants to be: the main characters constantly refer to movie stereotypes, particularly to hang lampshades on how different they are from those poorly thought out characters, or how little they want to be like one of them in real life. It's a nice conceit, actually, but the film is just not quite smart enough to pull it off. It's got some lovely moments and great little lines, but it seems like there's a little much stuck into one film. Although that seems to make it's own point even better: it's not trying to be a romantic comedy, it's trying to be a film about the life of someone who happens to spend too much time thinking about how to write a romantic comedy. It gets a little distracted from its own existentialism and exploration of truth. The tricky bit is, while trying to get a "real life is not a movie" message into the plot, the movie still has to be a movie. It's got to walk a very thin line between too much lampshade hanging about how different they are from a movie, and actually being a movie that people want to watch. It's an ambitious move overall and I would advise against judging them too harshly for it.
I think it's probably an under appreciated little flick overall. There are some genuinely novel comic moments, even the minor characters are well fleshed out, and it hits rather sweet tone at the end by looking at the real happy endings in the characters' lives versus the constructed ones that the author could have forced them into.
Criticism: Brittany Murphy is simply naked a lot in this film. There are sometimes reasons, but mostly, it seems like they just wrote her as a character very comfortable with her own body and the camera *wink wink nudge nudge* just happened to be there. In moments of candid humor, it works. But I simply cannot buy the scene in which she beds down for the night in an underwire bra. She was shown moments before in thin and comfy T-shirt, which would be much nicer to sleep in- the sexy lingerie seems thrown in and out of character, and I can vouch for it as something that would simply be wildly uncomfortable at any level of intoxication. Yes, the boy has to be turned on by her, but they could just have had her naked under the covers and that would have served just as well.
Love and Other Disasters seems very much the work of a young screenwriter who took "write what you know" a little too much to heart. The movie divides its time between Jacks the main character and her gay roomie Peter, who breaks the fourth wall to write the screenplay that we see turned into the movie we see before us. Only, not exactly, because the final showing of the film sticks Gweneth Paltrow and Orlando Bloom into the main character's roles and shoehorns a simple happy ending onto it.
The movie is not as clever as it wants to be: the main characters constantly refer to movie stereotypes, particularly to hang lampshades on how different they are from those poorly thought out characters, or how little they want to be like one of them in real life. It's a nice conceit, actually, but the film is just not quite smart enough to pull it off. It's got some lovely moments and great little lines, but it seems like there's a little much stuck into one film. Although that seems to make it's own point even better: it's not trying to be a romantic comedy, it's trying to be a film about the life of someone who happens to spend too much time thinking about how to write a romantic comedy. It gets a little distracted from its own existentialism and exploration of truth. The tricky bit is, while trying to get a "real life is not a movie" message into the plot, the movie still has to be a movie. It's got to walk a very thin line between too much lampshade hanging about how different they are from a movie, and actually being a movie that people want to watch. It's an ambitious move overall and I would advise against judging them too harshly for it.
I think it's probably an under appreciated little flick overall. There are some genuinely novel comic moments, even the minor characters are well fleshed out, and it hits rather sweet tone at the end by looking at the real happy endings in the characters' lives versus the constructed ones that the author could have forced them into.
Criticism: Brittany Murphy is simply naked a lot in this film. There are sometimes reasons, but mostly, it seems like they just wrote her as a character very comfortable with her own body and the camera *wink wink nudge nudge* just happened to be there. In moments of candid humor, it works. But I simply cannot buy the scene in which she beds down for the night in an underwire bra. She was shown moments before in thin and comfy T-shirt, which would be much nicer to sleep in- the sexy lingerie seems thrown in and out of character, and I can vouch for it as something that would simply be wildly uncomfortable at any level of intoxication. Yes, the boy has to be turned on by her, but they could just have had her naked under the covers and that would have served just as well.
