Love and Other Disasters is a movie about just that: Love and other disasters. Disasters like bad scriptwriting, bad plot design, horrible character development, a painful attempt to rip off Amelie, and more bland gay humor than I can shake my stick at. I don’t know why the sheer idea that two people have the hots for each other is still considered some important plot point that strikes up laughs and controversy just because they’re both dudes. That whole tolerance movement was designed to make it a non-issue and congrats, you fabulous people you, ya’ll won. Now reap the rewards: people don’t bat an eye anymore. Stop making movies that pretend like you’re breaking ground just because you include the whole gay thing; it just doesn’t make for good cinema unless you’re trying to say something or are clearly content with not saying anything.
But alas, here’s Disasters which centers around Jacks (Brittany Murphy) whose gay-dar is as bad as those who keep approaching me asking if I’m part of the “family” even after I say no. Serving as an intern for Vogue magazine, she finds herself surrounded by men who she doesn’t have to fear will try to make any advances on her because she’s about as unattractive to them as I am to most women. One of these men is Paolo (Santiago Cabrera), a photographer who she starts hanging out with with the hopes of getting him hooked up with her gay roommate Peter who has the hots for some random guy he saw in a lobby named Tom who gets confused for David who also happens to be gay without confirmation because apparently the rule is “once you know one gay guy you know every gay guy, because every guy you meet thereafter is gay.” It’s convenient that way, except Paolo is straight and too stupid to realize that if a girl keeps asking you out so she can talk to you about her gay roommate and discuss when you can see him next, she’s obviously not interested in you, but Disasters decides to push this issue despite the fact that a simple conversation in the early stages could have solved everything but no, everyone is too dreamy to fall for rational solutions.
I hate romantic comedies that stall the romance simply because nobody feels like explaining something very basic (like whether or not they’re gay). Too many times does this movie ignore the typical first date questions and skip right to the complications because it assumes we’ll just accept that their couples just work together. What this means is that the chemistry is non-existent and for those (five) of you who remember one of my rules of romantic comedies it’s that you have to honestly feel like the couple can make it after the movie is over. Not only does that NOT happen in this movie but you’re practically left with an adequate reason to believe the two should break up.
So, what are we left with? The positives (and not the HIV positives. ZING! On a roll. Sorry, too easy, moving on.). Despite the fact that this movie stayed really stupid, it never got really cheesy, and lord knows it was aching for some of that. But really, that’s about it. Disasters was just garbage start to finish and you don’t want to know what it tried with the whole Adaptation “oh we made a movie about the movie you watched! Tee hee!” Oh…well, I guess I just told you what it tried. It’s called “a cop out for a movie that doesn’t know how to tie up loose ends.”
This movie tried to be funny and wasn’t. Tried to be clever and wasn’t. Tried to be romantic and wasn’t. Tried to be sweet, charming, provocative, touching, and all of that typical crap and it wasn’t. It was just gay. In every sense of the word, even the kind the Hillary Duff gets on a PSA for and says “you shouldn’t call people gay because it’s derogatory.” Well hell, if it over-glorifies sex with the same gender for no other reason than to do so, has a gross disregard for anything that makes a real relationship work, but instead validates it by using the idea that two people are standing up for something that still is unpopular (however the fuck they got that idea), and has about depth as much as two chicks scissor-…ah, I won’t do that one but you get the idea, then, naturally, how the hell could I not classify this movie as gay-diddily-ay? There’s a difference between being stereotypical and observing too many instances that just fit the bill and not enough to convince me that it’s just a shallow-minded assumption.
Anyway, with severe temptation to put this in the fucking microwave anyway, Love and Other Disasters frolics away with a disasterous 3 dustbusters out of 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment