Archive for the ‘Romance’ Category
Monday, November 17th, 2025
I don’t say this lightly, but I think Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN might be up there pretty high among the top Frankensteins? Or at least it hits hard for me. It’s one of the more faithful adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 207-year-old novel Frankenstein: But If You Think About It It’s Almost Like a Modern Prometheus, but it’s reinterpreted enough to feel like pure, personal del Toro.
He uses the wraparound story of a Royal Danish Navy expedition to the North Pole that’s now stuck in the ice. The crew sees an explosion nearby and discovers injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, THE CARD COUNTER). Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen, of the Copenhagen Mikkelsens) takes him on board to shelter him from The Creature (Jacob Elordi, THE MORTUARY COLLECTION), and this strange guest decides to be dramatic and tell his whole damn story from childhood to that very day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz, David Bradley, Felix Kammerer, Guillermo Del Toro, Jacob Elordi, Lars Mikkelsen, Mia Goth, Oscar Isaac
Posted in Reviews, Horror, Monster, Romance | 19 Comments »
Thursday, November 6th, 2025
MATERIALISTS is a movie I missed in theaters, caught on blu-ray a while back, and this week it will start streaming on Home Box Office Maximum, if you want to catch it to. I really needed to see it because it’s the second movie from writer/director Celine Song. Her first was PAST LIVES (2023), which I didn’t review, but I loved it. It’s about an American woman (Greta Lee) reuniting with a guy (Teo Yoo) who she knew before her family left South Korea when she was little. He’s handsome and in love with her and reminds her of her roots, but also she loves her life and her boyfriend and oh man. It’s so good. Swooningly romantic, achingly beautiful, keenly observant, feels so true to people and to life, never like a formula. Why didn’t I write about it? Maybe I was afraid I couldn’t do it justice. I should watch it again.
Celine Song Joint #2 is pretty different. Another classy A24 production, but with beautiful movie stars* and a little bit of a satirical or social commentary aspect to it, in that it depicts a world of entitled people with superficial and unattainable demands for relationships. Madame Web herself Dakota Johnson (NEED FOR SPEED) stars as Lucy Mason, a top matchmaker for a New York City company called Adore. She has a great reputation for success, so her clients feel comfortable bluntly talking about people as lists of statistics: salary, net worth, race, age, weight, height. Most of it is very demeaning and presumptuous.
Everyone wants to marry rich, and Adore throws Lucy a party every time she hooks up a big wedding. At one of those (notch #9 on her belt) she tries to match the groom’s brother, Harry Castillo (Maxwell Lord himself, Pedro Pascal, THE GREAT WALL) with another client, but instead he begins pursuing her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Celine Song, Chris Evans, Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Romance | 15 Comments »
Thursday, September 4th, 2025
August 19, 2005
I completely forgot that I reviewed THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN when it came out in 2005, but there it is. It’s not the kind of movie I normally review, but I thought it would be important to include in this series as the most influential comedy of the summer and as the opposite of WEDDING CRASHERS. That one was about smarmy well-paid pickup artists really falling in love while trying to just get laid via deception, this is about an awkward dork who works as a stocker at an electronics chain store and doesn’t own a car who has spent his life deliberately not trying to get down women’s pants, and the lie to the woman he’s falling for is just not telling her that he’s okay with not having sex yet because he’s scared he’ll do a bad job.
Steve Carell (last seen in BEWITCHED) plays Andy, friendly but socially awkward action figure collector whose life changes after his co-workers David (Paul Rudd, HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS), Jay (Romany Malco, URBAN MENACE, TICKER) and Cal (Seth Rogen, DONNIE DARKO) very reluctantly decide to invite him to fill a vacancy in their after-hours poker game in the store. He does such a bad job of joining in their locker room talk that they figure out he’s a virgin and make it their quest in life to help him change that. “From now on your dick is my dick. I’m getting you some pussy,” vows Jay. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Catherine Keener, Elizabeth Banks, Erica Vittina Phillips, Jane Lynch, Jonah Hill, Judd Apatow, Kat Dennings, Kevin Hart, Leslie Mann, Mindy Kaling, Paul Rudd, Stormy Daniels
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 13 Comments »
Monday, July 14th, 2025
July 15, 2005
WEDDING CRASHERS is kinda like an old nemesis of mine. I reviewed it very negatively on The Ain’t It Cool News twenty years ago and though mostly people believed me there were some talkbackers who also saw it in preview screenings who got kinda mad at me. It wasn’t as controversial as my THE TRANSFORMERS pan or anything but I was applying a similar (in retrospect overblown) destructive fury to it – the headline was “Fuck WEDDING CRASHERS.” It was being hailed as a new comedy benchmark, or a return to the raunchy R-rated comedy, but I swore it would fade instantly. I made a challenge to one guy to meet back in two years and see if he still considered it a “comedic gem.”
If we had followed through on that bet I’m sure I would’ve lost. Its popularity lasted at least five years, which I can clock by realizing in hindsight that this movie is the reason my wife’s younger cousins asked us to play “Shout” by The Isley Brothers at our wedding. But by then THE HANGOVER had come out and I think it quickly replaced WEDDING CRASHERS as the bro comedy of record (no judgment for that – I’d say it’s a funnier movie). (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bradley Cooper, Christopher Walken, David Dobkin, Dwight Yoakam, Isla Fisher, Jane Seymour, Keir O'Donnell, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Rebecca De Mornay, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 37 Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2025
June 24, 2005
If you’re like me you knew there was a Bewitched movie, but you didn’t know it used a weird meta premise. It turns out that yes, it’s a fantastical romantic comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a pretty blonde witch trying to live among the normies without cheating too much by using her magic, and Will Ferrell as the non-witch she falls in love with. But they don’t exactly play Samantha and Darren, the characters from the sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1972 but that I did in fact watch sometimes as a kid, on Nick at Nite or something. They play the people starring as Samantha and Darren in a 2005 revival of the show.
So I started the movie thinking that director Nora Ephron (writing with her sister Delia, who also wrote THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS) just thought it would be cute to have Nicole Kidman do that nose-wiggle thing Samantha does when she casts a spell, but pretty soon I was thinking no, they just liked the logo and the theme song, and needed an excuse to keep using them throughout. They’re also able to show a bunch of clips from the original show, show a gift basket full of its merchandise, animate the expressions on an officially licensed Samantha Barbie doll, and remake the animated credit sequence with Will Ferrell’s likeness. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: based on a TV show, Carole Shelley, Delia Ephron, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth, Michael Caine, Nicole Kidman, Nora Ephron, Shirley MacLaine, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Will Ferrell
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Romance | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025
O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to SHREDDER ORPHEUS and SIX STRING SAMURAI, so I support it.
An apocalypse has happened. Something called plasma (a rainbow colored oil-like substance) has poisoned the earth. But people still have farms and stuff. O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, FEAR STREET PARTs TWO and THREE) is a young woman who lives on one with her mother Calliope (Bree Elrod, RED ROCKET). She has a guitar made of junk and, like Pearl but not psychotic, she’s lonely enough to perform for a scarecrow.
Calliope discourages O’Dessa’s musical ambitions, because O’Dessa’s father Vergil (Pokey LaFarge, THE LONE RANGER) and five generations before him were what they call “ramblers.” Vergil took off one day to travel around playing music, never to return. Some deadbeat shit right there, but sounds amazing to O’Dessa, a regular pre-aunt-and-uncle-being-burned-alive Luke Skywalker. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bree Elrod, Geremy Jasper, Jason Binnick, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Mark Boone Junior, Murray Bartlett, Pokey LaFarge, post-apocalypse, Regina Hall, Sadie Sink
Posted in Reviews, Musical, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
Monday, April 7th, 2025
LOVE HURTS is a trifle, a truffle, a little treat meant to be devoured quickly and forgotten. But that’s much better than I’d heard (one critic called it “nearly unwatchable,” I remember), so I feel kinda guilty that I listened to the conventional wisdom and skipped it in theaters. Ke Huy Quan got his 87North-produced action vehicle, an even greater honor than his Academy Award if you ask me, and I waited for video. For that I apologize.
Quan (BREATHING FIRE) stars as Marvin Gable, a corny realtor who rides his bike to work, toting the heart-shaped cookies he baked for Valentine’s Day, and spreads joy like his name was Ke Huy Quan, so his co-workers would never guess that he was once a brutal and feared assassin. But some old associates and other dangerous people come crashing through his comfortable suburban life when a woman he was supposed to have killed resurfaces to leave them all taunting love notes. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: 87North, Andre Eriksen, Ariana DeBose, Cam Gigandet, Can Aydin, Daniel Wu, Drew Scott, Elisabet Ronaldsdottir, Jonathan Eusebio, Josh Stoddard, Ke Huy Quan, Lio Tipton, Luke Passmore, Marshawn Lynch, Matthew Murray, Mustafa Shakir, Phong Giang, Rhys Darby, Sean Astin
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Martial Arts, Romance | 7 Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2025
THE GORGE is a movie with an appealing, simple premise, strong execution, great tone, and a fun mix of elements you don’t usually see together but that feel perfectly natural. It’s a romance within a monster movie, or vice versa, but not in a a jokey way at all (though that worked for LOVE AND MONSTERS). It’s funny because its two main characters know how to make each other laugh, but its outlandish situation is taken seriously.
It’s also a movie star movie, as most good romances are, with its two leads reaching new levels of onscreen charisma, though for some reason Apple made this for the small screen only. I guess that’s none of my business. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anya Taylor-Joy, Atticus Ross, C. Robert Cargill, Miles Teller, Scott Derrickson, Sigourney Weaver, Sope Dirisu, Trent Reznor, William Houston, Zach Dean
Posted in Reviews, Action, Horror, Monster, Romance, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 12 Comments »
Tuesday, January 28th, 2025
I found out there was a 2015 movie called DANCIN’ – IT’S ON!, so obviously I had to see it. Primarily for the title, secondarily due to my affection for modern dance-off movies, thirdarily because it co-stars Gary Daniels (FIST OF THE NORTH STAR) and is co-written by David A. Prior (KILLER WORKOUT). I’m happy to say that it lives up to the goofiness you’d hope for from that combination of factors and is also more interesting than expected.
My favorites of the genre are STEP UP 2 THE STREETS and STEP UP 3, both directed by Jon M. Chu. Those have just the right mix of ludicrousness and actual style, cleverness and dancing. At times there could be debate about how much you’re laughing with it and how much you’re laughing at it, but it doesn’t really matter because you get caught up in the whole joyous spirit of the thing. DANCIN’ – IT’S ON! is definitely a cheaper, less cool and less competent version of that type of experience, with a cast made up of So You Think You Can Dance contestants, most of whom have not acted before or since, and give some very stiff line readings. But all of those things, combined with an element of sincerity I’ll get into later, make it a really fun time.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ava Fabian, dance movies, David A. Prior, David Winters, Gary Daniels, Whitney Carson
Posted in Reviews, Music, Romance | 13 Comments »
Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
August 12, 1994
CORRINA, CORRINA is a nice comedy-drama that deals with grief, love and some heavy race and class issues in a very light, warm-hearted sort of way. Is that bad? We can talk about it later.
Manny Singer (Ray Liotta between NO ESCAPE and OPERATION DUMBO DROP) is a recently widowed jingle writer in suburban Los Angeles, 1959. His 9-year-old daughter Molly (Tina Majorino, also in the seal movie ANDRE this summer – sorry, I had to skip a few things) is so not-over-it she refuses to speak, but he’s gonna be screwed if he doesn’t return to work, so he looks for a housekeeper/nanny to stay home with her. After some misfires he ends up with Corrina Washington (Whoopi Goldberg, also in THE LION KING and [briefly] THE LITTLE RASCALS this summer), who seems cynical at first but of course forms an adorable bond with the kid.
In 1994 I wasn’t interested in things this cutesy, and never considered watching it. Now I’m a middle-aged cornball, so I found it moving to see Whoopi turn that little girl’s cartoonish pout into a giggle. Majorino has a pitch perfect deadpan for the non-speaking portions and then a timid little mouse voice when she does talk (spoiler). She breaks your heart when she lays in the grass with her dead mom’s dress laid out next to her, one hand in its pocket, or when Manny lies to a deliveryman that Mrs. Singer is in the bath tub and she lights up and runs to the bathroom to see her. Damn, Manny. What a fuck up. So then you’re primed for the opposite emotion when she notices her dad slipping and referring to Corrina as “your mother” and she doesn’t point it out but breaks into a huge, toothy grin. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brent Spiner, Bruce Surtrees, Courtland Mead, Don Ameche, Erica Yohn, Jessie Nelson, Joan Cusack, Larry Miller, Lin Shaye, Patrika Darbo, Ray Liotta, Steven Williams, Tina Majorino, Wendy Crewson, Whoopi Goldberg
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama, Romance | 2 Comments »
