From today’s LA Times review of "Must Love Dogs:"
Ah, movie divorce. The dinner over the sink loneliness. The ice cream out of a carton sadness. The bad date montages. About three-quarters of the way through "Must Love Dogs," Sarah (Diane Lane) suffers her first big romantic setback, at which point my viewing companion keeled forward and croaked, "Oh my God. Of course she’s wearing bunny slippers."
"Must Love Dogs" must not love movies very much because it takes Lane, John Cusack, Dermot Mulroney, Elizabeth Perkins, Stockard Channing and Christopher Plummer and forces them to reenact the entire unabridged Encyclopedia of Treasured Romantic Comedy Clichés and Chestnuts, Revised Second Edition.
And the studios wonder why fewer people are going to movies these days…
Haven’t seen this one, but I will attest that there seems to be great difficulty in making genuine love stories in Holllywood and why is that?
There are so many great love stories out there, some told, some waiting to be told, I don’t see why the blockage.
Had I only seen that review before I saw it tonight.
It was cringe worthy — there were so many sequences where the actors seemed out of place, where the “romantic moments” have been played out decades prior, and where characters “fall in love” without ever showing you why.
Blech.
I used to go to the movies all the time. It’s great escapism. I’d walk into the theater and into another’s life for 90 minutes or so, then return to the real world with a fresh perspective. I’d always go in the afternoon when the theater was empty and the price was $4. I haven’t been since the $4 matinees because the price went up as the apparent quality (determined from the ads) of the movies went down. There hasn’t been a single movie out there lately which has appealed to me, especially at the current ticket prices.
I loved “Must Love Dogs” … it was one of the few romantic comedies that I’ve actually laughed with all the way through. It’s one of the few that I felt had character and situation humor and didn’t rely on bathroom humor to get you through. I found it very relatable. Yes, there were cliches in it and yes it would be better if writers came up with new things. But we seem to live in an age where so many writers are applauded and rehired for writing ‘homages’ (think rip-off of someone else’s original thinking) that I’m happy when I can sit through a movie and actually laugh. Not be bored like with Batman Begins or thinking of the plotholes like War of the World. Here’s one of the few movies that I actually laughed and related to and didn’t spend the two hours thinking about the writing, structure, plotholes, which movie or book was being retreaded or other things that have occupied my mind through too many movies this year.
Anyway, just my opinion. Probably the only thing I groaned at in this movie was the eating by the sink scene. I do think that was pretty heavy-handed and I thought at the time, who does that? All the divorced people I know eat in front of the television (the only time I watch TV and thank god for the invention of VCRs and DVDs) or read books/magazines. Not only does it let you get your reading/watching done so you can have a life outside of being a couch potato, but it’s hard to be lonely when you’re distracted.
This is a movie I’ll be waiting to see until the DVD comes out. I’m hoping its better than the reviews have been painting it. You would think with such a fantastic cast that it would be a great movie.