Listen Out For Love (2022) - it’s been a while since the last one of these but as someone who’s been indoors for like a full week now due to covid i figure there may well never be a better time, psychically, for me to watch another one.
what has the Hallmark machine been cranking out lately? this one is topical, maybe alarmingly so - a love story between a brash podcast host (he climbs rocks and has a show called “Bringin’ It!”) and a diligent network producer specialising in mindfulness content, who walks around declaring things like “MicroMindy is on FIRE this morning” and whose previous prospect was a lady whose whole thing is being able to detect “love vibes”. these opposites are brought forcibly together by means of the network boss, who intones things like “I warned you your content was lacking” in a threatening-the-player-in-an-FMV-game voice. an additional complication is that the producer lady’s ex is the host of something called the “Epic Life Podcast” (tagline: “YOU CAN LIVE AN EPIC LIFE”) although this actually doesn’t come up very much. we never get to find out what it means to live an epic life, although based on the guy itself it possibly involves looking like a licensed ps2 game version of chris pratt.
maybe this world i’m describing sounds new and strange to you!! this is not the hallmark that we know. yes, we’re still in the region of somewhere reassuringly vancouverish but in many other respects this is an ominous and alien terrain, and here to drive the point home is the soundtrack. i don’t know how to put this, but: somebody told the hallmark music library procurers about synthwave. someone at hallmark was possibly exposed to the Drive soundtrack at some point in time. this is not a drill. it starts out pulsing but then gets kind of vague and noodly, which leads to every scene in the movie being soundtracked as if the characters are either browsing the wii store, listening to the underrated ost of an obscure SNES tennis game, or finding out about the death of Laura Palmer. there’s even a vocal song although i’m not synthpop familiar enough to know whether it’s a “santa bring a boyfriend to me” style adaptation of a similar, though legally distinct, more well-known piece. it does play again during the credits.
anyway maybe calling this a love story is pushing it, mostly the movie weirdly revolves around a totally different kind of aspirational lifecoach celeb, an older lady with kind of a Mary Oliver vibe who is randomly friends with the jock podcaster. this famous though single lady whiles away her days trying to scrape up money for the single most made-up-in-30-seconds idea for a charity i’ve ever heard of:
helping an only child to buy a dog. not a deprived child per se, and not even “only-children” as a category, since in the whole movie we only see the one kid and it’s the same little girl as in the poster. but she does get a dog at the end, and all it takes is a movie’s worth of organizing an expensive formalwear charity gala for a task which could trivially be accomplished by the organizer spending just a little of her own money. and people say the liberal ideal is dead!
anyway not-mary-oliver is hurting for charity ducats and love both, and the producer’s solution: that they start a new weekly podcast dedicated to trying to help this lady find love. as it turns out, she stumbles on THE ONE pretty quickly, but the other two push her to keep dating so as to keep the metrics up. eventually they learn the error of their ways and even find time to make out 0.5 seconds before the credits, but i wanted to mention this subplot because i found it very charming that the guy the movie holds up as the single most desirable, love-on-first-sight possibility, who all the other characters are trying to entice into a relationship, is just some random guy named Barry who looks like this:
i’m not making fun of him, for one thing i’m pretty sure he plays for NoMeansNo, but i did enjoy that The Abrupt Reappearance Of Barry is essentially treated as the main romantic climax of the movie, next to which the pairing off of the actual protagonists is treated as the most perfunctory of subplots.
anyway, what else: at one point the podcast guy gifts the producer lady a tiny string instrument, and says it represents her power to conduct his career. never before has the world’s smallest violin been put to so earnest a usage. later when they’ve had a fight, she pulls it out and stares at it mournfully:
this is after MicroMindy has already informed her that she’s giving off Love Vibes (“yeah! love vibes on fire!” “you are totally buzzing!” “vibes don’t lie!”). at the big only-child-themed charity gala, the characters sum up what they’ve learned:
“i think its important to recognize how special and wonderful love is.”
“yes… i’ve learned that.”
“so have i.”
when the gala is finished, more happy news: “the livestream numbers came in and they are by far, the most ever.” “we have exceeded ALL of our goals. isnt that fantastic?” who the fuck wrote this film?? as it turns out…
oh shit, this guy wrote Dying For The Crown!! well, at least i’m able to confirm that this one’s not his best work. but looking at his imdb bio at least gives some other rewarding details:
the world is a magical place, sometimes, perhaps even moreso than any hallmark movie.