my mom is a self-described “non-practicing catholic” who records all the christmas hallmark movies every year so she can spend the rest of the year watching them to exult the non-jesus holy spirit and traditional american values like white people getting married. and thats the completely psycho behavior thats earned hallmark an eternal place on my “shit list”
1 Like
the christmas ones are definitely the most brutal but i guess it’s also the one time of the year when these movies are allowed to acknowledge the supernatural so it’s a tricky risk/reward combo. my desire to see these things go mask off about their weird internal theology is perfectly balanced against my desire not to watch anything with adorable kids.
6 Likes
the hallmark network should allow paul schrader to make the ultimate calvinist romcom masterpiece using their vast resources
2 Likes
i mean “forever mine” actually showed up recently in the romance category of one of those shady youtube movie accounts that usually just post movies with titles like Baby Police 2: Baby Crime Unit so hopefully we’re not too far from all these things collapsing into one singularity that finally gives this world the brooding paul schrader movie about baby police that it deserves.
1 Like
let’s play a game it’s called, Moonstruck or Bloodborne
8 Likes
this lifetime tv movie available on youtube seems completely perfect for this thread. it appears to be the second installment in a franchise dedicated to forcing fictional trust fund kids into Learning A Lesson. i love that weirdly ominous description! raquel welch and brian dennehy are inexplicably in this!! very exciting stuff here!!!
1 Like
See I would argue that lifetime movies are a slightly different thing than romcoms from the ones I have seen. Lifetime movies are more like…pulp thrillers for bored housewives.
They are spiritually related, but distinct genres.
4 Likes
Lifetime movies are (sometimes) secular chick tracts
4 Likes
The Clapper (2017) - In a choice between watching Death Race 2000 and this we picked the latter on the basis that it would be more lowkey. This example goes to show how assumptions can lead you wildly astray. I took psychic damage watching this.
The premise for this one is that the main guy works as a “clapper”, which means he gets paid to show up in the audience for infomercials and occasionally ask questions. If you think that sounds like the set-up for about 2 minutes of mildly humorous fake infomercial montage you would be correct! Unfortunately for the guy, a late-night tv show host notices him and does a segment about this mysterious reoccuring audience member, who he names “The Clapper”. And I guess Clappermania apparently sweeps the country, because the TV host not only commits to the bit hard enough to make “the hunt for the Clapper” a regular reoccuring segment, he also springs for enormous 20-foot billboards outside on the street, flyers everywhere, etc. So it’s one of those cases of ostensible culture critique that really just feels like some nightmarish alien anxiety dream. The Clapper also gets his own internet meme video, or someone’s vague imagining of what internet memes are, which in this case is just a regular recording of him but with explosion animations coming out of his head and airhorns in the background.
A strange thing about this one is that it’s written in a very disconnected, talking-past-each-other style - where none of the characters really listen to each other and at best react to words at random from the last sentence - but taken to such a degree it kind of feels like all the characters are either high or dealing with some level of concussion. I remember at least one scene where the conversation went like:
-What are you watching? That the internet?
-I’m watching an internet video
-You’re watching a video on the internet?
-This is the internet
-Is that a video? Let me see that.
-You can watch videos on the internet!
Nearly everyone in the movie talks like this! It may seem like I’m exaggerating but they actually include a similar exchange in the trailer. It’s like every character can only communicate via laggy Skype voice meeting call. At times the effect becomes interesting - there’s a part where the main character and the love interest are trying to talk through a broken intercom, and they’re constantly talking over and mishearing one another while squalls of distorted noise play over them from the speaker, and this is drawn out for such an extended period of time that it kind of elevates from mild gag to some kind of truly perverse avantgarde art gesture. But then they leave the intercom booth and start hanging out in real life and they still talk like that! So I dunno. I feel like you could imagine this kind of dialogue in the context of, like, maybe kind of punchy older dudes, but when most of the cast are youngish sitcom actors and the characters are presented like shlubby but snarky indie rock soundtrack types it gets very weird. The talkshow subplot kind of feels like it’s drawn from the American Splendour movie but like, imagine if all the characters in that were played by people from The Office.
Anyway the main love plot is that he’s kind of creeping on this girl who works at the gas station. At first it seems like they already know each other based on how familiar he’s acting but it turns out - no, he’s just a customer who visits every day so he can talk to her, he brings his own folding chair so he can stay longer during her shift, when he sees her on the street he runs after her yelling her name before commenting it’s the first time he’s seen her outside of her box. I guess this would be normal romcom behaviour if her character didn’t constantly have an expression of vague fear in these scenes, but I guess she turns out to be into it…? Anyway she vanishes after being harassed by Clappermaniacs at work, and he decides to go on the nemesis talk show to make a plea to find out where she is (doesn’t know her surname, etc). And this turns into his own regular hosted talk-show segment, where he makes flyers with her face and interviews people about the possible whereabouts of “Jill”, from “the gas station”, and I guess this also becomes a big hit, and he gets put on the cover of Variety. And then she calls in to the show and calls him a stalker, and he tries to get her number from the network, and it plays it like they’re being unreasonable by not giving it to him, after she called him a stalker on air and told him to leave her alone. But then he gives a Moving Speech on air and she sees it and falls in love with him again. And she shows up again one day and they have a conversation like
-I love you!
-Ha ha ha! Wow!
-Ha ha ha!
-Ha ha ha! I love you too!
-I love you!
-I love you! Ha ha ha!
-Let’s get married!
-Um! OK!
-Ha ha ha!
Then there’s a photo of the wedding and the film ends. Please clap.
IMO they should have made the entire film about the bootleg spiderman impersonator who appears briefly at the start and who impressively appears to be dressed up specifically as Ben Reilly from the Clone Saga.
6 Likes
How much domestic violence and sexual creepery in America is the direct result of the neverending flood of movies that have enshrined the principle that stalking = true romance
5 Likes
a funny thing to me is that it’s the most formulaic romcoms that seem most aware of the deep potential for skeeviness in these things, at least in the sense that so much of the formula is just finding ways to ward against that skeeviness. the protagonist’s friends meet the male love interest beforehand and give him their character endorsement; he has friends that vouch for the fact that he’s a good guy (or he has a dead wife, which fits the same purpose); he gets on well with the family dog; he is Settled, he has Values, and if he’s a “bad boy” who’s still a bit flaky then the main character will get to put him in place with a firm speech. there’s also usually some attempt at equality of status: even if he’s her boss, either it’s implied she can leave whenever she wants with no negative repercussions or else he’s not her real boss because she’s an undercover reporter or something.
none of these are actual guarantees that he won’t act like a creep, especially not in real life, but in the formula they’re kind of used like letters of credit to balance out any potentially dubious implications of the grander romantic gestures that happen later in the film (showing up suddenly outside her house or at the office, etc…). 1 elaborate but kind of creepy act of courtship has to be paid for in advance by 3 or 4 different character references, demonstrations of trustworthiness, or acts of penance. it’s a fundamentally dopey equation but at the same time, i’m pretty sure it’s not having that pedantic counterbalance that makes the more ambitious kind of romcoms generally tend towards being so creepy. i’m pretty sure any love interest in a hallmark movie who went on tv trying to hunt down a girl without even knowing her surname would have to, like, have spent the last 20 years working at an orphanage to make up for it in advance or something.
6 Likes
X Charity Y Stalk
i think it ties in very neatly with the idea of being friend-zoned, i.e. “i have done enough good deeds to now have a romantic relationship with you”
3 Likes
Plus One (2019) - I’m not sure how exactly it happens, but it feels like all the romcoms on Netflix are contaminated by just a little startup-culture DNA. Set It Up had those two awful aspirational young people, The Perfect Date had the main character help develop an app that was like Uber for himbos, even Falling Inn Love had the plan to modernise the hostel by removing all the tvs and putting an ipad into every room. There are no apps or ipads in this one but the male lead is apparently “VP at a startup” while the female lead complains about how she should have fired the lady from accounting who slept with her ex, which I guess means that she’s girlboss. Making fun of the class implications of these movies is sorta low hanging fruit but it was funny to me that even the relateable twentysomething viewpoint characters here apparently still have to belong to the management caste and have their own AirBNB looking houses. In my head I pictured this as taking place in the Sorry To Bother You universe, but like, from the other direction.
Anyway the plot of this one is that two friends have to go to a bunch of weddings so they team up to go to them all together. The movie is segmented by wedding like in Four Weddings And A Funeral, but without the funeral, although the main couple do have sex in a graveyard at one point, perhaps to compensate. For the most part there’s not a lot going on - all the dialogue is that particular kind of weirdly flat and undifferentiated banter that always sounds to me like a scriptwriter’s impersonation of comedy riffing, the kind of thing where nobody’s being particularly funny but at least they’re throwing the ball back and forth pretty fast and keeping things moving. There are one or two moments where the writing gets weirder; at one point our heroine is accused by two moms at a pool of being “one of those asian girls who only dates white guys”, which they describe as a case of “opposites attracting”. When she wonders “wait, are asians and white people opposites?” the two moms exchange a knowing look. What does it all mean?
As always in these things the best characters are the minor ones, including a bunch of guys doing super sentai poses in the wedding photographs and a group of squat bald guys collectively referred to as “the Uncles” who wander around talking over each other indecipherably and giggling while smoking weed. The main characters are kind of gruesome and I think my wife summed it up best when describing this as “the extended universe version of the dipping mustards tweet”. Probably the queasiest line from any of these movies in a while came when the lady put on her childhood braces before having sex and the guy describes it as “the full seventh-grade experience”. Well, thank you for your service I suppose.
High part of this one was that there was a scene soundtracked by a weepy indie song with a lyric that sounded suspiciously like “you know we kimcartoon”.
5 Likes
have you seen Always Be My Maybe? It very much indulges in tons of romcom stereotypes, but I actually think it’s kind of good. It somehow does it with a lot of self awareness but not in like an ironic way. The rom com fan’s rom com, for the new generation of 90s kids who are all grown up now.
But anyway the startup culture DNA is sort of part of the plot, in that one of the characters is like an up and coming celebrity chef (not a startup, but startup adjacent imo) and the other is a stoner burnout who works for his dad’s air conditioner repair company. But the resolution of their conflict is like him becoming a doting, supportive stay at home spouse / trophy husband and her pursuing her dreams of becoming an influencer. I don’t know if that’s bad or not? It feels sweet in a weird way
1 Like
Better than most I guess, but I still didn’t really like it. Even the extended Keanu meditation felt forced. Pretty rough when Keanu can’t dig your movie out of the hole.
Requesting thecatamites review of The Lovebirds, a thing my wife and I watched because we wanted to see something cute and it ended up being plotted like a romcom version of No Country For Old Men, with significant violence being uncomfortably laughed off. Romcoms I find more than most movies really struggle with tone, they are never quite clear how zany and grim and cute to be at any given time. I mostly watch genre movies and they never seem to struggle so much with this.
ohh i’ll try to add both these to my list - i’ve been kind of curious about some of the action themed romcoms and haven’t gotten around to anything, last time i tried i found out only seconds before the movie started that it was written by max landis so i was able to dodge that bullet.
weird to think that no matter what happens to influencer culture it’ll still be treated like a viable career in these movies for the next 15 years, in much the same way as romcom heroines have somehow been making middle class incomes from their blogs as late as like 2017.
anyway posting because i saw the below, hoping against hope it will mean a wildly unexpected police abolishment subplot in a december 2020 movie called something like A Christmas Uncle
4 Likes
Always Be My Maybe (2019) - Watched this after it was recommended ITT and can confirm it actually does feel a little looser and more natural than these things tend to. I wonder why? Maybe the bay area setting, maybe because both characters both consciously pursue each other from fairly early in the movie rather than relying exclusively on an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of Love. That said I also did enjoy the gradual appearance of more typically crazed romcom elements as things went on, like watching everything slowly be contaminated by an alien parasite.
The plot of this one is two friends grow up together, they have awkward teenage grief sex after his exposition-loving mom’s funeral (the widowed dad will be taking up exposition duties for the rest of the film, in her memory), it pushes them apart, then they meet up a decade later when she is a celebrity chef and he is a blue collar air conditioner repairman. He also has a band, which I would describe musically as sounding like conscious hip hop except without the consciousness. I think a sample lyric is “My name is Marcus, now it’s time to hark us”. There’s some tension between the two, she thinks his band could be big if he had more ambition, he dislikes the fancy celebrity chef shit. The movie mostly abstains from seconding either view entirely although it was a little weird hearing the main guy constantly referred to as a life failure, when having a band, a job, and a weed connection means you’ve aleady “made it” by the standards of most people that I know.
I would like to thank u_u for not mentioning the surprise twist guest appearance in the movie, which is that the main romantic rival of the film turns out to be… Keanu Reeves playing himself!! I do feel like this kind of stunt casting always tends to result in pretty much the same character, like the exaggeratedly-awesome-but-also-petty-and-ridiculous-hollywood-guy self parody, there aren’t that many new developments on the archetype here. I do like the scene where he proves his knowledge of Chinese affairs unasked by naming a bunch of CCP dignitaries at random. In deference to romcom law, he of course ends up paired off with the female romantic rival, which in this case is a stoner beat poet named Jenny whose main form of activism is stealing plates from “the racist butter lady”. I wish them both the best in this crazy world.
Where the movie starts to get weird is when the two leads actually hook up 2/3rds through the movie, since that’s when plot machinery mandates they have to split up again before coming together for real at the end. The male lead becomes extremely passive aggressive for no real reason, but then has an ephiphany about the need to improve his lot in life, etc. Part of this involves finally “getting serious” about his band and their attendent merch store, and his progress is shown in part by the increasing amount of t-shirts he manages to sell online. When he finally works up the confidence to go to the main lady’s fancy restaurant in New York, he discovers - - she was the one secretly buying all the merch the whole time!! And just has an entire room filled with boxes of the same band t-shirt (as well as the branded tennis balls introduced earlier in the movie). I guess that’s true love?!? No word yet on whether the movie was sponsored by Redbubble.
Lastly, and speaking of which, I did enjoy the stylish eyeball shirt the heroine wore in this one scene.
7 Likes
Flip That Romance (2019) - two rival house flippers who used to date must compete with each other to renovate adjoining sides of a duplex house, in order to win a feature spread in the famous Innovative Designs Magazine. But will they also renovate their love in the process…?
I guess this is something of a crossover movie, connecting the TV romcom format with the increasingly ubiquitous and cursed realm of property-flipping related media, tv shows, videogames, etc. It’s pretty earnest about trying to do justice to the rhythms and plot beats of that format - deadline changes, unexpected screw-ups, haggling over construction materials, etc - and I actually did kind of enjoy the distracted air this gives to the romance plot itself, where characters can only really think about love stuff in the space between hammering 1000 nails into a plank or whatever. Attempts to synthesize the two formats beyond that end up being a bit more hit and miss - for example the part where the two characters have to stay at the property overnight to hit a tight deadline, and then the power generator goes out, and in the next scene they’re hanging out surrounded by 200 lit candles like the love scene from Desperado. Not sure about that one from either budgetary or workplace safety perspectives.
It’s kind of grim that the main characters flirt with each other in part by setting arbitrarily tight self-imposed deadlines for themselves when most of the actual work appears to be done by an army of nameless subordinates. At one point the heroine is complaining about how she has neither time nor money to meet the big deadline, so her mom yells out in the family cafe - who wants to help out renovating this house for the big cover spread in Innovative Designs Magazine! - and immediately like three quarters of the customers in the store put their hands up excitedly! Not sure if this is meant to represent smalltown togetherness or the brutal state of the American economy if even people building houses turn out to be doing it for the exposure. I will say that the construction theming leads to possibly the closest a hallmark movie has ever come to innuendo when the male character wanders into her side of the house saying that he “thought I heard pounding over here.”
Also, one of the ways the male lead is characterised as secretly sensitive is that he builds his own artistic furniture designs and then refuses to sell or tell anyone about them unless cajoled. And then everytime someone sees one, they talk about how beautiful they are, they give him business cards so that he’ll sell them his designs, etc. And the furniture looks like shit!!! Like it’s sheets of clear perspex just kind of slotted into unvarnished wood to make tables and chairs, etc. The big showcase element is a swinging crib which is suspended on chains from a high ceiling, perfect for when you want to imprison a baby in a warehouse.
Anyway eventually they kiss and THEN there’s the big reveal where we finally get the guided tour of both elaborately renovated houses, which I guess from context is the real emotional climax of the film. Meaning that instead of a romcom that incorporated house flipping elements it ended up being a house flipping movie that consumed a vestigial romance plot…? Maybe that’s what the title means.
10 Likes
look
that’s not for babies
2 Likes