Saturday, January 16, 2010

Love Happens (2009) (Monday, January 11, 2010) (215)

Long cross-country plane trips are great for one thing: seeing terrible brainless movies that you've missed during the year. On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I was able to see Love Happens, a totally lifeless and recycled rom com with the lifeless-est actor in the world, Jennifer Aniston.

In it, Aaron Eckhart plays a guy whose wife died in a car accented and has turned the tragedy into a pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-off self-help empire. It's not totally clear if he's a bad guy or a good guy who likes living dangerously or if he's just a good guy that seems like he might be bad but is actually just good. Whatever. He meets Aniston, a florist who is unexplainedly unlucky in love. The two meet and get off to a rough start and then fall in love. Then some more stuff happens with his self-help club. Then they go to a concert for a band I've never heard of.

I realized most of the way through the film that basically the filmmakers had given up trying to care about making a decent movie and were just putting out scenes with actors speaking words. It is totally boring and unoriginal. I'm not sure if Aniston and Eckhart have any chemistry together, I could barely pay attention to them. For some reason Martin Sheen and Frances Conroy are also in the film - I guess they need to pay their mortgages too.

There is nothing good in this film. It's not hateful, but it's very not good. Everything from the dialogue, to the acting to the direction is boring and hackneyed and bad. It shocks me that a Hollywood studio would put money into a turd like this. I guess it's cheap and easy to recoup the production investment. Whatever - that's a terrible reason to make a movie.

Leap Year, you're on my list for my next long plane-trip in mid-June!

Stars: 1 of 4

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