Review: Love and Other Disasters

How can one pass up a movie with a title so epic as 'Love and Other Disasters?' Doesn't that sound like potentially the best romantic comedy of all time? Unfortunately, the movie opens very strong but cannot risk falling into traditional cliches and frustrations of the genre. A tip to the writer, Alek Keshishian: Even if you acknowledge something as a formula or a gimmick in your film, it's still a formula or a gimmick.

But let us begin with the good.

Brittany Murphy, always charming, can never seem to quite fit into a great role. We either get the 'Clueless,' 'Sin City,' or '8 Mile' Brittany, or we get the 'Just Married,' 'Uptown Girls,' 'Little Black Book' Brittany. Here, in 'Love and Other Disasters,' she falls somewhere in-between.

The movie is about Love, as well as a few Other Disasters. One of those disasters is that Brittany Murphy's character Jacks (short for Jackson) is stuck on an ex-boyfriend who she sleeps with in order to "fill a void. Literally." Another Disaster is the abundance of gay stereotypes portrayed in the film. Her gay best friend Peter (Matthew Rhys, of TV's 'Brothers & Sisters') enjoys living in fantasy relationships because every time reality hits, it hits too hard and too real. Funny, charming, and entertaining these all are. Yet somewhere around the beginning of Act II the film loses its touch.

Jacks' main interest in the film is Paolo (Santiago Cabrera), who Jacks assumes is gay. The disaster here is that he is not, and like so many other films, cannot simply correct her because of countless odd coincidences. The movie amounts to frustration that is only passed by the film 'Serendipity.' (Which I enjoys, until I wanted to rip my hair out 30 minutes in.) Why can't Paolo simply say "I'm straight" thirty minutes into the film and be done with it?

All of those are disasters of the characters, which, while not the best writing in the world, are a part of the film. The disaster of the film itself is the half-ass attempt to play on the formula 'Adaptation.' did so much better so many years earlier: With one of the main characters writing a film script about the film we are watching. Yes, Peter is trying to become a famous writer, and eventually he turns the film we watched into a script. Naturally he wants it to be more like 'real life' (which, by this point, we're hardly in those waters anymore), and naturally the studio wants to spice it up with a happy ending, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Orlando Bloom. This film would have been better without the tricks and Courier New font roaming free on my screen.

Despite its structural flaws, the film has some redeeming qualities, mainly in some witty exchanges of dialogue and how to furnish your expensive London apartment (how do they afford that place?). Worth a watch if it is on the tube, but barely worth the rental.

Rating: 3.5/7