ALEX & EMMA review

Gad dang it, this movie is so frickin’ aggravating that it makes me want to locate Rob Reiner and screenwriter Jeremy Leven and just barrage them with, “Why’d ya have to go and fuck that up?!?,” questions till I’m blue in the face.

See, I love romantic comedies. I’m an old school romantic, love the idea of flirting, falling in love, the special moments, the trite contrivances of the genre, the oh so easy relationship that just makes it look so painfully easy that you leave the theater thinking that it may very well be possible that you’re 36 hours from being swept off your feet and married to your soul mate that you’ll just happen to meet because you forgot your cel phone at a restaurant and you go back for it… reaching for it at same time a beautiful hand reaches for it, you look up… 36 hours later, you’re married and on the path to happily ever after.

Sigh. Hollywood.

Rob Reiner has directed 4 great romantic comedies.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE. WHEN HARRY MET SALLY… MISERY and THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT.

Ok, several of you would probably disagree about MISERY, but Annie Wilkes loved Paul Sheldon so much that she was willing to do anything for him to not make the career mistake of his life. That Paul Sheldon wasn’t in love, was the basis for this pitch black romantic comedy.

The others, well you all know are superior Romantic Comedies, so I walked into ALEX & EMMA with a great deal of anticipation. I knew the history on the project, which began life as a Jeremy Leven adaptation of the famous Dostoevsky novel, THE GAMBLER, but through his research into the back story of The Gambler and Dostoevsky, he found the material for a perfect romantic comedy.

You see, prior to Fyodor authoring THE GAMBLER, a fairly evil publisher advanced him the money to write the book with a deadline of one year. Dostoevsky gambled away every cent and had lost his soul to the roulette table. With all his future writing possibly ending up in this evil publisher’s hands, he hired a stenographer with a month to go and dictated to her THE GAMBLER, and wound up marrying her.

It is great material to work from and for the VAST majority of the film, Rob Reiner, Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson just do an absolute magnificent job convincingly showing these two characters growing endearment and love blossoming, whilst being in the high pressure throngs of a seemingly impossible task of creating an entire novel in 30 days via dictation.

There’s one sex scene that reminded me in the very best way of the all out assault and blasting of the male machismo syndrome audacity of the sex in BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRAVIXEN with Luke Wilson mugging like a virile willing klutzy garbage man and Sophie Marceau as the sexually aggressive female unleashing a sixty mile-an-hour zinger upon the poor guy. As I said… Russ Meyer inspired. Made me giggle for quite some time, even if it was just a PG-13 version of that X-Rated Russ Meyer/Ebert Glory!

The dictation back and forth between Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson, and the imagining of the story he’s dictating and the way he visualizes her, and how she changes over the course of telling the story… Well, it’s quite beautiful and the dialogue is smart and fun. Luke Wilson is great as is Kate Hudson. Didn’t particularly care much for Sophie’s character, but then we were not being manipulated to care for her… she is, more or less, a fuck fantasy with zero development or signs of endearment.

Of course we root for Luke and Kate to hook up. You couldn’t fight it that feeling off with a cold shower and a dry ice pack. When they finally have built this great relationship, and we’re right at the end of the film… They just decide to without any reason at all, pull the old COMPLICATION FROM LEFT FIELD card into play. The result is this… After this scene I don’t care much for Luke Wilson’s character or Kate Hudson’s character. Suddenly after an hour and 45 minutes of perfectly building their relationship and my relationship to those characters as an audience member, they decide to pull a SCREAM 2 ending and just RANDOMLY pull something out of Ass number 5. The second this happens, I’m just pissed. The remaining dialogue was ok, but frankly, it felt like dialogue being constructed to deal with a situation that should not have come into play with the film.

Kate Hudson’s character likes to read the last page of novels before she decides to read them, because if she likes the ending, she knows she’ll want to invest the time to get there a second time. Well, having seen the film once, and now knowing the ending, I can say honestly… I don’t need to pick this up again, and I’m mad about it. Frustrated by it. Absolutely annoyed that I don’t love the movie, cuz they had me for an hour and 45 minutes and I loved what they were doing, all of it, then suddenly… nope… No more, I’m gone, you lost me… Don’t like this. This sucks. Nope, don’t buy it. Don’t accept it.

For the vast majority of this light romantic comedy the film works great, and the audience applauded afterwards. Performers like David Paymer, Rip Taylor and Cloris Leachman have great little parts. The real highlights though are Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson. I’m glad I saw it, but gad dummit, I hate that last few pages.