Surprised to see me review this movie? So am I. But since I had to sit through it for two hours, I though I’d get it out of my system by writing about it. And hey, there’s actually a few interesting things about it.
First off, the reason I saw was that my sister Ivonne had a birthday recently so we celebrated by going to the movies. However I was under the impression we were going to see the latest Narnia… instead, Ivonne’s daughter Nelimar insisted on seeing this movie because she’s a big Ann Hathaway fan. Ehh, whatever, it was my sister’s choice.
I quickly found out why she insisted, though: this movie isn’t a romantic comedy. IT’S FUCKING PORN!!! :eek: No, that’s not an exaggeration: Miss Hathaway (and nearly every other main character) not only has near-full-frontal nudity (everything except genitals shown) plus several sex scenes, and I’m not talking disrobe-fade out-wake up together style things, I mean ‘BANG HER AGAINST THE WALL’ kinda things!!! O_O Wow! Nobody told me that was going to happen in this movie! (Ivo must have known, and decided to keep an eye on Nel and her date.)
Hathaway’s other movies are tame next to this (which may be the idea, to break her girl-next-door image.) Now, I don’t mind this stuff, hell I watch my fair amount of porn online; it’s just that most of it felt so gratuitous. I know that this is a comedy about a Viagra salesman, and with stars like her and Jake Gylenhall I understand exploiting their sex appeal to the max. But having every character cynically talk about sex for nearly 70% of the movie gets old very quick.
Oh, and want to know the funniest (unintentional) part? The movie had subtitles in Spanish (most movies aired here do)… that were censored. For example, the characters threw the F-word around all the time but the captions just had them say “have sex.” While this is typical when dubbing something for TV (we are not as Liberal as you people are around here) this is a movie with UNEDITED SEX SCENES going on. The inference is that TALKING dirty is bad but SHOWING RAW SEX is not. HAH!:hahaha;
The movie has a big problem, though: it tries to be too many things at once. It tries to be a full-blown sex comedy; but it also tries to be romantic (the main characters just want to have sex, not a relationship, but fall in love anyway, and not very convincingly) and worst of all it tries to be tragic as well: Hathaway’s character has Parkinson’s Disease. That isn’t fatal, but it slowly destroys your body and mind (and yes, it’s incredibly rare but people of her age DO get it sometimes.) There’s no cure for the disease, meaning that even though they stay together in the end, at some point in the future she’ll decay away and he’ll be forced to watch helplessly. At this point, the movie, which had us going with Viagra jokes and Slam-Bang (nonviolent) “action” so far, gets all preachy on us. It doesn’t work, not for me anyway.
Love and Other Drugs isn’t a bad movie- you can see it for the sex or for the (admittedly ) sad twists, but it isn’t a major movie in any sense. I never would have paid to see it in a theater had it been up to me. Wait for the DVD. Or the (heavily edited) broadcast version. :hahaha;
