Love and Other Disasters is a spiraling, screaming pile of overly saccharine poop. I don’t think you will find a truer sentence on this blog.
Starring the late Brittany Murphy, it tells the story of a fashion designer (Murphy) and her turbulent love life in London. Living with her gay best friend, Murphy is happy to set her friends up and enjoy the life of a bachlorette, despite having sterile, by the book sex with her vile ex. Then she meets Paulo. Thinking he’s gay, she promptly tries to set him up with her neurotic housemate, not realising that he really likes…. You know what, I’m going to stop there. The more I type about the thin tissue that’s called a plot, the more I want to take an eyeball out with a spoon.
I struggle to find anything positive to say about this film. Okay, it has a gimmick whereby the characters constantly remind us and each other that this is ‘real life’ and not a ‘movie’. In fact, Murphy seems to have it as part of her contract that she recites this mantra every other sentence. They reference the rules of a romantic comedy and all the clichés that come with one. That’s right. We’re in Scream for the Bridget Jones generation. However, if it were really was clever as it wants to be, then why allow everyone’s storylines to be resolved in the formulaic fashion that they mock.
The gay stereotyping that runs through this is equally trite. ‘Ooh, gay men. They love talking about girly things with girls. Thye like soooo get girls’. Ugh. I didn’t realise people still used the term ‘gaydar’, let a lone with a straight face.
Everyone is so English and so white and so middle class, part of me wondered if this ws a giant piss take in the vein of Epic Movie et al. Richard Curtis has liteally nothing to fear from this abortion of a movie.
But let’s look at the positives. The film had an ending.
Early Bird Film Society 