For those who don’t know, I don’t really like rom-coms, and after the last couple days, I got a reminder of why. If it wasn’t bad enough that I signed up to watch a rom-com for the newspaper, I ended up watching three: “Anyone But You,” “How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days” and “10 Things I Hate About You.”
These films made me regret a lot of things.
To start, let’s talk about “Anyone But You.” It was released December 22, 2023, directed by Will Gluck, starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. What can I say about this movie? It’s cliche, unfunny, sad, but not in a good way, and pathetic a waste of time. An hour and 37 minutes of just pure garbage.
The plot, which at times is based off the wonderful work of William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” is sadly a crime to his legacy. The movie tries to follow the plot of the original but also tries to do its own thing, which almost never works.
The soundtrack is basic and without taste. Most of the time it’s just a piano playing sad music, or a random girl singing about the summer. Most of the characters are underdeveloped and at times just outright hateable.
The story itself feels like it’s been done before, but unfortunately this movie did it worse.
This movie will go down as a ⅕.
Now, “How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days” — a film released on January 27, 2003 and directed by Donald Petrie — wasn’t what I was expecting.
The movie was actually good.
The film has a run time of an hour and 55 minutes of awkward and laughable scenes that provide a frustratingly good time. Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson play their roles rather perfectly in this movie — two people working in opposite directions as they slowly fall in love with each other — blending their two very different forms of delivery into a plot that sadly doesn’t deliver.
Like many different rom-coms, it suffers from a cliché plot that makes the movie just seem boring and stale at times. There is always that one challenge or bet that makes the two leads meet, they eventually fall in love, they get into a fight and by the end they get back together because of the power of love or something. This movie follows that format perfectly.
If you watch this, you’ve practically seen them all. A sad truth for a movie that had two great leads, good and funny moments, and the potential to be so much more. This movie goes down as a ⅗.
Finally, we reach “10 Things I Hate About You” — released on March 31, 1999, directed by Gil Junger, famously starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles — the movie everyone wanted me to watch. Even a rom-com hater like me has to admit, the movie does everything it has to with the time it has.
In my opinion, the best part of the movie is its soundtrack. Now, the songs are still cliché — mainly because they’ve been related to teenage rebels for ages — but at least they’re good. Songs like “Bad Reputation” riddle the movie.
Sometimes the side characters can feel a little over the top, like the principal that cares about nothing else in the world but her novel, even when questionable things are happening.
The main plot point in the story, which is the relationship between two of the characters, is greatly underbuilt to the point that sometimes I would even forget about it. And lastly, the final part of the movie where the two main characters finally make up — a scene that has been done a thousand times before — makes it flat and at times unlikeable.
A movie this good has to go down as a ⅘.
I have reached the end, I’ve seen it all, and I sit alone thinking to myself, what’s next? My whole life I’ve hated rom-coms, they’ve always been the one kind of movie I won’t watch. Throughout the last couple days, I have laughed and chuckled at these movies. I guess now I can tolerate them.
In small doses at least.
Rom-coms: nowadays they’re cheesy films that get no love or attention and are just shoved into the backlogs of Netflix for anyone that hates their life to see.
Well, probably a run of either “Spider-man” or “Lord of the Rings,” two movies that will hopefully wash away all rom-coms from my mind.
