The Proposal (2009)

(I watched this yesterday afternoon, but even a day later, I still feel the need to excoriate that mess. So now you all get treated to my ranting. Sorry.)

I'm sure it's not news that marriage of convenience/otherwise faking couplehood is my bulletproof narrative kink. I also have a tremendous fondness for even the most formulaic romantic comedies out there. Sure, I wouldn't want to watch one every day, but a well-done series of predictable cliches, portrayed by charming people in charming settings...there's nothing quite like it for comfort entertainment.

So in theory, I should be all over The Proposal like a chicken on a junebug. Like white on rice. Like scum on a pond. Etc. Not only is it basically an updated Green Card, which I love, but it's Green Card set in small-town Alaska! It has Betty White! For the love of god, it's about a book editor and her assistant! You could not make a movie more tailored to my interests!

...And yet in fact it is an affront to formula rom-coms. It is offensively bad. Look, I know how these things work. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and buy that two characters who don't much like each other can fall in love over the course of three days if they do it convincingly, but this was about as convincing as William Shatner's toupee. Instead of more than two scenes where Margaret and Andrew are shown beginning to tolerate each other, the writer decided the movie needed Sandra Bullock and Betty White, who was wearing some kind of faux Native Alaskan blanket, rapping and dancing in the woods. I wish I were making that up.

( More ranting. )

Woof.

Ugh. Apparently my bad luck with rom-com movies continues, because wow, The Truth About Cats & Dogs was not nearly as funny as I remembered it being. I must have had really low standards as a twelve-year-old.

On top of that, I now have a burning need for Abby/Noelle femslash, and there is almost none to be found online. None! Even though they cry out for mountains and mountains of fic. (Noelle brought Abby flowers! They were holding hands while walking through the mall! They were so much more adorable than either of them paired with the male lead!)

I think it's time to go back to books for the rest of the weekend. At least Salman Rushdie won't let me down.

(P.S. Speaking of Janeane Garofalo, apparently she's now one of the leads in a Criminal Minds spin-off, which I think counts as my biggest pop culture WTF moment of the year. Though I hear her character is supposed to be a vaguely feminist loudmouth, which at least seems less out of character. And IMDB suggests she's been slowly transitioning to dramatic roles in the decade since I last paid much attention to her, so maybe it's not as odd as it seems at first glance. I watched the most recent episode of the show online, but I won't be making that mistake again--I dislike procedurals as a rule, and adding nightmare-inducing scenes of people getting dismembered while alive does not endear them to me any further.)