January 24: Love Hard

[kinetic_elaboration]

Did some work today but probably not enough. I’ve just been so tired, even when I’m awake. My mind just won’t focus.

Anyway, I did watch a movie! I watched Love Hard, because it takes place in Lake Placid but was shot in Vancouver and I wanted to be able to spend the whole time going ‘that’s not what Lake Placid looks like!’

My actual review of its Adirondack nature is mixed. On the one hand, most of the scenes took place indoors, and the downtown scenes and aerial shots of woods or the Lins’ neighborhood and so on were, like, obviously not Lake Placid to me but plausible for representing that area if you’ve never actually been. The outdoor supplies store was a reasonable approximation of the kind of store and the kind of decor one would expect.

On the other hand, it was simply not cold enough. No one’s breath was visible when they were outside. No one ever acted like they were cold. Natalie shows up wildly under-dressed (fine, she’s from LA) but then she’s totally unbothered by this, even standing outside, after dark, in December, in the Adirondacks. She’s being snotty about her Uber driver when she should be desperate to get somewhere warm. Her hiking attire is March appropriate at best–she is literally not even wearing a jacket–and the snow around her looks March-like, not December-like. Honestly, the amount of snow in general was really light. Where are all the drifts? She’s there for two weeks and it doesn’t snow once? Unrealistic. Most of the natives are under-dressed as well. Whhhyyy are you all of you wearing short sleeves? I really don’t care if you’re indoors. Unless that indoor space is overheated, you would have sleeves. At the very least, you would be layering.

The other thing about Lake Placid is it really is a small town and someone from LA would experience culture shock about that. I think they played with this some in a fun way: the smallness of the airport (though it was still too big if we’re being really honest here–she would be flying into Adirondack Regional and even that is smaller) and its staff; the Uber driver who is also the Lyft driver who is also the airport employee; who also knows the house she’s going to; everyone’s grown up together and knows everything about each other’s childhoods. But, I don’t know, it feels like they could have done more? Like what is the point of setting in Lake Placid if it’s only rarely going to be relevant that this place has 2,500 people in it?

In general as a movie… very serviceable. I’m not a big romcom person but I thought it was fine. Probably its weakest point was Natalie, who I found pretty annoying. I liked her more by the end, partially because some of her annoying qualities were in fact there on purpose as Lessons to Learn: that she is the problem on some of her bad dates because she is so judgemental and impatient; that she is a hypocrite for being so mad at Josh for catfishing when she catfished Tag waaaay worse, by changing her whole personality instead of just a couple of photos. Also, her most annoying trait was how negative she was about so many things. But when I phrased it to myself as 'this girl is just a hater,’ I felt more sympathetic. Sure, I’ll defend women’s wrongs.

In the spirit of many romcoms, it was super chaste, so I don’t know about their sexual chemistry, but I did think the leads had a pleasing, believable building up of romantic chemistry. All the slow-building romantic moments you’d expect, making each other better, being there for each other, and so on.

Also in keeping with the genre, the side characters were kind of the best? The best friend and her awesome Let Women Vote mug, the grandma, Natalie’s boss Lee, even the ditzy sister-in-law (brother bear!). I wish there’d been more of all of them.

I didn’t find it unfunny but I didn’t find it overly funny either. Again, this is like not really my genre, though. The two jokes I found legitimately funny in a sort of shocking way were “I did [fuck him], don’t tell HR though” and “E-Rock. When did he get out of jail?” Other than that, the humor was basically part of the genteel, sexless, background, bland but harmless.

A couple of other things I judged the movie for us as a whole: the line about Natalie’s match being perfect “except for one thing” and the thing isn’t that he lives in Lake Placid aka the other side of the country; Shel Silverstein, one of the most popular children’s book authors of all time, being presented as obscure literature; that the ending did not resolve the obvious question of where these two people from opposite coasts are going to live in the future.

I liked that it was a Christmas movie without being, like, too Christmas. I’ll doubt I’ll ever watch it again but if I had to watch a Christmas movie, this would be a plausible candidate.