BEFORE: I really don't recommend that anyone else do what I do, and watch 30+ romance-based movies beginning on February 1. That will mess with your mind, I promise you. I have a co-worker who just got out of a relationship, and she asked me what I've been watching lately, and I was almost afraid to tell her. But no matter what your romance situation is right now, it doesn't matter, PLEASE don't try this at home, because you may get a different perspective on life by watching too many Hollywood movies about love, and real life is just not like the movies, nor should it be. Maybe Hollywood movies about love should be more like real life, and OK, maybe that's what Nicholas Sparks films are about, how you have to take the bad with the good, the crazy ex-cop husband that comes with the cute girl, or the separation that comes from the soldier dating the college girl. Anyway, please don't take my process as an endorsement for following suit, I'm a professional and I've built up a tolerance for romance films over the years.
Amanda Seyfried carries over from "Dear John".
Here's tomorrow's schedule for Day 5 of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar line-up:
Best Original Story Winners and Nominees:
7:15 am "The Doorway to Hell" (1930)
8:45 am "One Way Passage" (1932)
10:00 am "Manhattan Melodrama" (1934)
11: 45 am "Action in the North Atlantic" (1943)
2:00 pm "The Stratton Story" (1949)
4:00 pm "Love Me or Leave Me" (1955)
6:15 pm "The Brave One" (1956)
Oscar Worthy Royals:
8:00 pm "Mrs. Brown" (1997)
10:00 pm "The Lion in Winter" (1968)
12:30 am "The Madness of King George" (1994)
2:20 am "Marie Antoinette" (1938)
5:15 am "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933)
I was at 22 seen out of 47, and I've seen 4 out of today's 12 ("Mrs. Brown", "The Lion in Winter", "The Madness of King George" and "The Private Life of Henry VIII"). So that's 26 seen out of 59, and I'm down again to 44%. Look, it's clear that TCM just doesn't WANT people watching their channel during the day, that's when they're programming all the older and shittier movies. Sure, tune in tomorrow at 8 pm and enjoy prime time, but under no circumstances should you take the day off and enjoy movies while the sun is shining, because they're just not worth it.
THE PLOT: Sophie travels to Verona, where she finds an old unanswered letter asking for love advice. She answers it, and when the recipient shows up along with her grumpy grandson, they head off to find the old lost love while a young love sparks.
AFTER: Tonight's movie was one of those left stranded after last year's romance chain, maybe even the last two romance chains. I'm glad to be finally clearing it off the docket, third time's the charm...
This is a real thing, Italian people do write letters to the fictional Juliet (of "Romeo and..." fame) with questions about romance issues, and there are really women who collect those letters and write letters of advice back. I'm not exactly sure WHY this takes place in Verona, I mean, sure, that's where Shakespeare's play was set, but there was NO real Juliet, was there? I guess Billy Shakes didn't really create the story, it's been around forever, but he made the definitive version. In England, not Italy. And even if Juliet WAS real, she'd be long dead, so why do people keep writing letters to her? Don't they have any friends they can talk to for love advice? Can't you just post your love questions on Reddit or something?
And even if Juliet WAS real and even if she could answer your letter, would you really want her to? Her go-to move was to take a sleeping potion that would mimic death, and then she didn't tell anybody she did this, so her family put her in the crypt. Then Romeo saw her there and (spoiler alert) drinks real poison because he can't live without her. When Juliet wakes up and sees that Romeo is dead she (spoiler alert again) stabs herself and dies. This is not someone who should be dispensing advice about how to fix your relationship, that's all I'm saying. Wouldn't her solution to how to deal with a snoring husband be something like, "Well, first you get a sleeping potion from the apothecary..." and likely that would be her answer to everything, right?
Teenage girls need to learn to deal with their own romance problems, without bothering fictional characters from the 16th century. They're kind of busy being not real or dead. But still, they keep littering the walls of Verona with questions about their problems. In today's film, Sophie is a fact-checker for the New Yorker magazine, but she yearns to be a real writer, unfortunately she's got nothing interesting to write about - until she takes a pre-honeymoon with her chef boyfriend and accidentally learns about the Secretaries of Juliet, who answer all those letters from people seeking advice. It's a team of four Italian ladies, one is married, one is older, one consoles the heartbroken, they kind of divide up the work. Now here's where Sophie could have just written a nice article about these ladies that everyone would enjoy, end of story, roll the credits, thanks for coming. But the movie doesn't stop there, two more things need to be settled.
The first is that Sophie finds a letter that was hidden in the wall, and it's maybe 50 years old, from an English woman who visited Italy and fell in love with a farmhand, then left for home without warning and felt very guilty about it. Sophie gets permission to answer the letter, not knowing if this woman is even still alive, advising her to return to Italy and track down her boyfriend, Lorenzo, from long ago. NITPICK POINT: I don't know how fast mail travels across Europe, but here in the U.S. it takes probably four or five days for mail to go from the East Coast to the West Coast. So I suspect that by the time the letter gets from Italy to the U.K., Sophie's pre-honeymoon would be over and realistically, she should be headed back to the U.S.
But that's not the case, the older woman IS still alive and she turns up in Verona like two days later, somehow, with her grandson as her companion. They somehow meet up with the Secretaries of Juliet, and learn that Sophie wrote the letter of advice, and now Sophie wants to join them on their quest to find Lorenzo Bartolini somewhere in Italy, maybe. The only trouble is that there are like 75 people in Italy with that name, and they're spread out all over the place. Again, Sophie should be headed back to America by now, but she sticks around to drive all over, from one city to the other, looking for this guy who may not even be alive any more. It's far-fetched, to say the least.
However, this dovetails neatly with the fact that Sophie's fiancé has been pretty much ignoring her from the start, meeting with his cheese vendor or going to a wine auction or getting a tour of this bakery or that, even learning pasta recipes from the chef who cooks for the Secretaries of Juliet. Do I really have to paint you a picture, here? He's on a vacation with his soon-to-be-wife and he wants to do everything else but spend time with her. This relationship, if I can even call it that, is doomed from the start. If we've learned anything so far in this romance chain, it's that you should NOT go to war and ignore your girlfriend if she looks like Amanda Seyfried. Also, you should NOT go to a wine auction and ignore your girlfriend if she looks like Amanda Seyfried. I can't stress this enough, it's very important, because she WILL find another boyfriend who is close by who will eventually put her needs first and realize she's the one, and that's how these things go. Well, I guess if you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with. Happy almost Valentine's Day, I guess?
The rest you can probably predict, whether Claire finds her Lorenzo, and whether Sophie will give her chef boyfriend the heave-ho and try to make things work out with Charlie instead. Jeez, they just had to throw one last bit of confusion/misunderstanding in at the end, because why should ANYTHING be easy in these movies? Life is a continual struggle, I guess, but not everything needs to be THIS hard. Whatever, I guess - just don't put Romeo and Juliet out there as a successful love story, because it's not. Look where a little miscommunication got them, it ruined everything, keep that in mind.
Directed by: Gary Winick (director of "13 Going on 30", "Bride Wars")
Also starring Christopher Egan (last seen in "Eragon"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Franco Nero (last seen in "Camelot"), Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "Rosewater"), Luisa Ranieri, Marina Massironi (last heard in "Luca"), Lidia Biondi (last seen in "Eat Pray Love"), Remo Remotti (ditto), Milena Vukotic (last seen in "A Good Woman"), Oliver Platt (last seen in "Pieces of April"), Daniel Baldock, Stefano Guerrini, Ashley Lilley (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Fabio Testi, Luisa De Santis, Marcia DeBonis (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Giordano Formenti, Paolo Arvedi, Dario Conti, Angelo Infanti (last seen in "The Black Stallion Returns"), Giacomo Piperno, Sara Armentano, Benito Deotto, Marcello Catania, Silvana Bosi (last seen in "The American"), Elio Veller, Sandro Dori (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Adriano Guerri, Robbie Neigeborn, Hilary Edson, Gabriele Manfredi.
RATING: 5 out of 10 hotel rooms all over Italy (man, this must have turned into one expensive trip!)
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