Random movie talk talk

Back from the weekend.  Been enjoying some time with my wife, it being her birthday.  Some going out with the kids, some staying in and watching the Olympics (actually a lot of that).  We watched a movie called Alex and Emma, staring Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson.   I was horribly disappointed, in that while the idea of the story was cute, the writing dialog and acting took a bit away from the film. 

The entire idea of the film is that a struggling writer, Alex (Wilson) needs to write a romance novel before the month is over or some Hispanic goons he owes money will kill him.  The only way that he can write with that kind of speed is by orating his ideas to a court stenographer, Emma (Hudson), and so he hires her by pretending to be a struggling law firm.  Not withstanding the fact that it’s a stretch to believe that a publisher would hand out the $100k he needs in order to pay off the goons the second he turns in the finished book, but we are presented with having to root for the hero of the tale to get the girl when the hero is a depressing liar with a gambling problem. 

The trick with the film is that we experience the plot of the story he is trying to write along with the main story of his growing relationship with the Emma.  The book is meant to mirror the reality of what he is experiencing.   The writing for the novel parts, as dictated by Wilson’s character, are terrible, but I’m assuming that was on purpose and part of the comedy of the film.  There were some bright moments, like the constant morphing of Hudson’s character in the novel (first she’s Swedish, then German, etc…).

However, there were too many moments when I thought the dialog in the main part of the movie (not the novel part) was just as bad.  And like I said you have to struggle to really like Wilson’s character.  And it doesn’t make me want to pick up a romance novel anytime in the foreseeable future either.