Sometimes I wonder exactly how some of these movies get made.
It's not only that the modern day romantic comedy has more over-used formulas than a high school science lab. It's that they're so utterly lacking in charm even at the most basic elements. You'd think that any writers or story-tellers, such as screen-writer Aline Brosh McKenna and director Anne Fletcher, would have had to sit through enough romantic comedy movies to recognize a formula when they see one. But they don't credit their audiences with the same knowledge and skills of recognition.
So they set about making '27 Dresses,' most egregious misuse of formulas I've had to endure since tenth grade chemistry. The cringe-worthy cliches start with the first scene and endure to the very last. From the sad, single, always-a-bridesmaid Jane Nichols (Katharine Heigl) to cynical, secretly-wounded Kevin (James Marsden). All the other elements are there: the storm-wrecked car, the "this is a great song" playing in the bar, hasty decisions and repentances, and more sudden epiphanies than the New Testament. Particularly tortuous was a sequence of what were meant to be meaningful, insightful, soul-searching and relationship-changing conversations. One or two in a film is excusable. I counted no less than six, all within fifteen minutes and with not even a coffee break in between.
Everything about the film screams abhorrently of over-doing it. Any single woman with friends can understand and sympathize with the ungrateful task and unspeakable torture of being a bridesmaid, but the lengths Jane goes to for her friends would test the most patient and accommodating of women. To have voluntarily forked over a share of your dignity - not to mention the money - twenty-seven times for such honors? Too incredible to be believed.
A more appropriate question would be how Jane afford a Manhattan apartment after paying for all those dresses and the closet space to put them in.
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