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    Alex and Emma

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

    "Alex & Emma" is an incredibly poorly written romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor funny. The film follows Alex (Luke Wilson), a once-successful writer who has fallen on hard times. He must repay $100,000 in debt to the Cuban mafia within 30 days or they'll kill him. Since he's been stuck on the first sentence for months and the enforcers destroyed his laptop, he hires a stenographer named Emma (Kate Hudson) to write down the novel as he dictates it. The novel is about a man named Adam Shipley (played by Luke Wilson), a teacher who has fallen on hard times and is now tutoring the children of a rich, single woman named Polina (Sophie Marceau) Adam is torn between his immediate attraction between Polina and the nanny (played by Kate Hudson) As Alex dictates the novel, Emma chimes in whenever she dislikes what is going on in the plot and the two write the novel together. Who will Adam choose: the rich, sexy Polina, or the down-to-earth nanny? And what about in real life?

    For a film that follows a supposedly brilliant writer, there’s an astonishing amount of badly written scenes. One early exchange between Alex and Emma shows off how manufactured the dialogue is."Here's what I figured. You've got exactly 8 words so far. Since a typed page is 350 words, that's roughly six weeks per page. With one week off for Christmas, two weeks summer vacation, three hundred pages would take approximately 37 years which quite frankly, is a little more than I'm willing to allocate to this project." Now, if Emma was some kind of mathematical genius sure, she might be able to put that math together AND write up that nice speech to deliver it to Alex but as is, it just shows that this was a bit of math and dialogue the writer was so proud of he couldn't let it go even though it doesn't fit the character at all. The bad writing isn't limited to the dialogue either. The book Alex and Emma are writing is horrible. There’s little character development, plot elements change wildly from page to page and there’s absolutely no consistency in the nanny’s nationality. You would think that this writer, so good that his editor is willing to pay $125,000 for any manuscript he produces would be somewhat of a professional. Yet he's constantly changing his mind on what his characters should be, making last second re-writes and never has any idea where the novel he is writing is going.

    The film is extremely predictable and does nothing new with the romantic comedy genre. From the get-go, you can tell that these two characters aren't going to like each other but will in time, fall in love. Emma is attractive but clumsy and has those quirky character traits that give off the illusion of character development without actually telling you anything about her. Two examples come to mind: She can't stand tomato skins and likes to read the ending of the book first, then decide if she wants to read the rest of the story based on whether or not she liked the end. These are nice, safe flaws. Nothing that would actually make you think the woman is unlikeable, but enough to create a scene where Alex expresses a slight dislike for her. As for Alex, we're told that he likes to gamble and write. We can also assume that he's totally irresponsible, with the enormous debt that he's accumulated and the totally derelict apartment that he's living in but hey, Luke Wilson is a handsome guy so that means all he needs is a woman to come and clean him up a little! I found it incredibly ironic that Alex describes his novel by saying "This isn't a comic book, it's a novel. There's character development. Symbolism. Subtext." Classic writing from an author that’s never read a comic book and quite hypocritical considering the trash he’s churning out.

    Despite the fact that Alex has to finish a novel in 30 days there is never any sense of urgency. With only a few days left, the would-be couple decides to leave their work behind and go on a date, apparently assuming that the very first draft of the novel is going to be good enough to print and apparently oblivious to chapters that still need to be written. Emma trips and drops a significant amount of the manuscript in a puddle of water in a scene halfway through the film. Earlier, she had a significant amount of complaints about the story so you think this is going to be a significant plot point. Will Emma rewrite the novel, proving herself to be a better writer? Will a rift be created between the two when Alex realizes how careless she's been? Nope. It's just a setup for a lame joke as Emma fills in the missing pages with a brief resume of what she remembers happened. It's a pointless scene.

    The main characters actually don't share that much screen time in the end because so much of the film is dedicated to the novel's plot. It feels like the only reason Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson are playing characters in the novel is so the audience can believe that the two are getting closer together and that the romance at the end won't come out of thin air. The final shot of the film feels like someone beating you over the head and shouting: you see! It's love! “Alex & Emma” is predictable, unfunny, the writing is bad and there’s not even a crumb’s worth of chemistry between the leads. What’s left to win you over? Not much. (Full-screen theatrical version on DVD, July 27, 2013)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  1.9.2016 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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