Worth Mentioning - Feel the Rain on Your Skin

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Cody checks out a pair of rom-coms.

ANYONE BUT YOU (2023)

There has been a surprising slow-down in the production of big screen comedies in recent years, along with that comes a lack of romantic comedies, which were once a big draw. Most things comedy or rom-com simply go to streaming services these days – which is why when director Will Gluck took on the job of directing the romantic comedy Anyone but You, he saw it as a challenge to make what could be the last rom-com in movie theatre history. So he wanted it to make it as funny, sexy, musical, and epic as possible. He clearly succeeded, and showed movie-goers do have an eagerness to see rom-coms on the big screen again, because Anyone but You managed to pull in around $200 million at the global box office.

The film stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, two actors who are currently getting a major push to be seen as the Next Big Thing. Since they got so many people to show up to see this movie, they just might be. They play Bea and Ben, who hit it off during a chance meeting in a coffee shop and end up spending the day together, hanging out and talking until they fall asleep in Ben’s place. But when Bea wakes up before Ben does, she sneaks out of the place, not really knowing why... and when she returns to apologize, she overhears Ben, who was hurt to see that she left without notice, telling his buddy Pete (GaTa) that the girl he spent the day with was a “disaster.” Bea objects to this description, despite spending a large amount of the film’s running time proving that she is indeed a disaster of a human being.

Bea and Ben are forced to be in each other’s presence again when her sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) decides to have an Australian destination wedding with her girlfriend Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), who is Pete’s sister and also a friend of Ben’s. Of course, they hate being around each other, but since they have to be together so much in the build-up to the wedding, they also gradually fall in love. With plenty of chuckle-inducing scenarios playing out along the way.

Scripted by Gluck with Ilana Wolpert, who drew inspiration from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing while crafting the story, Anyone but You is very much your typical rom-com, but it’s an entertaining one with a fun energy and some amusing moments. Sweeney and Powell do fine work in the lead roles, and they have a strong supporting cast around them. In addition to the actors already mentioned, there’s Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths as Bea and Halle’s parents and Bryan Brown and Michelle Hurd as Claudia and Pete’s mom and stepfather.

I’ve always found good rom-coms to be entertaining, and this one fit the bill. It’s a movie you can just kick back and have a good time with. It’s only out to make the viewer smile – as is most evident from the fact that it wraps up with a cast sing-along to the song “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield.

DESTINATION WEDDING (2017)

Written and directed by Victor Levin, Destination Wedding (which has the complete on screen title of Destination Wedding, or A Narcissist Can't Die Because Then the Entire World Would End) is another rom-com of sorts, but this one was definitely not aiming to be an epic way to cap off a genre. It’s a very low-key film that plays out entirely through a series of conversations between two people – and while it did get a theatrical release, it was a small run that only pulled in $2 million.

Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder star as Frank and Lindsay, two not-very-pleasant people who are understandably put off by each other during a chance encounter in an airport. So they are, of course, annoyed when they find out that they’re not only catching the same flight, they also have the exact same destination: a wedding in the California city of Paso Robles. They’re both connected to the groom, as Lindsay used to date the guy and Frank is his half-brother who isn’t very fond of him. If Frank and Lindsay had their way, they would stay far away from each other while the destination wedding events play out – but somehow they always manage to be right next to each other. And since neither of them is particularly enthusiastic about this wedding they’re attending, they end up talking to each other. A lot. And soon enough a romance is blossoming... but these aren’t the sort of people who can just fall in love and give themselves over to romance, so there are still complications to overcome.

While there are occasionally other people around them, Frank and Lindsay are the only two characters with dialogue to exchange, and Levin did give them some interesting conversations to have, even if the dialogue is occasionally overwritten. The movie reminded me of the sort of independent movies I would watch back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, when Gen X filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith were coming onto the scene with dialogue-heavy films.

Reeves and Ryder are both really good in their roles, and it was especially nice to see Reeves doing something like this, given that a lot of the movies he does don’t require him to do much more than have fights and shoot a whole bunch of people. He removed almost all of his dialogue from the most recent John Wick sequel, but on this one he had a whole lot of lines to memorized, and he delivered them quite well. It would be interesting to see him fit movies like this into his schedule more often.