Dascha Polanco – Movie Smack Talk

As eager to please as a never married woman with a ticking biological clock who’s approaching 40, the perfect match is the perfect cliché of “can a happy bachelor ditch the one night stands to find true love?” Of course, when it comes to ‘rom-coms’ the answer is “absolutely!” and not, “he’ll probably be hitting on nurses in his nursing home in 40 years.”

In The Perfect Match, Charlie (Terrence J) uses his unmatched charm and looks to sleep with the most attractive women in L.A. Worried that Charlie will never open himself up to a loving relationship, his friends Rick (Donald Faison) and Victor (Robert Christopher Riley) challenge him to date only one woman for the weeks leading up to Victor’s approaching wedding. Charlie accepts, and immediately pursues Eva (Cassie Ventura). Upon first meeting, Charlie reveals he only has short-term relationships, while Eva tells him she’s only been in long-term ones, but is looking to switch things up and have more fun. As you can probably guess from here, Charlie finds himself falling for Eva, proving his friends right.

I will say this movie is what it is. It’s the standard rom-com theme. I mean, what do we love more than a bachelor we can reform, right? So it’s a safe bet that this makes a good, if not entirely unique, story. The story takes a unique twist in the end, but for the most part, remains formulaic and predictable.

As if to make up for the predictable main plot, The Perfect Match is bogged down with a slew of uninteresting B-stories. Each member of Charlie’s friend group has his or her own bit of turmoil we explore in depth: Rick and Pressie (Dascha Polanco) are trying desperately to have a baby; Victor and Ginger (Lauren London) aren’t seeing eye to eye on how much money to spend on their wedding. On top of that, Charlie is trying to sign French Montana (who appears as himself) to his agency in connection to some new app he’s developing, and Charlie’s sister Sherry (Paula Patton) is confronting him about never coming to terms with the death of their parents. Oh yeah, both of his parents died in a manner that is never explained.

The attempt to make the story more interesting with more plots just means that the story of the two main characters gets lost entirely. This was a mistake, as I think the two leads were compelling enough to carry it on their own. I think if they’d just left it at that, it would have been a comfortable movie, though not groundbreaking. It doesn’t look like that was what they were going for.

So it will make your head spin, but it’s still light entertainment. This movie is a solid C plus effort that is safe first date fare, if not entirely original. A compelling cast makes it worth watching, if you just want to watch attractive people have drama. You won’t be any smarter for it, but it’s still a way to waste an evening.
WE GAVE IT: 3.5 Stars – Watch the Official Trailer and Official Movie Poster below!

[youtube id=”vKCFkFaIwU0″ width=”680″ height=”383″]

Great, another story about a struggling mother trying to make it in the business world. God knows we can’t have enough of those. Just the other night I was watching Lifetime (I was too drunk to change the channel) and only saw the storyline of Joy about 8 times in 12 hours.

But hey, I guess if you can get Jennifer Lawrence, you don’t have to put it on Lifetime, right? Wrong. My deep, and slightly Sapphic love of Jennifer Lawrence aside, I really did not find this movie watchable. It’s melodrama really made it only suitable for Lifetime.

Our heroine is Joy Mangano (Jennifer Lawrence) a chick who apparently peddles mops for a living. She supports her big, dysfunctional family including her mom Terry (Virginia Madsen), mom’s ex-husband Rudy (Robert Diner) Rudy’s girlfriend (Isabelle Rosalina) and a bunch of other people I can’t be bothered to name.

So the whole thing is narrated by Joy’s grandmother, which gets particularly jarring at the midpoint, when she dies but continues narrating anyway and is about Joy beating all the odds and…selling mops.

No joke, with all the dramatic speeches made about mops, you would have expected them to friggen cure cancer. They don’t. They’re just mops. But hey, she gets those magic mops on TV and bam, they’re a hit.

Then, in the blink of an eye, she goes bankrupt…and I laughed and laughed.

Let me say this to start off. I do not admire those who make millions by peddling crap on the Home Shopping Network. I think those jerks are preying on the most vulnerable in our society by selling them junk they don’t need, because they’re so lonely they’ll pay to talk to someone on the phone. It bothers me and I don’t like seeing it glorified here.

It’s a tried and true, overly sentimentalized story about a woman overcoming obstacles to earn her rightful place as a billionaire…peddling crap to old people on public access tv. I found it more annoying than I did inspiring.

I will say that I felt Lawrence made every effort to make her character work, I just found all of the ‘land of opportunity’ speeches to be a bit too on the nose and irritating. So many times I wanted to scream at the screen “it’s just a mop!”

It’s amazing to me that that a director who made Silver Linings Playbook, who partnered Lawrence with Bradley Cooer yet again, could have failed so badly, but this one fell flat for me. I just didn’t get why this woman was important. I didn’t get why the mop was so damn important.

I have a vacuum.

In short, I found this film a bit too silly and desperate to be real. Much like the melodramatic soap operas Joy’s mother loved so deeply, I didn’t buy the plotline. Much like I’m not willing to buy anything from the real Joy Mangano, I’m not buying this story based on her life.

Sorry Jennifer Lawrence. No hard feelings.

WE GAVE IT: 2 Stars – Watch the Official Trailer and Official Movie Poster below!