Thursday Movie Picks: Fake Relationships (Romance Tropes Edition)

 

For the fifth week of 2021 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We go into the Romance Tropes Edition of the series by focusing on the subject of fake relationships. It’s a common trope that allow two people to be together for some scheme or to make someone jealous and such. Here are my three picks:

1. The Wedding Date

This rom-com starring Debra Messing, Dermont Mulroney, and Amy Adams is a delightful, harmless film where Messing travels to London to celebrate Adams’ wedding yet the groom’s best man is her cheating ex-boyfriend as she hires an escort in Mulroney to be her date. It’s a film that has some nice moments as well as a lot of attraction with Mulroney being the straight man and Messing also displaying some charm while Adams and Sarah Parish as their British cousin TJ are standouts in a film that is better than a lot of rom-coms and didn’t deserve the harsh reviews it received from critics.

2. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

When you have a film starring Adam Sandler, it’s often that it’s not going to be good and this one is no exception as one would’ve expected that the film which was co-written by Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor to be good yet their work was badly re-written by Sandler and his cohorts. It has Sandler helping out his fellow firefighter friend in Kevin James by marrying him so that he can get insurance including healthcare for the latter’s kids. It unfortunately caters to the lowest common denominator in terms of its humor that includes Rob Schneider as an Asian yet the saving grace of that film is Ving Rhames as another firefighter with some serious anger issues largely due to the secret that he’s carrying.

3. The Proposal

Starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds is this fun film where Bullock plays the latter’s boss as she learns she is to be deported back to Canada as she asks Reynolds to be engaged to her as he is set to go back home to Alaska as it’s revealed that he’s from a rich family. It’s a film that has charm with Bullock and Reynolds displaying some nice chemistry yet the real scene-stealer in that film is Betty White as the latter’s grandmother who is a joy to watch. It’s a harmless film that does what it needed to do yet does bring in the laughs.

© thevoid99 2021