This was a very cute romance movie. There are a lot of things I liked about it. On the other hand, it felt like something was missing, somehow. In all fairness, this is a low-budget, independent production, so you can't hold it to the same standards as a bigger-budget, Hollywood film. I gave it a solid 7, but that's grading on the curve. There's no way that the iMDb rating of 7.6 is accurate. That's a pretty high rating and just reflects the fact that this was a little-seen movie, and that most of the reviewers were likely connected to the project somehow.
First the good. I liked the premise of the movie a lot, i.e. A girl writes a column about her mostly disastrous dating life, while developing a friendship with a good guy who she refuses to see as a romantic possibility. A lot of rom-coms fail to develop the romantic relationship very well. That certainly wasn't the case here. Our leads Charlotte and Liam spent plenty of quality time together, and their interactions seemed mostly fun, natural and real. I liked that the loser dates that she wrote about in her columns were not the over-the-top, date-from-hell experiences that you might have expected. I also liked the relationship between Charlotte and her friend Lila. Friends in rom-coms usually exist solely to facilitate the main character's journey to romance, but I felt like the friendship between these two was fleshed out a little more. The two leads were definitely appealing physically. They looked good, both separately and as a couple.
Now the not-so-good. The dialog was pretty good, but there were a few rough patches, such as the scene where Charlotte and Liam are discussing what constitutes Mr. Right, and it basically comes down to the superficial stereotype of tall, dark and handsome. Well, only one of the guys that Charlotte deigned to go out with actually fit that physical profile. I felt like the reasons that Charlotte so quickly decided to put Liam in the friend zone were never explained very well. Was it because she assumed he was beneath her because he was a lowly barista? Of course, we all knew he was the owner of the coffee shop, not just a lowly employee, but it felt kind of stupid that he would never have actually told her that. Also, the fact that he offered to take her on a tour of the city should have been interpreted as a date by anybody, even clueless Charlotte. It would have worked much better if he had just kept casually running into her at the park, the pizza place, etc. Instead of him actually asking her to participate in such events. The line between casual friendship and dating needed to be much more fuzzy.
The other thing I had a hard time with was the performances. Clearly, these folks are B-list actors, which was surely all they could afford to hire. But Sierra Reid's performance as Charlotte seemed particularly lacking, somehow. She is cute and perky, and she does this very well, but her range of emotions doesn't seem to extend beyond that. There was a scene where she was looking at old pictures of her family in happier times, before her parents' divorce, and you see tears rolling down her cheeks. There was literally no emotion on her face to go with those tears. And in the scene where she blows him off after he attempts to actually ask her on a date, she shows none of the sadness or conflicted emotions that that scene requires. Her acting is extremely one-note.
This movie was definitely amusing and I enjoyed the slow-burn feel of the developing relationship between Charlotte and Liam. But somehow, it failed to totally connect for me. It's like the "Almost Mr. Right" that the movie talked about. Maybe with slightly more budget, slightly better actors and a slightly better screenplay, it would have hit its mark.
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