Review: Love and Other Drugs

Love and Other Drugs
Dir. Edward Zwick
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: An Eternity

Edward Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs should have taken the title of Emma Kate-Coughlin’s 1996 Aussie Gen X romantic comedy Love and Other Catastrophes for a more apt description of itself. Zwick’s movie is a catastrophe all right! A truly horrendous, offensive and all-round execrable movie-going experience, one of the worst films of the year. Audiences should be cautioned against thinking it’s just another light and fluffy rom-com with attractive stars; it is actually a deeply unsetlling movie.

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Throughout the rest of my review I label this film a "circus freak show", "incredibly stupid", "offensive", "repulsive", "depressing" and an "excessively vulgar parade of grotesquery" with "one of the worst film characters of all time". And it's all true. Love and Other Drugs is A-W-F-U-L-!


I wrote about four times as many notes during the film as I usually do and most of them can be summed up as "WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE!!!" Because right from the opening scene with Jake Gyllenhaal acting like a tripped out raver in the electronics store, nobody within several kilometres of this movie was acting like anybody remotely human. If I ever came across Anne Hathaway's character I wouldn't feel sorry for her, I'd wanna slap her and tell her to stop being so annoying and self-righteous. Don't even get me started on the brother. Seriously, one of the worst movie characters of all time. The movie still wouldn't be any good without him, but with with him - and so prominently too - it just plunges the film deep down into even more bottom feeding territory. Lowest common denominator type stuff that character is.

I couldn't help but feel as if this was like some strange retro screenplay from 1996 that was written as a way to get Julia Roberts and Richard Gere back together after Pretty Woman, but they turned it down and hid the screenplay in a drawer for 14 years. Hathaway is made up to look exactly like Julia Roberts in 1996 with the hair and the make-up and you can totally see Richard Gere as this "lovable" womanising cad who is not at all womanising, but is in fact disgusting and repulsive. I admit to getting a bit of a silent chuckle out of seeing how many wool knit jumper and overall combination the costume designer would make Anne Hathaway way as she sits around her Lisa Loeb music video apartment listening to the soundtrack of Empire Records. Which, by the way, brings about the issue of these characters' story being so long and yet not one of them even redecorates their apartment once or moves a single piece of furniture. When you hate a movie as much as I do this one you find fault in everything!

It's all just so... ugh. I tempted with giving it an F, but instead I am leaving my grade at a D- because, as I mention in the review, the sexuality is actually refreshingly frank for a Hollywood movie. There are so mystical L-shaped bed sheets here where she is covered up over her breasts and yet he has the sheet delicately placed just above his own naughty bits. Apart from the general "these are two attractive people walking around naked" bonus, it was just nice to see. Alas, the rest of the music is filthy garbage. D-