Sorry to have gone silent for a while. We moved on Patriot’s Day, and I’ve been enraptured by our new neighborhood. Whoever was holding his breath, you can stop now.
Here’s a palate cleanser, three Netflix rom-coms for three date nights with your best-beloved.
They’re all #MyKindOfBenedy stories, but that’s not too hard a target to hit. Studio movies have the funding to both despise and dismay their audiences. Indies not so much. The flip side is that, by virtue of having no budget, the writing, the acting and the production values for independent films can suffer.
Those caveats definitely apply to the first choice, Candy Jar. It’s a high school grudge/love match set amidst the world of competitive debate – so it’s a sports movie, too. The plot is as predictable as any romance novel – opposites attract – but the film distinguishes itself in the most charming way: It is post-racial. The snooty-wealth-and-privilege characters are black, the underdogs white (underbitches, really; there are no fathers). Skin color matters nothing to the plot, and that’s just wonderful.
Christian Mingle is a decent take on the fish-out-of-water rom-com. It’s explicitly Christian, a niche market I’m happy to see growing. In fact, religion is all but irrelevant to the plot – which of course turns on the choices of the lovers. But if this film was not funded by ChristianMingle.com, it should have been, and they should do four of these a year. Meanwhile, it’s great to see love working out for people you would welcome as your neighbors.
The Kissing Booth is the most farcical of the bunch, calling to mind such great high school rom-coms as Clueless, Mean Girls, and, especially, Ten Things I Hate About You. The plot is first-love for the girl-next-door with an intra-fraternal love-triangle, so there’s a lot of story. Even better, when ingenue Elle is reeling in rebellion from her mother’s death, recovering bad-boy Noah steps up with the best masculine frame I’ve seen in cinema in a long time. These two should be married by the end of Act III, but young love maturing appropriately is a story Hollywood can never manage to tell.
In a true benedy, everyone should be a better person by the end of the yarn. In a romantic benedy, the romantic partners should be making each other better people. In Christian Mingle, the lovers grow to become a couple independently of each other. In Candy Jar, the kids are barely coupled at all, with plans to attend different colleges in the fall. Only in The Kissing Booth do the two lovers become full partners to each other, each making the other a better, more reliable adult. That’s a story I would love to see more.
