Love & Other Drugs January 14, 2011

*SPOILER THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE TEXT*

You meet thousands of people, and then you meet one person… and it changes your life… forever.

Hard-partying, emotionally-detached man meets sensitive, artist woman with fatal disease. They fall in love. They fall out of love. Will man come to his senses? Will woman allow herself to feel love despite downhill course of disease? Will we keep watching this dreck? Will attractive people getting undressed and having sex keep our attention? You know all the answers to these questions, as this film is just a rehash of dozens that came before it.

Where to start…. Even though I went with high expectations, Love & Other Drugs didn’t really satisfy me. Boy meets girl. They surprisingly fall in love. What else is new? The story outline was so obvious that I knew what was going to turn out from the first 5 minutes. Even before that. I knew the whole movie from watching it’s trailor and i’m not even kidding.

Jake Gyllenhaal (incredibly hot, btw) plays this charming shit-head womenizer who just basically fucks every girl who comes along. He is incredibly flirty and no one ever says no to him. Although he seems very confident and sure of himself and so on he actually has a very low self esteem because his father never appreciated him as a child. He even dropped out of Med School for it. He has never said “i love you” to anyone, including his parents, and he can not commit into a relationship.

Okay, first of all, how classic is this?! I’m pretty sure all of you who haven’t watched the movie yet understood what it’s all about already. Charming jerk surprisingly falling in love with the one girl that rejects him… Like, gee, this is even more cliche then the “boy meets girl” stereotype. These days I’m starting to think that charming shit-head jerk boys have became more common then normal boys with feelings. I mean just look at the movies. In most, boys are portrayed as these flirtatious, can’t settle down to one girl, uses everyone for sex, doesn’t do relationships.. blah blah blah.. and of course, in every movie, there is a childhood connection to these problems so they actually make us pity the character.

So anyways, Anne Hathaway plays the love interest of Jake Gyllenhaal. Of course, as the cardinal rule of a modern romantic comedy, she is “different” from any girl Jake has been with. She is cynical, pessimistic and more importantly like Jake, she is deadly scared of committing and relationship because she firmly believes that it’s not going to work out and she’s going to end up being heartbroken.

A very important thing about Anne’s character is that she’s sick with Parkinson. She’s only a level 1, but since there is no cure to Parkinson, her disease is doomed get worse. In her mind, she’s the “diseased girl”, she is needy, pathetic, pitied, hard to take care of, etc. That’s why she tries to be so strong and independent. She can’t commit because she is so desperate to be able to take care of herself, she can’t admit to herself that she needs someone. This is one of the rare parts i liked about this movie because it displays the sick person psychology very well. Another thing that I liked was that the movie was set in 1996, the recent-past. Even though it was only 15 years ago, everything was very different from now and it really made me think. They didn’t have proper cellphones, computers, softwares were just being produced, they didn’t have facebook, they didn’t text eachother, they had just found viagra, prozac wasn’t popular, etc. I was particularly apalled by the fact that they didn’t have INTERNET. Like, i still haven’t fully grasped it. This really made me think in context of how internet changed our lives.

Ahh, i’m inspired now. I’m going to make another post about this.

Oh, I was almost forgetting, if you haven’t figured yourself, Jake and Anne end up together after a dramatic set of ups & downs and at the end realizing that they can’t live without eachother.