Monday, June 9, 2008

Born Romantic

(caution: Spoiler Ahead! But really, it's a romantic Comedy, what do you thinks gonna happen?)

This weekend I also watched Born Romantic, an English film with Craig Ferguson, my favorite late night host. Anyway, this was an impulse buy at the corner store near my apartment for $2...what can I say? I can't pass up an English Romantic Comedy with a Scottish actor!

The film focuses on three men and their love interests. Frankie (played by Ferguson), a somewhat crass but hopelessly romantic divorcee has the hots for "a classy lady"; Furgus (David Morrisey) has traveled to London in search of the woman he calls his soul mate...after leaving her at the altar eight years before; and Eddie (Jimi Misty, what a name!), an amateur thief who uses chloroform to rob people, ends up falling for one of his targets, a hypochondriac who dresses graves for a living.

Two things work to tie the plots together - the salsa lounge where they all meet up, and trying to give a deeper meaning to the whole thing is Jimmy, the cab driver who lost his wife a few years before. The best thing about this script is that they kept the cabby's speeches to a minimum and his bursts of insight short and sweet, relying more on the actor's ability to use subtle facial gestures to communicate with the audience. This allowed for him to sound intelligent and insightful, vs. the side character played by Ian Hart who goes into long speeches about how women can't actually feel love and other crap (by the end, this gets tied up nicely as well). Other than that, this film's script had something lacking, and really was carried by the ensemble cast, nice cinematography and the fact that they all had accents.

My absolute favorite scene is one in which Frankie sings "L.O.V.E." in total homage to Dean Martin, Sinatra and all those dudes - and he does a good job! The accent (American) sounds funny coming from him, as it always does, but it just adds to his lovable character.

Of course, everyone gets his girl in the end...and even the cab driver starts dancing with the foxy salsa instructor as the aperture closes around their faces.

1 comment:

Onkel Hankie Pants said...

You just l-u-u-u-v those chikfliks, dontcha?

Sounds like that cab driver part was my kind of (under)acting.

By the way, that was a nice literary touch: You ended one paragraph with,

" . . . dresses graves for a living."

and began the next one with,

"Two things work to tie the plots together . . . ."

It's always nice to have aesthetic consistency when there's a double funeral.