Review of Alex & Emma (2003) by Edward C — 15 Sep 2016

Alex & Emma(2003).

Starring: Kate Hudson, Luke Wilson, David Paymer, Sophie Marceau, Paul Wilson, Chino XL, Lobo Sebastian, Rip Taylor, Alexander Wauthier, Leili Kramer, Rob Reiner, Gigi Bermingham, Jordan Lund, Francois Giroday, Robert Costanzo, Cloris Leachman, Earl Caroll, Michael Rapport, and Danica Sheridan.

Directed By: Rob Reiner.

Review.

Is it love... or are they just imagining things?

Alex and Emma is a movie about a guy who has to write a novel in thirty days in order to collect the money from his publisher to pay two gamblers who will otherwise kill him. So he hires a stenographer to take dictation and they fall in love. But the thing is, it's a bad novel a very bad novel. Every time the author started dictating I was struck anew by how bad it was, it was so bad it's not even good romance fiction.

You might reasonably ask why we need to know he's writing in the first place, since the story involves the writer and the girl . But alas, it involves much more: There are cutaways to the story he's writing, and its characters are played by Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson, the same two actors in the present day story.

This other story takes place in 1924 and involves people who dress and act like characters from The Great Gatsby. Not the central characters but the characters who attend Gatsby's parties and are in those long lists of funny names. It might have been a funny Idea from the novelist to steal from the Great Gatsby, confident that neither the gamblers nor his publisher would recognize it, but funny ideas are not easy to come by In Alex and Emma.

Alex is played by Luke Wilson and Emma is played by Kate Hudson. He also plays Adam, the young hero of the story within the story, and she plays four different nannies(Swedish, German, Latino, and American) who are employed by a rich French Divorcee(Sophie Marceau) who plans to marry a rich guy(David Paymer) for his money, but is tempted by the handsome young Adam, who is a tutor to her children, who remain thoroughly untutored.

So the story is a bore. The act of writing the story is also a bore, because it consists mostly trying out variations on the 1924 plot and then seeing how they look in the parallel story. Of course chemistry develops between Alex and Emma, who fall in love =, and just as well: There is a Hollywood law requiring fictional characters in such a situation to fall in love, and the penalty for violating it is a crappy movie. I give Alex and Emma a one out of five.