Review of Love Story (2011) by Forrest P — 14 Sep 2010

Believe it or not, and I know that this goes against my usual taste, but I actually liked Love Story. Is it the best romance film I've ever seen? No. Is that plot annoyingly familiar? Somewhat, but only because an audience is likely to have seen it so many times since then.

What I liked about Love Story were about four major things. First of all, I really, really loved Ali MacGraw's character, Jenny. She is not the typical love interest I normally see in the movies. She's caring, teasing, loving, and occasionally even pretty funny. She's the kind of girl that *I* would like to know. And she's very believable, very genuine, and very endearing. She's a lot of what makes this movie work.

I also liked Ryan O'Neil's character, though to a lesser extent. He's not quite as captivating as his love interest, mostly because he's a lot more bland. I mean, he's a nice guy, but not one I could fully connect with. I connected a lot more with Jenny, though the scenes in which he tries to take her to Paris toward the end of the film became very poignant.

The second thing about this film I really loved was the music. Some of it is classical music with a beautiful score written by Francis Lai.

The third thing was the screenplay. Though the plot is a tad overdone and a little emotionally milking, it is no where near as bad as modern films that try to imitate this style. I think that's where its biggest flaw comes from, like Airplane!: imitators that suck.

The last really great part of the movie was the ending, which left me slightly uneasy and as though not everything was accomplished by the characters, which I deem as being the more poignant and courageous ending.

So, I liked Love Story a lot. I didn't love it outright, but I think most modern audiences will like it even more than Nicholas Sparks and Michael Bay.

8/10.