{"id":14545,"date":"2011-07-29T05:42:21","date_gmt":"2011-07-28T21:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=14545"},"modified":"2018-03-14T10:38:38","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T02:38:38","slug":"love-and-other-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2011\/07\/29\/love-and-other-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Love and Other Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"love-drugs-01\"Love and Other Drugs<\/strong><\/em> (2010) – on rental. By coincidence, this was the second of two rented films I’ve watched in this month about relationships centered on casual sex.<\/p>\n

Like the earlier film – No Strings Attached<\/em> – Love and Other Drugs<\/em> stars two well-known and attractive-looking leads engaged in physical relationships without long-term commitments. The two are Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Jamie, a smooth-talking ladies man employed as a salesperson for a mega pharmaceutical company; and Anne Hathaway, who plays Maggie, a waitress suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease. The two start off in a relationship based off sex-on-demand, and not surprisingly so, as the film progresses, potentially turns into something more.<\/p>\n

Funnily; it’s not this central theme of casual relationships that I found most engaging. In fact, if nothing else, I thought that the premise of Maggie having an incurable illness and thus wanting non-committal relationships had promise. However, the film doesn’t do anything much with that material, and only in the last act when Maggie attends a sharing between others having the same condition is there progression and a glimmer of what might had been. Rather, it’s the subplot of the machinations of large pharmaceutical companies that was given better treatment. It’s fun to see how cutthroat these companies can be against each other if the film’s representation of sales people is anything to go with.<\/p>\n

But the film was killed for me with a bunch of other problems. Apart from the story that springs no surprises, neither of the two leads are likable in their roles. Jamie is a serial womanizer, and by the film’s end, has slept with five women, two of whom in a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois. Hathaway looks unattractive, what with her curls and heavy eye-liner and shock-red lips. The dialog has lots of profanity – not surprising for a show of this nature – but good parts of it coming out from the Hathaway sounds forced.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the amount of skin… oh my. There is nudity in this film, and lots and lots of it. I’m not certain if Hathaway was willing to disrobe this much because she thought this was a way of demonstrating her progression to more adult fare, but a lot of the flesh paraded in this film was gratuitous.<\/p>\n

So, watchable though still somewhat disappointing. The other film stars Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. I’ll blog about that soon too . =)<\/p>\n

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Love and Other Drugs (2010) – on rental. By coincidence, this was the second of two rented films I’ve watched in this month about relationships centered on casual sex. Like the earlier film – No Strings Attached – Love and<\/p>\n

Read More Love and Other Drugs<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-entertainment","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}