I am humiliated by how much I want to see "Letters to Juliet":
The movie really should push none of my buttons. I actually don't like Romeo & Juliet very much, mostly because I actually prefer the proposal scene in Henry V. How can a girl possibly resist something like this:
And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy...What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king.
Love that he's not sure she'll take him for himself so he offers himself up in an escalating list of titles.
Let's see what else. The Golden Cynical Dude in the trailer seems exceedingly dull. I know how the whole movie is going to end now, thanks to poor trailer decision-making. Amanda Seyfried is so absurdly peaches-and-cream and adorable that I think she might be a rom-com robot. And her conflicts with her pasta-making fiancee seem exceedingly manufactured.
And yet, I will likely see this on opening weekend. I am an enormous sucker for movies involving the exchange of letters, Vanessa Redgrave, second chances, and Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is an absurdly mature and lovely piece of pop songwriting. "I was a scarlet letter" spoken as a declaration of pride, devotion, and sexual desire is kind of amazing as a commercially successful act of feminist reclamation. Also, "this love is difficult, but it's real" is one of the sager one-sentence assessments of a relationship in a song ever. And it has one of those changing choruses, much like The Cranberries, which, in its shift from "it's just my imagination" to "it's not my imagination," is uplifting if you notice it.
All of which is to say that I am as susceptible to marketing to anyone else. I'm just capable of working myself into a disgruntled, elliptical, tryptophan-induced huff about it.