Films for Thoughts on Thursday: Love, Rosie

This is a weekly meme that I am hosting here at Reviews from a Bookworm. To take part all you have to do is share a movie review once a week, link back to Reviews from a Bookworm and add your link to the linky tool.


This weeks movie review will be for:


Love, Rosie

I posted my review for Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern yesterday, and it's fair to say that it was less than glowing. I didn't enjoy the book at all and didn't really see why so many people think it's a romantic story. I couldn't really find even two positive things to comment on about it, I'm not even sure I found one. The book was something I wanted to pick up and throw out my window, never to be seen again. But, and it's an important but, I still wanted to see the movie despite how much I hated the book. The movie looked like it had a lot of potential, it felt like it could be another Maze Runner for me. The books are huge disappointments, but they change so much for the movie adaptation that it actually makes a brilliant film. Thankfully that was the case with Love, Rosie.

I'm not about to tell you that if you go see it that you're going to be watching some amazing piece of cinema. You're not. It's a light, fluffy, romantic comedy and delivers what you'd expect from that genre. It's helped along greatly by great casting, Sam Claflin and Lily Collins are brilliant leads for this film. It doesn't have the greatest script, but the humour that they add to the role really makes it work better. It's as predictable as any romcom, we all know how it's going to end before we even get there. It's the journey that they'll take to get there that will matter.

The story follows Rosie and Alex, who've been best friends since they were children, as they reach their late teens and the lines between friendship and romance get a little blurred. Thanks to drunken blackouts and poor timing, they can never seem to take their relationship past friendship. As they get older and their lives pull them in different directions, you begin to wonder if they'll ever be able to get it together and tell each other how they feel.

I'd already read in advance that they had shortened the time span. The characters go from young children to their 50s in the book, in this it only spans twelve years of their lives. That is what the book should have been like, so I'm very grateful for that change in the movie. It wouldn't have worked well on screen anyway, what with the actors needing to age as the characters do. They only age twelve years in this and even then they don't look as old as they should. Whoever wrote the screenplay should be applauded for the fact that they recognised what needed to be changed. The time span had to be shortened and the characters couldn't be so useless.

One of the things I was most happy with was the fact they made both characters much more likeable. I felt a lot of sympathy for Alex in the movie, something I never once felt when reading the book. Most of the time I just wanted to reach inside the book and slap him. And Rosie seemed like less of a pushover in the film then she did in the book. You still get frustrated with the characters and their inability to tell each other how they really feel. But it's not as infuriating as it is in the book. The shorter time span means that we don't have to sit through sham marriage after sham marriage, unplanned pregnancy after unplanned pregnancy and near miss after near miss. I also want to comment on Jaime Winstone as Ruby because she did a beyond amazing job. She was my favourite character by a mile and was responsible for most of the funny moments.

6/10 Butterflies

I'm definitely not going to say that Love, Rosie is some amazing piece of cinema. It isn't. It's a chick flick and it delivers what I would have expected from a chick flick. It's romantic and cheesy, sometimes to the point where I was cringing behind my hands. It has those hilariously funny moments that had me spitting my drink out as I tried not to choke. It had the near misses and the frustration. It had the ending we were all expecting. It had everything I needed and it entertained me. Not an amazing movie but an enjoyable one, and one I'd probably watch again. I'd recommend if you're looking for a light, funny comedy with superb lead actors. 

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