The Convenient Groom (2016)

That is some odd posture, lady.

    Oh, that’s nice, we’re not opening in New York City but in some kind of harbor town. All right, movie, that’s one tick in your favor so far. Our apparent lead seems to be a relationship therapist of some kind that shoots her live (?) show in her living room with a big logo behind her featuring brainy glasses as the tagline “Just ... no.” I like that, at least. We are treated to shots of desperate- seeming women glued to their tablets and phones and drinking in her advice. I wonder if the man who eventually teaches her to not think so much and instead feel will be some kind of sailor or a woodworker? [spoiler: woodworker]

    Her advice seems to consist of identifying petty nitpicks as self-evident deal-breakers on a first date and telling women to ditch the man then and there. And the things she identifies really are slight annoyances, like an overly-technical coffee order or getting overly upset if someone spells your name wrong when you have a non-traditional spelling, but if you use those as deal-breakers you’ll never get more then three sentences into a date before it’s over.

    Next she’s strolling around with the guy who’s going to break up with her in a few scenes and hey, whaddaya know, they don’t get along so great: misunderstood humor, petty holdover arguments, is the therapist bad about her own relationship? I also would really like some clarification on what she calls her ‘career.’ Is she on YouTube, Twitch, part of a larger platform? Was was live or did they just not do a good job of showing the video being produced? I’m not saying there’s not an audience for this kind of online content but the logistics do matter a bit. Her assistant mentions how ‘her website’ is getting big which ... doesn’t mean anything.

    Her clearly eventual love interest is introduced as repairing her standing desk and it’s taking too long for her liking, so maybe not strictly woodworking but clearly handy-man and the theme is going to be she’s too fast and needs to be taught to slow down, which ties in with her therapy advice, which fine, decent enough. Also despite her loud protestations they clearly had a romantic history when they were younger. I will now stare at the ceiling and await the breakup scene. We’re at five minutes 24 seconds, I say it’s over with by nine minutes in.

    We’re actually past ten minutes now and it’s clear that he’s going to dump her because her blog and its fame is taking over their engagement announcement and their entire relationship and moreover he keeps trying to get her to acknowledge that he’s not perfect and she keeps not reading him correctly and for once I’m 100% on his side, she is just not right for him. Run away from the crazy, man. Also her assistant keeps forcing the issue and this movie would be 1,000% more interesting if she just ends up as an evil mastermind who has a full-on villain arc, just saying [spoiler: they get like halfway there but eventually it just fizzles, which is a shame].

    They start shooting the show and despite earlier more or less establishing it was taped they’re now live? Back to staring at the ceiling. They ‘lose the feed’ which isn't a thing unless she's sending this via satellite and the fiance takes this opportunity to break things off. Our actual love interest happens to be secretly listening in due to dog-related shenanigans. Also turns out the fiance was cheating on her which wasn’t set up and makes no sense and blunts the very real points he was making but I guess our lead can’t ever really be in the wrong.

    At least our actual love interest immediately tells our lead he overheard what happened, glad we won’t have to have a fake conflict over it, and then she goes back and ... oh, oh no, I just got the premise of the movie. Maybe I’m about to be proven wrong (the movie’s on pause right now) but she’s about to announce her fiance just dumped her and immolate her career and so the actual love interest is going to jump onto camera and claim to be her fiance. Such a stupid thing would never have occurred to me without that dumb, dumb movie title.

    Wow, whole fifteen seconds later and I’m right. Just a moment while I go break things.

    Ok, so apparently there’s a book deal on the line so they have to do through the motions of putting together a wedding to save her career. Dumb but serviceable. There are several scenes of him being amiable and her being miserable and the assistant being low-key evil. I would like to point out that when she goes over to his parents’ for dinner his younger, high-school age sister gushes that she and all her friends watch her show which, no, no you don’t honey, just stop.

    The following scenes are nice enough. There’s a sudden power cut so now she’s staying in his guest room, he starts pointing out her little foibles, they enjoy spending time with each other, basically they start dating and find they like each other, not groundbreaking stuff. One night they’re about to finally smooch when suddenly in a scene I really did not see coming the ex-fiance shows up and says they should get back together, which even in the context doesn’t make sense on any level. This causes her to step back from the fake-wedding stuff so ok, makes sense in a false-dilemma kind of way, I guess, but you’re lucky I’m grading these things on a curve, movie.

    Lessee, we’re less than twenty minutes from the end, that’s enough for the breakup to be announced, a ‘moving on’ montage, then something about maybe her dead mom reminds her of what he means to her? She’s mentioned a broken memento from her childhood a couple of times, maybe he fixes that. Let’s roll them bones and see what happens [spoiler: only got the memento right, I’m losing my touch].

    Okay, the ex-fiance’s girlfriend releases a video revealing everything and apparently this brings it all crashing down, which, to put it simply, is not how the internet works, randos post stuff all the time, but sure, movie, deny our lead even a tiny bit of agency.

    Her career now in ruins, apparently, he tries to convince her their sudden love is real, she blows him off and brings up that memento thing from high-school they’ve mentioned a few times but never bothered to explain, he stomps away. She then destroys the rest of her relationships in her misery, and where are you going movie? Fake fiance’s mom shows up and in very small words explains to our lead that differences and even fights in a relationship aren’t the end of the world. Then fake fiance releases a video explaining how it was all his idea and he liked her back in high school and this is like sub YouTube makeup drama stuff right here. He states he loves her and she rushes over and lookit that, happy ending.

    The complications and hoops in this one were just as stupid as in that royal one but at least they did the stupid stuff to themselves. The male lead was pretty good (he was Christopher on ‘Gilmore Girls,’ if that means anything), she had a tendency to mug a bit too much, and they have a couple decent side-characters so this wasn’t a complete waste. Everything involving social media was very “out of touch 50 year old writer” but that’s hardly that big a sin. Her emotional beats were simplistic but at least made sense: her parents constantly fought so relationships devoid of conflict were the only kind that mattered, that at least follows. The plot shenanigans were far more random than I’m used to and I’m torn between being annoyed at things coming out of nowhere and being pleasantly surprised at being surprised, I’m going to call that one a wash. I know I’ve only watched four of these so far but I feel pretty comfortable nestling this one right in the middle of the pack. Nothing stood out as either particularly good or bad and I’m likely to forget this one as soon as I watch the next one.