Review of This Year`s Love

Introduction

This one’s a bit of a departure for me. I am known to most as your all round action movie fan. I like nothing better than a huge blockbuster of a moive loaded with special effects. Throw in some aliens and I’m even happier. This is, of course, a generalisation but it’s not one I can really disagree with if I am being totally honest. I do enjoy a wide range of movies but I must admit to gravitating towards the afore mentioned blockbusters.

So, for me to site down and review This Year’s Love, a British made romantic comedy, was quite a challenge for me. It’s a challenge I enjoyed though it has to be said, not for the film content in particular but because it’s nice to watch something a little different every now and then.

So here we have a tale which starts with the break up of a marriage then goes on to look at a 3 year period of time in which a group of thirtysomethings lives intertwine through to the end where . . . nah that would be telling :).

Video

The disc presents an anamorphic 16:9 ratio picture and does a reasonable job. I will admit to having extreme reservation when the titles boast “made with the help of National Lottery money” but overall it’s a fair picture. It’s not one of the best transfers ever it has to be said but it’s pretty clear of any marks in the most part and the colours are lifelike, giving a more real-life look to the proceedings. It’s probably a good thing as this kind of film wouldn’t have benefited from an overly enhanced image.

Audio

This is a little disappointing. No Dolby Digital 5.1 here, instead it’s a dated Dolby Pro-Logic effort. It’s not bad overall though, the soundstage is fairly wide and the rear channel is used to some effect but, for me, Dolby Digital 5.1 transfers always sound far more dynamic and lively.

This movie has allot of decent accompanying music from people such as Stereophonics, Ocean Colour Sceen and Garbage to name but a few and the tunes sound fine . . . but would have sounded oh so much better given the full digital works. Fair enough, it may well have been a budgetary constraint but this is a review not a spreadsheet overview :).

Features

As with most region 2 movies we don’t get allot in the way of extras. We get some cast interviews totalling about 7 minutes, a featurette again weighing in at about 7 minutes, a small making of segment and a trailer. To be fair it outdoes many other region 2 discs in the extras department but these extras are really no more than fluff. You could argue that most extras fall into this category, fair enough. But you do get extras on discs that actually add something to the movie be showing you what might have been or further explaining parts of the movie (take the extras on Sixth Sense as a good examply of non-fluff extras).

Conclusion

Let’s talk about the movie. I guess you could sum it up as a “Four weddings and a funeral” meets “Notting Hill” meets “Lock Stock”, as in it reminds you of all of these yet fails to successfully emulate or build on any of them. It may be a little unfair to compare “This Year’s Love” to the others as they are trying to tell a more realistic story however it is marketed on the backs of these so comparisons are unavoidlable.

At the start of the movie Danny (Douglas Henshaw) and Hannah (Catherine McCormack) get married. It lasts for all of half a day when Danny finds out that Hannah has slept with his best man. These two then go their separate ways and meet a group of people whose lives, over the course of the next 3 years, intertwine.

Through the course of the film you get familiar with several other characters. You have Liam (Ian Hart) who has some kind of obsessive disorder, Marey (Kathy Burke) a pub singer with a very poor self opinion, Sophie (Jennifer Ehle) the usual rich kid gone bad and Cameron (Dougray Scott) the good looking womaniser.

The setting had a feeling of ‘been there many times before, done that many times better’. The backdrop for this story is Camden Town, London. It seems to be a part of London populated largely by Scottish people rather than Londoners which I found odd . . . although I wouldn’t really know if there were more Scottish people living in Camden Town than Londoners I suppose.

Being a British movie I was looking forward to a good few laughs as can be found in the afore mentioned movies but unless your idea of a laugh is Kathy Burke needlessly swearing or peoples live getting screwed up then I don’t think you’ll find any here. Maybe it’s just me, I have read allot of very positive reviews of this movie but I simply didn’t get it. I found myself spending far too much time looking at the DVD display to see how long was left than is healthy.

I just wish I could say I found these characters interesting but they weren`t. I really wanted to end up caring for them and how they ended up but again I couldn’t. More than all this I wanted to laugh with them, but I didn’t.

I enjoyed “Four weddings and a funeral”, I loved “Notting Hill” and I thought “Lock Stock” was simply excellent. Unfortunately “This years love” was very poor in comparison.