Love Gala at the Reef Lodge

Love on the Reef – 2023 – Damien Castro, Alejandro Contreras – USA

Love at the Lodge – 2023 – Caitlin Gerard – USA

The Love Gala – 2023 – Bruno Hernandez, Damian Romay – USA

Trying to not be a snob, and always dreaming of being the first to identify a hidden auteur buried under a mountain of garbage, I tried out a few of the cheap streaming rom-coms to see if they really are as bad and cliche-ridden as everyone says. I usually pick action or horror when I watch cheap crap online, and I’m rarely pleasantly surprised, so I don’t know why I thought rom-coms would be any different. All three films have ‘Love’ in the title and were released in 2023. By bizarre coincidence, though each has a different lead actress, they all have the same lead actor (Marc Herrmann), whom I’d never seen before, playing basically the same character, (even twice named ‘Liam’). In one he’s a surfing champ turned dive instructor, in the next he’s a struggling mountain lodge owner, and in the last he’s a horticulturalist running a botanical garden. Love at the Lodge was directed by a woman, and Love on the Reef and The Love Gala were each directed by two men, (that’s four total), and each were written by separate women, yet all three seem exactly the same in terms of style, plot and tone. Based on these three movies, I can confirm that all the stereotypes you may have heard about are very real. A repressed, educated, cosmopolitan career-woman is forced by circumstances to deal with a free-spirited, down-to earth (i.e. uneducated) guy who looks like a fashion model and hasn’t a moral blemish in his entire being. A little bickering, much flirting and witty banter ensues as they fall in love, and then a big misunderstanding breaks them apart at the end of the second act. Not to fear, though, because of course everything gets sorted out with wedding bells in the air and even the secondary characters, (often black, gay, or both), pairing up neatly too. Stringently chaste, the two leads never even kiss until the final scene. Marc Herrmann’s characters are all connected with nature – the ocean, the mountains, vegetation – seeming to symbolize the grounding, centering effect that irrationally draws the uptight city girl to let go of the corporate uniform and become a real human being. Well, as with Asylum’s mockbusters and any average geezer teasers, the junk is always advertised as junk, so everyone knows what they’re getting into, but my complaint about these disposable timewasters is that they are not just harmless fun; they’re soul-killers too. They’re a wad of cotton-candy being sold to customers for the same price as sirloin steak. All these writers, directors, composers, actors and cinematographers I assume would prefer to work on stuff they could be proud of, but the decision was made that quality is no guarantee of profit, so why bother? It’s no more profitable, but no more expensive either, so if all things are equal, why not find people with talent who can transform the predictable pulp material into something interesting; something that viewers would be happy to pay for again and to recommend to friends, not leave them feeling ripped off. Look what Orson Welles did with Touch of Evil or John Carpenter with Halloween. The producers of both expected nothing more than B-grade, drive-in fodder, but got auteur classics as a bonus for the same money. Look at David Lynch’s G-rated The Straight Story, which would have been instantly forgotten feel-good Oscar-bait without his involvement. The concept is not crazy; it has been done many times to financial and critical success.