Monday 22 August 2011

Guilty Pleasures

This film started with a short, Greensplat. A personal tale about the wee village of Greensplat, when it was a village and before it become a (literal) hole in the ground. Nee wee film, and suggests a bigger documentary possibility.

The main feature then was Guilty Pleasures, about the guilty pleasures of reading Mills and Boon romances. It's quite a humourous movie, but when they read out segments, you can hear why. Oh, and one of the segments is read out by the writer, an elderly man. It's quite odd.

What they don't explore is why women read them, or why they are popular, and only touches a little on the impact of these novels, in that women get expectations that aren't fulfilled by reality. More or less, the film follows a few people around, and some of the couples do end up not extremely out of sync with M&B romance... although not all people are like that. (Amusingly, we also follow one of the models that poses for the cover, the male model that is, and his regime and his life and getting to be with a woman... although it's a shame he doesn't seem to be admitting that he is clearly gay.)

While the reader side is nice to see, I would have liked a little more about the other side of the whys for the books. Enjoyable documentary either way.

(No trailer on Youtube, but here's an interview with the director.)

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