
In reviewing the film The Greatest Hits (2024) it seems that the film has struck a chord with fans of the genre who are looking for classic rom com themes. If you’re the type who gets bored easily and can appreciate the impact of the 20-year gap, it’s likely that The Greatest Hits will satisfy your craving for familiar genre conventions. The protagonist is widowed, the heroine has a picture in her head of how her love should look and eventually finds someone a new potential love, but has a funny best friend and a hot brother who we never know the pink sister’s cast. About that context, it is clear that no masons were booked it seems to be enough to make them scream, This work has potential for future rom coms because the viewer knows what is coming as only one overcome alive sticks more thanks to the performer.
As far as this viewer is concerned, the major concern, and only worry is that when the film finally wants to go through the concept as entirely scientific in its execution, the story itself is getting prepared to end, and this should be troubling. Chung Chung Hoon’s brilliant photography, Page Buckner’s production design that is comprehensive, detailed yet never ostentatious, as well as Olga Mill’s costumes, are almost on the verge of a sci-fi parable love story but do not get there.
That made me wish for something different. This is what I want to say, even if this is the kind of thing that usually gets people in trouble, which is taking points off of a movie because it is not quite what they envisioned for its fare, rather than what is, in essence, a linear movie, and repetitive.
Morris, Harriet’s closest confidant, and a DJ, goes out of his way to explain to her in very polite terms that she is, in his words, trapped in a self-imposed vicious cycle of grief and that she must find a way to cross this phase in her life because it has turned into some sort of a perverted comfort zone that gives her an excuse to never progress in life.
When it comes to losses, the more realistic dramas dealing with grief transcend all boundaries by showing us how & why people feel what they feel with an almost anthropological sense of detailing or to counterpoint by translating those feelings down into universal ideas using big, sometimes wild but easy to understand parallels (science fiction, horror, and many other genres are particularly good at this). This one is stuck somewhere between the two, forever lost, just like Harriet, only able to swing to one side or barely move on ahead. For Harriet and the other women in the film, working with disordered eating also becomes a form of care. If only hard, labor intensive effort was the only criterion for success in film making, this movie deserved a standing ovation.
In this particular case, I believe Boynton tries to do a lot with a little. This character is shaped, for lack of a better word, almost utterly by a loss (and of all things, this is hardly something one who has lost a mate would want) and the measures she takes to deal with her condition (how wearing headphones in public almost becomes crazy to avoid hearing a triggering song, how the speaker has to buy out her own music collection to remove anything that comes how she grieves in silence while working at a public library). An illustrative example is, for instance, the idea of her great lost love which is almost abstract. You’re educated very little concerning him apart from the fact that he was extremely good looking, was fond of Harriet, and was a musician, and she was his producer, and (a rather late detail which one laments is a detail since it would have been a good point to explore) he was a bit of an egotistical knobhead.
As he appears on the screen, Justin H. Min who in After Yang left a mark screams life to the motion picture. There are some who may seem naturally cheerful and self-centered, but in his case, he possesses a captivating perspective that is very well controlled. There’s something about his character that convinces you that no matter how annoying he comes off, his heart is in the right place and he always looks out for Harriet.
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