To All the Boys I've Loved Before

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman

Romantic Comedies were dead before this came out. It’s hard to imagine but before the time of heroes we got so many fairly benail rom-coms starring two pretty people making eyes at each other and quipping pop culture laden jokes. Where they all bad? No, but for some reason Hollywood through the baby out with the bathwater and the careers of so many amazing actresses never had the jump of point that their contemporaries had before. Now, it may seem strange to highlight To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before over Crazy Rich Asians in a year that audiences fought back and said “We want rom-coms back!” but that should speak to have moving To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before was.

Very few films can sell teenage love and it seem real. Very few films of this type even have an eye for detail. For every Easy A and The Duff, we get something like The No Kiss List. Films that lack care and are made because that audience will eat anything… or so they think. This film felt like John Hughes touched us again. The performances were incredible but all of this speaks to the direction of this film from Susan Johnson. She wields with role with an assured confidence you rarely see in someones second feature film. She also made the incredible choice to use Michael Fimognari, who DP’d Oculus and The Haunting on Hill House, a director who had a striking eye for color and shadow on a film that could have easily used some by the numbers DP and had flat TV look.

I could ramble all day but Netflix needs to invest in Romantic Comedies over action films. Support directors like Susan Johnson and keep making more of these incredibly inexpensive films we need in these dark times. Also it had a fly ass kitchen and I miss me some Nancy Meyers kitchens!

Rating: 5/5 - I’d give it 6 if I could.

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