by Jerry Roberts

April 14, 2002

This movie makes me ashamed to have been born in November.

Sweet November uses the movie cliché playbook like it was a holy text. A remake of a 1968 movie starring Sandy Dennis and Anthony Newly it owes a lot more to Love Story, so much, in fact, that it is one loving glance away from a tremendous lawsuit. Love apparently means never having to hire a script doctor.

How many clichés are provided here? Let me count the ways:

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

1.) Young guy (Keanu Reeves) has a fear of commitment, he’s a workaholic who has just driven his babalicious girlfriend away because he ignores her.
2.) He is an ad executive. Which means:
3.) He drives a Jag
4.) He’s always on the phone
5.) He’s addicted to coffee
6.) He is working on the biggest account of his career.
7.) It is a product that allows him to make a lewd, sexist campaign that gets him fired. (it’s for hot dogs).
8.) He makes a lewd, sexist ad campaign.
9.) It gets him fired.
10.) His girlfriend is a brunette. Brunettes in bad movies are the universal sign of a non-commitment.
11.) He meet-cutes a gregarious blonde (Charleze Theron). Blondes are universal bad movie sign that he’s found the right girl.
12.) She involves him in a crime of good will by rescuing puppies from a science lab.
13.) He wants nothing to do with her despite the fact that it is obvious to even to the clinically dead that she is perfect for him.
14.) To show her affection she mails him a stupid gift. In this case: a puppy donning a party hat.
15.) She wants a relationship with him based on term limits.
16.) Her term limits are so incredibly lame that we make a mental list of flaws in her 17.) plan before it even gets underway. In this case, she only wants to stay with him through the month of November. And, just in case we missed that point, she proudly displays a calender in her apartment with the past days crossed off.
18.) She doesn’t initially tell him why she has term limits beyond a glib philosophical explanation. In this case: “It's long enough to be meaningful and short enough to stay out of trouble”. Uh-huh.
19.) Their first sexual encounter is awkward and brief.
20.) Their second sexual encounter is slow and “romantic”.
21.) She’s dying.
22.) She doesn’t bother telling him this until he opens her medicine cabinet and finds it packed with so many bottles of medicine that it makes a better sight gag than a dramatic revelation (I promise you, there much be 250 bottles in there).
23.) She gets mad at the revelation and throws a handful of the bottles at him
24. He doesn't bother to ask the inevitable:
What disease do you have?
Why didn’t you tell me?
Is it curable?
What treatments have you had?
Since you are taking over 200 kinds of medication isn’t it possible that you might be overmedicating?
It is only after he discovers her disease that she begins to deteriorate.
She says she wants no medical treatment despite the medicine bottles spilling out of her medicine cabinet
He takes walks to their favorite spots while angelic music plays and he flashes back to their daily outings. Which include:
An intimate bath
A visit to the marina
A day at the beach
Playing with the puppies
A day with a local kid who gets picked on
Displays of affection:
1. Passionate kissing

2. Kissing passionately

3. Kissing with a little passion

4. Kissing with a lot of passion

5. Kissing, passion, then kissing again

He has a womanizing best friend who doesn’t understand why he’s gone ga-ga over this woman and is giving up his career.
She has a cross-dressing gay best friend who only serves the function of zen romantic philosophy and nursing duties.
She contracts Ali McGraw’s Disease, whereby she gets more and more beautiful the sicker she gets.
He doesn’t help with the disease but instead buys her all the gifts that she would have wanted had they had time to get married. This despite the fact that he has no job and she will be dead soon.
His love for her defies even the laws of physics: he climbs in the window with a sack full of presents and he still has room in it for an automatic dishwasher (yes, an automatic dishwasher).
The weather seems to get grayer and grayer as the end approaches.
The movie ends with out a death scene but instead a scene in which he is asked to simply walk away – AND HE DOES!!
There, that’s it, that’s the entire movie and I promise that I haven’t left anything out. And just in case you thought that the movie couldn't be any more inept, Warner Brothers got the release date wrong on two counts: First, they released it in February not November. Second, they obviously wanted to cash in on the Valentine's Day date movie couples. BUT THEY RELEASED IT ON FEBRUARY 16TH!

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!