Under a Lover's Moon

I know, I know. These sort of movies have a standard story-line. We meet girl and the boy, something goes wrong, blah-blah-blah, happy ending.

And 95% of the time I can like these movies, because they are rather mindless and just what I want to watch after a busy day.

This one however... Barely 5 minutes into the movie and I want to punch the female lead in the face! She's SOOOO annoying!

7 minutes in and I want the boy to RUN for his life and never look back. He does run, at first, but then the idiot goes back to her because he's some masochist or something. Oh, excuse me, I mean because he's so in love with her. (Why? Why? Why?)

She's so incredibly selfish, so self-absorbed that I sincerely cannot understand why he went so out of his way to 'win her back'. She cannot for a second try to see his side, she doesn't WANT to either and her attitude when she finds out what freaked him out is beyond stupid.

It has the usual blah-blah-blah. The ending is barely surprising. I liked the 2 male leads, I liked the sister and her story-line, but the main character... It's girls like her that make you cheer for the serial-killer/monster in certain movies.

Concept was Stupid, actors were horrific, UP TV should do better! No way was this any good, can't accept a guy leaving a girl at the alter and being forgiven, and the lists by the bride were asinine!

Romantic TV movies don't need to be pretentious or deep, but they do have to amuse you and make you feel better at the end. This one doesn't do either.

The lead actress is plain awful. Her character (Ava) is annoying from the very first minute. Not quirky, not relatable, just annoying. Self-obsessed, judgemental, dominant, childish, superficial, neurotic.

The supporting characters aren't much better. Really no idea why the two guys (Brett and Kyle) are fighting over her except for stupid masculine pride or testosterone maybe. Run, boys, run!

Examples of the very poor writing: she falls asleep on a airbed in the swimmingpool. She falls over and doesn't seem to wake up or try to get out of the pool. Not believable at all. Both male leads are trying to build the highest pile of sand in a contest and the winner gets to take her out. Really? And due to a misunderstanding Ava and Brett broke up when they were in high school, but apparently he didn't bother to clear that up when they got back together and got engaged.

It's filled with cliches. Usually that's quite acceptable - there are only so many ways to tell a love story - but somehow that irritated me in this movie.

Not worth your time, unless you want to get annoyed.

The only surprise in the movie was how Brett put up with ava for as long as he did. Absolutely nothing likable about the main character. The sister's storyline was more interesting.

I desperately wanted to like this movie. I love the main actress, Rebecca Dalton, but even she couldn't save the character she was playing. Her character as written was one of the least likeable female rom-com personalities I've ever seen...and I've seen a LOT of rom-coms.

At base, she's a control freak. Now this in itself isn't a horrible problem, it's been done enough in rom-coms that it could even be considered a trope: "Control freak learns to loosen up and relax". The problem is...she never changes. When you start with an unlikeable character you need character growth in order to show they've changed into someone likeable. There simply isn't any character growth to be found in this movie. Even in the last scene, she's STILL manipulating the male lead and forcing him to do things he's uncomfortable with and doesn't want to do.

This is compounded by the fact that she's not "oh it's a cute over the top rom-com" kind of controlling. She's honestly kinda creepy manipulative "no one in their right mind would put up with this insanity" kinda controlling. I don't want to have to spoiler tag this review so I won't go into specifics, but a central theme of the interactions between the two leads is being better at communicating. While the blame/ownership of the bad communication is placed entirely on the male lead, good grief was that not the case at all. Her character could teach a master class on gaslighting...

5.5 stars would be exactly average. This is definitely below average, so I went with 4 stars. It's a 3-star movie, but I bumped it up 1 because of the lead actress. She played the character as it was written well...but that was the problem.