Love Don't Cost a Thing

Do you remember the 80's? Did you collect Garbage Pail Kids while the NKOTB-buttoned girls played Care Bears and Kid Sister?

If you did, then there's a chance you had to suffer through quite a few 80's films.. Or rather, it felt like you were being made to suffer, way back when.

We're a little older now, maybe more mature and hopefully a little more open to rediscovering the 80's.

"Can't Buy Me Love" is an 80's masterpiece I still enjoy today. Dempsey's nasal sonnets, his little brother's hustles and their parents' 30-something attitude to everything are classic. Ranked up there with "Weird Science", "Real Genius" and "Raising Arizona", the original tested the times while paving new ground.

"Love Don't Cost A Thing" is a paycheck for the producers whose idea of a good time must be making K-Mart xerox copies of ideas they wished they had first.

If they have a Triple-Gold Globe Awards for the likes of Master P and Snoop's acting quality, I'll make sure to steal a cell phone and call the 900 number that gives your ghetto fabulous trash 5 Bling-Blings and two slaps across your face on GP, Uuuugh.

This 'Movie' is hard to flush, let alone swallow.

Prior to watching this, I had not seen "Can't Buy Me Love". This is one of those movies that came out while I was still delivering papers, and I didn't see it because I read horrible reviews for it in the paper. I decided to finally watch it, and while the reviews were way too harsh, this is not a great romantic comedy, and it falls flat largely because of Nick Cannons over-the-top and somehow, still wooden at the same time performance. This actually could have been a pretty fun movie with a different leading man. Christina Milian does a good job, and you cannot fault her. It would also help if Cannon and Milian had more onscreen time together, as it is a bit limited. They just never build a really strong connection, and I'm not entirely sure why Milian would be interested in him for real. I actually think it would have been a better movie if Kenan Thompson was the lead, or hell, Kal Penn, and Cannon was one of the sidekicks, he just cannot handle this role at all. He tries, and sometimes it is fun, but it is wildly inconsistent.

Steve Harvey is over-the-top cringe, I really really think someone else should have played his dad. Every scene he is in is painful to watch, his expressions, his vocal tone, everything feels grossly out of place, and he is normally pretty funny.

The movie is filled with some great hip hop and rap music from the early 2000's, and is a blast from the past, the dancing, the clothes, etc. I do love that Alvin is a hardworking intelligent entrepreneur, but again his character is OTT exaggerated by cannon, he comes across less cool than Urkel actually. He does not feel like a real person, but a bizarre caricature.

If you're a teen though, you might still enjoy it, and I did enjoy it at times, even though I am well out of my teens, but I feel as thought this could have been a really good movie, and it was, instead a missed opportunity.

You know Hollywood's hard up for material when it starts blowing the dust off movies from as recent as the 1980's to rehash and remake (films that weren't any good to begin with, I might add). `Love Don't Cost a Thing' is a pointless update of `Can't Buy Me Love,' the tale of a high school nerd who hires the hottest babe on campus to pretend to be his girlfriend. His hope is that, through his association with her, he will gain entree into the `cool' crowd at school.

The stereotypes of adolescents that the film presents weren't fresh twenty years ago and they're even less so today. The story is utterly hackneyed and predictable what with Alvin being first an object of scorn, then - after some utterly unconvincing ghetto-`Pygmalion' makeover scenes - finding acceptance in the upper echelon of with-it kids, while at the same time turning his back on and rejecting the fellow nerds who used to be his friends. True to the formula, Alvin eventually learns a lesson or two about what being true to oneself really means.

There are virtually no funny moments in the film and the scenes between Alvin and his sex-obsessed dad begin to border on the creepy. `Love Don't Cost a Thing' may seem clever and fresh to audiences not old enough to have seen many movies, let alone the original on which this film is based. The rest of us with somewhat longer memories will gladly take a pass. What next? A remake of `Howard the Duck'?

Viewers should not be upset with the quality of this tired formula film. It was basically a remake of another tired formula film, "Can't Buy Me Love". If viewers knew their film history they would know to stay clear of sub-par formula films that simply lift plots from even worse sub-par formula films. But Hollywood depends on the stupidity of average viewers who think this is an original and sweet plot about high school fears and wishes to be popular.

Another sad effort for us- the public. The film rates a solid D. Thank you for the time. Off to slice up, or praise another film, maybe a classic like Frankenstein (1932) a Gothic winner!

Unlike the original movie from 1987 "can't buy me love", "Love doesn't cost a thing" is too slow a little bit boring, most of the characters are annoying and the movie as a whole is just not fun. They try a little bit too hard to be cool and updated but as the girl said in the movie "Urkel has become gangster" it's just not it. the idea was good, re-make the classic and the beloved film of the 80's in the millennium version, but we've seen too many teen movies that look and sounds just like this, and they are better. If you like Christina Milian you'll LOVE her in this movie, because she is so amazing in this role, but that's the only good thing i have to say about this movie.