by Mimi Lu

Created on: December 24, 2007

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

P.S I Love You (2007), directed by Richard lagravenese, is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill chick flick. It endeavours to transgress the barbed-wire electric fence of that venerable, immutable genre. Primarily, this is due to the fact that the chief love interest, Gerry (Gerald Butler), is dead. Yet Iagravenese, for some inscrutable reason, keeps on trying to bring him back to life, brain tumor and all. In a series of flamboyant self-necromatic gymnasitcs, he had Gerry pre-write a set of letters to his grief-stricken widow, Holly (Hilary Swank), each with an instruction that he believes will help her overcome her grief. How wrong he was. It causes Holly to hallucinate and even worse, chain herself to the past. Ultimately, Iagravenese's ill-fated choreography of ostentatious somersaults and cartwheels flings his film into the air, only for it to be impaled upon the proverbial barbed-wire and inevitably fried.

The problem is immediately evident in the very first scene, when Gerry was still alive and well. The argument between husband and wife is untitillating and repetitive Holly is throwing a petulantly childish tantrum because she believes that Gerry suggested to her mother that she does not want children. But do you blame him for coveting some welcome diversion from a whinging, highly-sensitive, attention-seeking wife of eight years in the form of a pink cherub or two? The easy-tempered Gerry futilely uses humor to pacify his fuming wife, but the best that the writers could come up with in reply to Holly's, Why can't I be the cute, carefree Irish guy who sings all the time?' was Because you can't sing without making dogs bark?' All the while, Holly is stripping into her Cat-woman style lycra leggings and bra and the mood is set for the sudden passionate run into each other's arms. Hilary Swank's hot body saves the day again. Unfortunately, the audience is not so easily guiled into the director's substitution of didactic substance with porn.

What annoys me most about P.S. I Love You is that it pretentiously purports to propagate a profound message about the transience of life and the ability of love to survive the cessation of life. Call me abnormal, but keeping one's husband's ashes by one's bed is not what I would define as a healthy relationship. Being sung to or cuddled by his ghost in bed does not exactly fit into that category either, I'm afraid. But his persistent epistles do not make the situation any easier for

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