The following was a writing exercise I did with a writers' group circa 2012, when I was about 26. I think the exercise was essentially to write a review, as if for a newspaper, about a movie called Love Letter winning an award. Love Letter as both a book and a movie, in this case, is fictive (although I believe there are at least a few books and movies with this title). Opinions expressed in this writing do not necessarily reflect my current or future beliefs.
Love Letter Adaptation Wins Oscar
Having apparently exhausted all potential film plot lines, Oscars are now being given out exclusive;y to historical pieces and sappy book adaptations as there is no other choice. Thus the guy who directed the adaptation of the predictable, mass-pleasing novel Love Letter accepted the Oscar last night for Best Picture.
This book was written by the same cynical at best, actually-that-much-of-a-pussy at worst asshole who brought us The Notebook. An unsettling two million people have read - or at least purchased - this waste of trees, and thanks to the money-hungry, fish-in-a-barrel filmmakers behind Love Letter the movie, approximately fifty million people have spent an evening being anesthetized by the kind of love story that perpetuates the fantasy of fate-driven, meant-to-be, soulmate bull shit that already plagues Western minds from enough sources, no matter how hard one tries to be logical about it.
Perhaps Disney/Pixar could make some tales about defense mechanisms, divorce, unfaithfulness, uncertainty under the burden of the modern overabundance of choice, attachment disorders, unfortunate childhood psychoses playing out throughout adulthood, and therapy.
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Update: Since writing this, I married a woman I wasn't in love with. Four days later I told her I'd never really been in love with her and was in fact in love with a friend of mine I'd known for nine years. That friend and I then moved to Austin to be together and pursue our dreams of being a farmer and a comedian, respectively. We are in love and will be getting married on May 13, 2017. I kinda believe in fate now.