There's Always Vanilla

There are great combinations in life. Peanut butter and chocolate. An embrace and a kiss. Cold lemonade and a hot dog. A romantic comedy and George Romero are not among those. This was only George's second movie. I almost wrote "believe it or not", but if you decide to torture yourself with this waterfall of monotony and misery, you'll wonder if it was his first film. Or a student film. Made on a dare, perhaps. Think of every cliche camera movement you can conjure that feels indicative of the late 60's and early 70's. This movie has all of them, used over and over again. This movie isn't so much copying filmmaking trends of the time as it is abusing them in the same way the guards abused the prisoners in the Stanford Prison Experiment. This movie's visual language has less grace than a three-legged water buffalo on ice skates. Crash zooms, harsh and inexplicable milliseconds-long cutaways, unnecessary close-ups, it's all here, shot in a way that will make you feel like you've been shot. The story? Wikipedia lists this as a "romantic comedy", a mislabeling so tragic, Oxford should sue for misuse of the English language and the pillaging of their dictionary. There is absolutely nothing about this that fulfills either of those two terms, not even accidentally. The story is of a narcissistic drifter who comes back home, bumps into a fashion model for local ads, they get involved, he mooches off her until she gets sick of it and leaves. The description lists her as an "older woman" and him a "younger man", despite those adjectives making more sense the other way around, but that's neither here nor there. When the movie, after 30 agonizing long minutes of just chilling and not being in a hurry to do anything, finally gets to the "plot" (air quotes the size of telephone poles), we get to watch this total loser sponge off a woman AND be a self-righteous dick about it. He is rude, caustic, unappreciative, lazy, indignant, and manipulative ... and guess what she is? A naive doormat. He asks her to get brochures for a local college, she gets them and says she'll help him fill them out, and he proceeds to berate her for trying to push him into something he doesn't want to do. She says he needs to get a job and contribute, he calls her a bitch, then bluffs his way into a job he doesn't deserve and isn't qualified for, and she apologizes to him for doubting him. And in case you're thinking "but this is from a different time", the women's lib movement was alive, well, and quite vocal by this point. The gender politics in this movie were regressive in 1971; in 2024, they're downright toxic. Not once in this movie, at any point in time, do they ever approach giving a justification for this woman to stay with this total turd. Even worse is that the movie is intercut with this leaky faucet of a human being giving direct narration to the camera every so often. This puts the movie in the unenviable position of having this physical manifestation of ball sweat be the protagonist, and I'm just not prepared to have to sympathize with a guy who's just trying to be copacetic and not let his hang-ups get him down, man, when he's being a radioactive nightmare to this woman who loves him for no discernable reason. I'd say this guy outkicked his coverage with this woman, but he outkicked his coverage by getting ANY woman. He shouldn't be able to score in a monkey whorehouse with a bushel of bananas. Oh, that title? That doubles down on how terrible this movie is positioned. It's a piece of advice the main character's father gives him after she's left the skid-mark. It's a dismissal of her as being too exotic, too high maintenance, and that his son should settle for something more basic. You mean this woman that literally allowed him to live rent free in her apartment, knocked her up, and verbally abused her? SHE'S the high maintenance one? Fuck right off, movie. Fuck all the way off. On top of all this, the movie is just painfully BORING. I've already covered how this isn't romantic in the slightest, but the audacity of calling this a "comedy" is like calling Chernobyl "a minor malfunction". This isn't just me being unable to appreciate comedy that isn't on my wave length. Movie 43, for instance, was agonizingly unfunny, but I could, objectively speaking, recognize that there was an attempt at a joke, however terrible it was. There's Always Vanilla doesn't attempt jokes. It is unfamiliar with the framework of humor in the same way a seahorse is unfamiliar with the internal combustion engine. So, without romance, and without comedy, this movie is left without purpose. We watch a rancid broccoli fart of a person that wants to shirk responsibility at every turn fail upwards into a sugar baby role, abuse his way out of it, and end up having to succumb to being an adult after all. He doesn't learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, he doesn't come to understand that maturity is a gift and not a burden; he is forced into it by circumstance, and resigns himself to it. My funny bone is tickled and my heartstrings are pulled. Oh, no, wait, that's heartburn from dinner. Always get those confused. There is nothing of redeeming value here. Not a damned thing. The acting is "well, I need something for my demo reel" levels of enthusiasm. The dialogue is dull. The score is unmemorable. The two leads don't just lack chemistry, if you watch it with your spouse, it may inadvertently kill the chemistry in your own marriage. It can't even be riffed on, because it sucks the life out of the room. I'm legally dead as I'm writing this. A friend of mine (who will read this and know I'm quoting him) once said George Romero's legacy is unshakable, based on the three original Dead movies and Creepshow, and to an extent, that is correct. Hell, even take out Creepshow (I wouldn't, but follow me here); the three dead movies are all titans, icons of not just horror movies but cinema itself. But while his legacy is cemented on those movies, if one wants to examine him as a director in totality and ask if he was a legendary director overall, movies like There's Always Vanilla provide ample evidence that maybe his reputation as a director is inflated by his successes. If I were him, I'd certainly want failures like this forgotten.