.Gary Dretzka
.Leonard Klady.
.David Poland
.Ray Pride

May 19, 2003

I have decided that Down With Love is The Matrix for ladies.   It is The Lovetrix.  It is not reality.  There are fabulous clothes that almost nobody can get away with wearing in the real world.  It is filled with men and women living out the romantic notions of our mothers and father who were born into earlier versions of The Lovetrix.   Where else but in The Lovetrix could you the sell the idea of women having sex like men?  I don’t know about y’all, but 30 seconds of foreplay and a 2 second orgasm is not my idea of a perfect world.

In The Lovetrix, the sexes are spun around.  Miss Renee Z. is The One.  You may have assumed that she was the Trinity of Lunch, Dessert & Holy Barf.   Down With Love is her journey.  She does not really believe that she is The One.  Sarah Paulson’s Vikki Hiller is her Morpheus.  Vikki is sure that Renee’s Barbara Novak is The One.   It is up to Novak to save female kind.  No matter how she karate chops her way away from it, she really cares about love more than any form of logic.  Love and chocolate.

The One is stuck in The Lovetrix, in control of her sexual powers but unable or unwilling to use her power.  She wanders around looking in vain for her Agent Smith to fight.  In The Lovetrix, no one can hear you whine.

My Ewan is the Trinity of this saga.  He looks great.  He wears slick outfits.  He can kick some gluteus.  If you get him alone in a cave, he will pop all of his hoses!  He is the one that The One will inevitably love.  It is just a matter of time and careful production design.

Ewan may be tiny enough to slip into a faux chinchilla pocket, but for me, he has the skills of The Merovingian!  If you did not fight the lines to see The Matrix Reloaded this weekend, The Merv takes foreplay to a whole new level.  Girls get a mouthful of chocolate as a super bonus! 

Only a bunch of men would want to sit around for seven hours to tell one simple story.  Peyton Reed builds, changes and destroys The Lovetrix in just 90 minutes. 

Mr. Reed does talk to journalists.  He did not talk to me.  So I will pretend that he is just like the Wachowski Boys, although I have actually met the Wachowski Boys.  (I cannot tell you anything about them though for fear of being mysteriously hit by a speeding vehicle while crossing the street.) 

Senor P. Reed’s work proves that he has studied all the philosophical journals: Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Home & Garden, early Glamour. 

Some will accuse Pey Pey, as he likes to be called when tied up with an apple in his mouth, of being too pseudo-indulgent for words.  They are just jealous.  They wish that they could mix checks and plaids and not get laughed out of their morning carpool.  It is not the ideas of double-entendre that is really single-entendre or women in hats or Tony Randall playing a heterosexual that bothers them!  It is their own insecurity.

Consider The P’s use of names.  The name, “Barbara Novak” has twelve 12 letters and twelve is usually the last year before a girl becomes a woman.  Men are usually the “pitchers” in romantic comedies, but here the man is named “Catcher Block.”  “Vikki Hiller” may seem innocent, but notice the two consonants in each name  “Hiller” is only one crossed leg from “Hitler.”  And David Hyde Pierce’s “Peter McMannus.”  Could you get any more phallic than that name?  He is the weaker of the two men.  The weak man has the manly peter and the strong man is a catcher.  Ready to find a chat room where you can impress the other fashion geeks yet?

It is also very, very, very, very important to discuss the box office comparison between Down With Love and About A Boy.  Wild accusations were being slung across the Internet all weekend about Down With Love’s $7.3 million trying to sneak by About A Boy’s alleged $8.6 million gross on its opening weekend last year.  I have investigated carefully. 

I went to the theater myself and saw the lines that you had to stand in to get tickets to Down With Love.  I saw the ridicule that grown men have to endure when they finally got to the front of the line and were the first ones to buy Down With Love tickets in hours!  But who would you rather be with after the movies?  A woman who is thinking about sex and drinking many martinis or a bunch of guys eating rice pudding out of a rusty can, praying to be The One who has sex with the girl who came to the movies wearing a rubber suit?

People seemed upset at the end of The Lovetrix.  They felt that the ending was too abrupt.  They wanted to know whether Mrs. Renee was actually persuaded to eat solids while carrying My Ewan’s babies.  They wanted to know what would happen when hippie fashion came to New York.  They were enraged by not being told what “There Is No Underwire” really meant. 

The next film in the trilogy, Non-Plussed With Love, will upset fangirls even more.  I have it on good authority that Vikki Hiller and David Hyde Pierce’s Peter MacMannus will actually have sexual intercourse, and she will discover that her vibrator is not the only thing that can help her achieve orgasm.  You have to look out for those wiry ones!  This will shake The Lovetrix to its core, the poorly decorated Dion.  There we will find that human life is four reincarnations away from true freedom, as Dioo is followed by Diop, Dioq and finally, the perfect world of Dior.

The final film, Up with Love, should calm everything down.  Or so Pffff-Re hopes.  The pressure is on to explain everything.  Fox executives have already thrown out the idea of ending it all with Mistress Renee coming out of the shower, finding George Clooney naked in her bed and realizing that it was all a dream.  Apparently Harvey Weinstein has already included that idea in the Bridget Jones sequel.  The role of the man in the bed is not played by the lickable Clooney.  It is Robbie Coltrane as a character names Plarvey Heinspleen. 

Should I have done a spoiler warning?

I only know all of this because I am the Oracle Of The Lovetrix.  If you want to get to me directly, you have to get past a Dominican bantamweight named Marge.  She is also my manicurist.  Year after year, as I wait for The One, she let me know where I am going wrong.  I have been through a bunch of them.  My cookies are warm and waiting.  One more quart of Crisco and I’m sure I can get into that outfit that Carrie Anne let me borrow.  It is the first rule of The Lovetrix.  Knowing everything does not mean that you can fit into everything. 

Ciao for niao.

Email Patricia Vidal