Orbit
Some weekends arrive with a kind of accidental symmetry.
It started, as the best conversations do, completely sideways. My close friend and I found ourselves, without planning, without solemnity, without any particular reason, talking about wills and last wishes. What do you want? What will happen? The conversation moved the way those conversations do when you’re comfortable enough with someone to find the darkness funny. There was teasing. There was laughter. There was the particular relief of saying the unsayable out loud and discovering it doesn’t kill you.
And then we moved on, as you do.
Later, a message arrived. A friend of a friend had died. Suddenly. Without warning. A family and everyone who loved them caught entirely off guard. The kind of death that arrives without the courtesy of preparation. One that simply lands, mid-sentence, in the middle of an ordinary weekend.
The conversation found its way back.
Not the same conversation, not the same gathering - a different orbit entirely. And yet somehow the same weekend, the same thread running through it, pulling at something I hadn’t quite finished thinking about.
It was there, in that second orbit, that another friend asked me something I wasn’t expecting. She asked me to be one of the honoured ones - to speak words at her eventual death. To stand up, when the time comes, and try to say what she was.
Confronting. And beautiful.
In the way that life always manages to be both at once.
It has not left me in the days since. About the words we reach for when we try to hold a life. How do you show the joy, the humour, the particular and irreplaceable everything that makes a person whole, especially when those listening are in the depths of their own grief? How do you do justice to the fullness of it?
And then a strange thought arrived, quietly and with its own logic: why wait?
Why not begin now, while the knowing is here? While I can still ask the questions and laugh at the answers and get it wrong and try again. While the person is present and available and very much themselves.
The work is already in progress, as you’d expect from something this new and this strange. It feels oddly clinical right now. More inventory than elegy, more list than love letters.
But I trust it will find its way.
I want it to do justice to lives fully lived. I want to carry the laughter as well as the tenderness. I want whoever hears the words about their loved ones to recognise, immediately and without question, the people I am trying to describe.
That is the orbit, I think. Not the circling of loss, but the circling of love. The returning to the people who matter, finding new angles, new light, new ways of seeing what we already know.
And sometimes, if we are paying attention, finding the words for it while there is still time to say them out loud.
Hallmark Movie Review
I have such genuine admiration for actors. The discipline it takes to embody someone else entirely - their history, their contradictions, their very way of moving through a room - is a kind of talent I can barely conceptualise, let alone replicate. I hold this close whenever I sit down to watch something that isn’t quite working. These are real people doing a real job, and it is far from me to be unkind about the degree to which they succeed.
And yet. There is a particular kind of watching that no amount of goodwill can entirely rescue - where the most honest thing you can say is that nothing on screen made you forget you were watching a screen. Where reality, in all its ordinary weight, remained stubbornly present throughout. Where the couple at the centre of things simply could not, try as they might, pull you in.
The Love Gala was that kind of watching. I say this with the utmost respect for everyone involved.
🏙 The Love Gala
A garden gala, a contrarian manager and a romance with very little sparkle and even less spice.
📅 The Details
Year: 2023
Platform: Amazon Prime
Genre: Romance / Comedy
Directors: Damián Romay, Bruno Hernández
Writer: Jenny Morris Krick
Production Company: Reel One Entertainment
Cast: Lesa Wilson, Marc Herrmann, Sallie Glaner, Brandi Huzzie
🎨 The Setup
Kate has been handed the job of planning her mum’s Garden Gala - the biggest event of the year, apparently, in whatever world this film inhabits. Standing between her and success is Danny, the new and contrarian manager of the botanical garden, who is unhelpful in the mild, televisual way of a man who will eventually not be unhelpful.
There are, it emerges, three love interests. This is two more than the film has the energy to support.
💕 The Meet-Re-Meet
Kate and Danny occupy the same scenes. They have conversations. They look at each other in ways that are intended to communicate tension. The tension does not entirely communicate.
Danny is not unpleasant. He is not especially present either. The chemistry between them is the kind that exists on paper - in the outline of a story, in the logic of the genre - rather than in the room where the filming is happening.
📜 The Conflict / The Quest
The gala must be planned. Compromises must be reached. Feelings must be acknowledged. The film moves through these requirements with the efficiency of a checklist and the spontaneity of a terms and conditions document.
There is conflict, technically. It threatens on several occasions and is then resolved with a speed that suggests nobody was especially committed to it. Nothing is difficult for very long. Nobody is required to sit with discomfort
🍁 Cultural Check-in
The film's most interesting presence is Brandi Huzzie as Kate's gay best friend and business partner. Black, female, and noticeably more alive than much of what surrounds her. She brings a warmth and specificity the central romance never quite manages. The film does not make nearly enough of her.
😘 How Hot Is the Kiss?
2/10
Present. Confirmed. Generating no discernible heat whatsoever.
👀 POC Check
Brandi Huzzie is genuinely the most compelling person in this film, which is something, even if the film itself doesn't entirely register it.
🥨 Final Thought
I want to be generous. I genuinely do. The people on screen showed up, learned their lines, and did their jobs. And those are things I could not do, and would not attempt.
But The Love Gala could not make me forget reality for ninety minutes. Not even briefly. Not even in the good scenes, of which there were a handful. The sparkle, if it was ever there, did not make it through to the screen.
Some weeks, that is simply the film you end up watching. You note it, you write it up, and you move on - with full respect to all parties, and a quiet, private hope that next time there will be more spice.