Movie Review: Your Place or Mine

Showing their dedication to embracing the bleak future of the arts, Netflix has decided to become an early adopter of AI-generated content with the release of their latest romantic comedy Your Place or Mine. This technology-driven creation stars Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher as longtime best friends living on opposite sides of the United States who've suppressed their true feelings for each other for 20 years. After Witherspoon's babysitter (Rachel Bloom) lands an acting gig in Vancouver the night before she's set to travel to New York for a week-long course on corporate accounting, Kutcher's NYC-based character volunteers to fly out to LA to watch her teenage son (Wesley Kimmel) so she can fulfill her obligations. 

Once they land in respective destinations, all sorts of thoroughly unpredictable shit ensues. Kutcher quickly bonds with the kid who he hadn't seen in person since he was a toddler. Jesse Williams wins the attention of Witherspoon through their shared loved of literature and experiences as single parents. Zoe Chao, Tig Nataro and Steve Zahn all show up to provide comic relief and key monologues that help the main character's work acknowledge their unspoken love for each other. All of these developments draw a straight line to the grand finale:  Kutcher and Witherspoon ultimately confess their love for each other in an argument scene at LAX that suddenly turns romantic after a sentimental gesture comes to light. Congrats robots, you just wrote your first romantic comedy!!!! 

The funny thing about robots or in this case, humans that crafted something just feels like it was made by robots is that no amount of advanced programming can give them the instincts or emotional intelligence of a human being. They're completely beholden to the data of their code and while that's great for determining results on a search engine or running mass-scale calculations for an insurance company, it's fucking worthless when it's tasked to do a job that is driven by the creator's understanding of what makes a movie compelling for the independently sentient that's watching it. If the brain of a living, breathing person with full cognitive capabilities and no desire to satisfy an algorithm was behind any of the creative choices in Your Place or Mine, they probably would've recognized that Witherspoon and Kutcher have zero chemistry, there wasn't a single convincing bit of human emotion in the script and that a romantic comedy should contain more than just a little bit of romance and comedy if it's setting out to be a successful romantic comedy. 

Your Place or Mine has zero respect for the genre and what its audience wants or expects from the genre, which is particularly stunning given that both the writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses) and Netflix (Set It Up, Always Be My Maybe) have pretty good track records of success with romantic comedies. Computers don't know a god damn thing about storytelling or the heart and soul of moviemaking and humans that make movies for a living should stop trying to emulate their cold, analytical approach while they're working in an artform that was perfected by their own species.     

Grade: D+