Love Happens Is Manipulative Tripe

If only love didn't happen. Critics are lambasting Jennifer Aniston's new rom-com, Love Happens—the story of a courtship between a florist and a grieving grief counselor—as predictable and manipulative:

• It's "an inorganic soap opera," writes Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun. "Love happens here with a banality suitable for a film choked with homilies about mourners needing to shift their gaze from the rear-view mirror."

• "The movie strokes that grief chord over and over again, playing on the emotions of anybody who's ever lost a loved one, in a way that feels claustrophobic and dishonest," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "I kept counting the minutes until I could escape its cloying, self-helpy vapors."
• "Two hours of plodding, painfully predictable pseudo-drama interspersed with occasional dollops of comedy lite," sums up Bruce Demara in the Toronto Star.

(More Jennifer Aniston stories.)