Laila Odom

(On TV, January 2022) There’s a charming quasi homegrown quality to My Online Valentine that makes it hard to resist, even when it’s demonstrably toward the bottom of the cinematic barrel. As a modern romantic comedy, it’s rarely less than likable even when it’s preposterous or meaningless: As the story of a young woman meeting a young man through a dating application, it’s both modern and traditional. The stakes are low, and the complications are contrived: should she accept her no-good ex-boyfriend’s attempts at reconciliation when she’s just met a hot new prospect? Obviously, no, but then there wouldn’t be much of a story considering how thin the plot already is. There’s plenty of wish-fulfillment here: our female lead is an attractive food blogger, while the male protagonist is a successful entrepreneur with chiselled abs. Shirtless scenes provide eye-candy for female viewers, while Taja V. Simpson and Laila Odom are effortlessly attractive to men. Still, there are plenty of shortcuts and missed opportunities in the way this low-budget small-cast film is put together: the stock footage of Houston is interesting at first, then repetitive and annoying the more the same shots are re-used. There are some significant, almost amateurish issues with the sound mixing, to the point of background noise changing between shots and dialogue muffled by static—surely a little bit of ADR would have helped. The narrative density of the film is surprisingly low, with meandering dialogue filling up the gap. The film is also surprisingly serious for such a lighthearted affair, to the point of barely qualifying as a comedy. This being said, I understand the budgetary constraints—My Online Valentine feels like a family affair, considering the title card featuring four producers with the same family name as the director, the tiny cast, static camera setups and a handful of locations—I would be surprised if the film’s budget reached the seven figures. But what works are the actors—not necessarily gifted thespians, but easy to like and reasonably interesting to listen to. Some clunky dialogue along the way takes a backseat to a crucially good scene of reconciliation that feels real and ends the film on a very good note. Romantic comedies don’t need to be all that well-made if they manage to succeed in the critical areas: you like the characters, you want them to end up together… and they do.