A bookstore owner's "blind date with a book club" gimmick piques the interest of a successful author hitting a creative slump, who makes his way to the bookstore to find inspiration.
The take
Blind Date Book Club packs many times unnatural mouthfuls of dialogue and writing, but at the same time conveys an incredibly wholesome, adorable earnestness at its core. The movie has such a pure meet cute, thanks to the chemistry of Meg Tompkins (Erin Krakow) and Graham Sterling (Robert Buckley), which is all it really needed to succeed. Writing critique scenes and author characters almost always come with a mild cringe—always seems like the lines are aimed at the work itself, or a tool for deflection—but when the world around it is wrapped in a nostalgic young love à la Flipped, that stuff makes it even better. It's light fun, and it stays tonally the same throughout, but it's so unapologetically sweet you've got to respect it.
What stands out
The movie opens with a barrage of weird dialogue. It doesn't happen again, but it is the first thing you hear.
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