When the fourth wall is your TV screen

It all started with those commercials where actors try to convey some dim understanding of the films they act in.  So instead of seeing a clip from a movie, you see a clip of Jennifer Aniston explaining why the movie is "not your typical love story."

Granted, no one need defend the bold departure from convention that is "Love Happens."   Nor its abstruse but equally tantalizing tagline. ("...When you least expect it!")

It must have be nice for Jennifer Aniston to break free from the shackles of type-casting. In Love Happens, for example, she plays a risk-adverse man's free-spirited love interest.

The film confirms my theory that given enough hats and tiny pieces of paper, you can randomly generate a film's every plot detail.  How else do you get to a "florist named Eloise?"

Of course, there might be order to this so-called anarchy.  Like TV's recent throw back to the 80s (The tagline of the new Melrose Place gives Love Happens' a run for its money: "Never has apartment living been so .... complex."), Hollywood often looks to its past to find the pre-sold franchise of the future.  It's not an exact science, as evidenced by Speed 2: Cruise Control.  

Unless you are six-years-old and live on "the tippy-top floor of the Plaza Hotel," Eloise is an unusual name.  But when it's paired with the similarly archaic "florist," it's almost enough to distract one from Jennifer Aniston's patented "almost cry."

So I asked myself: besides that novel featuring indirect interior monologue and a woman who bought flowers herself, when have florists appeared in popular culture?  My five seconds of research led me to Ann Codee, a Belgian Vaudville actress who,  in dozens of films in the 30s and 40s, portrayed "florists, music teachers, landladies, governesses and grandmothers."  I was particularly intrigued by Codee's 1960 turn in Can-Can as a "tightly-corseted committee woman."

Can-Can was Ann Codee's final film.   I'm not saying I want Love Happens to be the same for Aniston.  But I can't say I'm looking forward to hearing her pontificate on the nature of conflict in The Break-Up 2.

But then, I'm just a duplicitous, lactose-intolerant celebrity blogger named Eva.