{"id":235997,"date":"2026-01-09T12:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T12:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/235997\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T12:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T12:09:07","slug":"a-slight-light-and-unconvincing-romcom-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/235997\/","title":{"rendered":"A slight, light and unconvincing romcom \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>People We Meet on Vacation <\/p>\n<p>\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n<p>Director: Brett Haley <\/p>\n<p>Cert: None<\/p>\n<p>Genre: Romantic comedy<\/p>\n<p>Starring:  Emily Bader, Tom Blyth, Lukas Gage, Jameela Jamil, Alan Ruck, Molly Shannon <\/p>\n<p>Running Time: 1 hr 57 mins<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Alex is handsome and uptight, and hates saxophone solos. Poppy is hyperactive and messy, and loves Kenny G. Alex wants to settle down in his Ohio hometown with his high-school sweetheart, Sarah. Poppy wants to be anywhere but Ohio.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Adapted from the beachy bestseller by Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation follows Alex and Poppy over a decade of romantic dilly-dallying, starting with a much-delayed carpool journey that improbably coalesces into will-they-won\u2019t-they best-friendship.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Emily Bader, the star of the cancelled cult favourite My Lady Jane, runs every sentence as the livewire heroine. Tom Blyth, an actor with highfalutin credits (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/film\/benediction-a-poet-s-war-life-and-loves-1.4880846\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/culture\/film\/benediction-a-poet-s-war-life-and-loves-1.4880846\">Benediction<\/a>, Plainclothes) and lead roles in Billy the Kid and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds &amp; Snakes, is merely required to look chiselled and plaintive as Poppy\u2019s friend-zoned significant other.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Romcoms pivot around bad timing, romantic misunderstandings and improbably luxurious interiors. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/netflix\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/netflix\/\">Netflix<\/a> romcoms pivot around trips to Paris \u2013 and sometimes beyond.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The best-friends arrangement to holiday annually and Poppy\u2019s nomadic career as a travel writer provide the temporal scaffolding for Bader\u2019s book. Various exotic holiday destinations, including New Orleans and Barcelona, are revealed in signposted flashbacks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The chronological leaping around to pop tunes by Taylor Swift, Boygenius and Billie Eilish is the most interesting thing about Brett Haley\u2019s sunny, saccharine film. The rest is flimsy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The carefully calibrated friends-to-lovers trajectory mapped by When Harry Met Sally or Love &amp; Basketball is eschewed in favour of wholly unconvincing make-or-break moments. The miscommunications that keep the couple apart are ill defined. The seasoned comic actors Alan Ruck, Jameela Jamil and Molly Shannon are criminally underused. Colin Wilkes\u2019s sleek costumes can\u2019t compensate for the lack of onscreen chemistry. They might as well be wearing hazmat suits.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">On Netflix from Friday, January 9th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People We Meet on Vacation \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 \ue9d7 Director: Brett Haley Cert: None Genre: Romantic comedy&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60,1868],"class_list":["post-235997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-netflix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}