It was always going to end up this way. When Spike Jonze’s Her presented a love story between a lovesick Joaquin Phoenix and a really fancy operating system, an important boundary had been crossed. A precedent had been set: Disembodied virtual entities had come into their own as full-fledged movie characters. And with Hollywood increasingly turning to blatant product placement in order to finance its achingly expensive films, it was only a matter of time before someone made a romantic comedy in which the leading lady falls madly in love with a social media account for a line of frozen pizzas. That is the underlying premise of Love @ Last: A Girl Meets Twitter Love Story, a new mock trailer from Above Average featuring actress Emily Kinney, best known as Beth on The Walking Dead. The fictional film plays exactly like a real rom-com, except the part that would normally go to someone like Jake Gyllenhaal or Chris Evans is instead filled by DiGiorno’s Twitter feed, which whispers such sweet nothings as “Use coupon code ‘Mozzarella’ at 7-11 for $1.50 off!”
Directed by Tim Bierbaum and written by Celeste Ballard, Love @ Last works because its creators are clearly familiar with the tropes of the genre they’re parodying. Sunita Mani, for instance, is on hand as the prerequisite “sensible best friend,” who tells tells Kinney that it’s not healthy or sane to fall in love with a heartless corporate entity, especially since the caddish, faithless @DiGiorno has been brazenly retweeting both men and women right and left behind her back. This leads to the standard breakup scene, during which Kinney cries while tearing apart a pepperoni-covered pie. But as all fans of the genre know, all that strife only serves to set up the inevitable reconciliation scene, represented here by having Kinney run through traffic yelling, “@DiGiorno! @DiGiorno!” The smitten young lady is in for another surprise, however, when she and her electronic paramour finally “meet” in an emotional climax.