Rom-Com Purgatory: “October Kiss.”

One of the many, many stupid and uninteresting contributors to IMDb’s “Trivia” section — which lets absolutely anyone submit what they wrongly believe to be an interesting fact about a film — has informed the public that 2015’s “October Kiss” is implied to take place in Seattle, and that a number of subtle clues throughout the movie bear this out.

I bring this up because we literally open on a wide shot of the Space Needle, and IMDb really needs to rethink who can post and who can’t. Anyway, whatever mysterious location we are in that happens to be near Seattle’s most famous landmark, we find a woman named Poppy teaching a yoga class. She’s doing it badly, because she doesn’t know the names of any yoga poses, so just makes them up and says things like “I can’t remember what it’s called but this one sounds like a sneeze.”

Having insulted an entire subcontinent in the opening minute of the movie, we then see Poppy attempting to work as a pizza chef and fucking that up, too. The start of this movie feels like a montage of “failed job” scenes from another, unrelated film that we’re somehow half way through, to the point where at the three minute mark I already had a note that read “What the fuck is going on?!”

It would be fun to think, having insulted India and failed at Italian food, that this movie was just a series of scenes aimed at…