Though we may come across as lifelong buds, the Dueling Chaps, as you’ve come to know and love us, only recently crossed paths. Due to an ever-escalating rock cocaine and prostitute habit, Dueling Chap Steve is forced to rent out the backyard toolshed of his garish Beverly Hills mansion to help cover the onerous monthly overhead associated with those vices. Until recently, the lucky tenants were a salt of the earth middle-aged couple. However, at his most recent New Year’s bash, Steve as usual had one too many eggnogs and got a bit handsy with the wife. When the husband caught them in the act, it effectively ended their landlord-tenant relationship.

Enter yours truly, a newly minted Starbucks barista looking to take the Hollywood scene by storm. I have an acting tutor, and am currently learning how to stare in shock at ominous things in the distance. Of course, this leaves my budget in quite the crimped state, so I was elated when I found a Craigslist ad for a “fully furnished 1 bed/1 bath 400 sq. ft. suite with a private entrance, $600/mo, no pets or muslims”. When I met Steve for a tour of the digs, I’ll admit that that I was initially a bit perturbed that the specs were not exactly as he represented them. The space was actually 20 square feet, and not 20-squared square feet (to be fair to Steve, he admitted this minor arithmetical flub straight out of the gate). Obviously there was no room for a bathroom, bed, or furnishings; he just flat-out lied about that. But I was willing to overlook our relationship’s shaky start, given that he seemed to be a Hollywood heavy-hitter and I needed connections.

The genesis of DuelingChaps.com was nothing short of serendipitous. About two weeks into my stay, Steve stumbled out of his home in his blue suede bathrobe carrying a half empty whiskey bottle, and angrily knocked on my padlocked tin door. Before I could remind him that I already paid rent to cover the next 24 months, he blurted out “Do you like websites?” I nodded curiously. “Let’s have one of those then,” he followed up as he smiled and winked, then took a swig of whiskey and returned to his palatial estate.

Given my acting expertise, and Steve’s presumably expansive background in the film industry, I set to work on the internet movie mecca you are currently viewing. Completing it was a challenge, as the terms of my lease explicitly forbade me from using the home’s Wi-Fi, and it’s generally very difficult to fully harness the power of a website without an internet connection. Steve spends the bulk of his days viewing pornography originating from various Southeast Asian locales, so it’s near impossible for me to sneak onto the network without him noticing.

Despite these limitations, I finished the DuelingChaps.com in less than a week, and worked up the courage to knock on the door of Steve’s manse to present him with our foray into the World Wide Web, fully expecting my efforts to be reciprocated with auditions for several TV pilots. Unfortunately, he had no recollection of any website request, or who I was. I berated him on the spot, as he broke down in tears. He confessed that despite his spacious villa in the Hills, he had not made his fortune in movies, but rather in monochromatic mock turtlenecks, an industry that has collapsed since the death of Steve Jobs, precipitating his downward spiral into hookers and alcohol. Of course, he had absolutely zero, zilch, nada interest in reviewing films.

As such, to assure this site doesn’t go to waste, I have been writing both my and Steve’s reviews from the start. Until now. I tried to get him to join me at the theater, but the terms of his parole forbid him from getting within 500 feet of any establishment that sells items that could be used as lubricant, popcorn butter included. As an alternative, we decided to just cuddle up on his couch, split a Hot Pocket twin-pack, and catch whatever was featuring on cable. Last night, Love in the Time of Cholera occupied the primetime slot, and I figured a movie starring Iberia’s finest artist since Picasso, Javier Bardem, could finally spur in my fellow chap an appreciation of film.

What a disaster. Love in the Time of Cholera is basically The Notebook except the people are only sort of good-looking and you don’t care if they die. Plus, The Notebook doesn’t give away its own ending in the first twenty seconds. LITTOC opens with the two leads, Javier Bardem and a somewhat hot white chick (SHWC from here on out), both now elderly, confronting each other after the death of SHWC’s husband, with Bardem explicitly elucidating that he has spent the past half-century in unsuccessful pursuit of this now finally single woman. There’s your license to check out for the next two hours. It’s perhaps the most inexplicable instance of “open with the ending” in film history, as it renders impotent any attempt at suspense in the chronologically preceding scenes, and there was absolutely no need for any of the information presented in the opening spoiler to be frontloaded.

Even if you weren’t aware of the inevitable outcome of every scene, it’s so boring that you’d be hard pressed to give a crap anyway. First off, it’s as cliché as can be. LITTOC is based on a novel, and I sure hope the novel is more original than the big screen adaptation. I have a feeling we’ve seen this setup before: Poor guy wants to marry rich girl, but her father doesn’t approve, so she’s forced into marriage with a rich older man that she ends up regretting. (That is a cliché theme in literature, right? I’m not sure, as I stopped reading books after He's Just Not That into You, which gave away the ending of He's Just Not That into You.)

In addition to the uninspired premise, LITTOC takes what the filmmakers deemed to be the most interesting “episodes” from the book, and then throws them together in a random jumble on screen with no emotional continuity between them. It’s hard to tell where blame lies, but either it’s the most monotonous book ever written, or the movie contains a terrible selection of episodes. Every scene is either Bardem using his skills in poetry to score random chicks to help him get over the one he truly loves, or SHWC looking sad as she sits around doing nothing. We then fade to black so the makeup crew can age the actors 2.5 years, then fade back in to do the same scene all over again.

Bardem’s and SHWC’s characters are quite simply wimps. They’re intelligent people, and know from a very early age that they both possess an undeniably strong love for one another. These feelings continue into middle age, and yet they refuse to take mutually decisive action to consummate the love even though they must know that their lives will end up unfulfilled. Bardem and SHWC perfectly emote their characters’ internal frustrations with their own inability to grab life by the horns; they want to scream in anger at the paths their lives have taken, but lack the courage to do so. They’re hypersensitive, sort of pathetic people. But who wants to root for pathetic people? As every sequence invariably ends with the two of them not hooking up (which, as mentioned, we already knew), you’re left thinking “Well, they had it coming.”

When we finally, tortuously make our way back to the “this is where we came in” moment, LITTOC at last becomes interesting, though it’s hard to tell if it’s because of improved quality or simply because the final fifteen minutes weren’t ruined by the opening scene. Here, as Bardem and SHWC near the end, the mutual regret over their wasted lives becomes palpable, as their rotted bodies render them powerless to fully express the desire that is now stronger than ever. It’s an effective tragic ending, not because of an unforeseen negative turn of events, but because the protagonists knew it would end this way all along.

Needless to say, Love in the Time of Cholera has failed to inspire in my dueling cohort a love of movies, and Steve now hates the entire art form with a passion. Instead, he has a renewed interest in Colombia, the setting for LITTOC. Particularly, he is now seeking to score some of that nation’s premier exports, a task I have agreed to assist him with as long as he steps up to the plate and finally writes his own review for this flick.