Listen for five or six seconds to the treacly, deeply patronizing narration in the trailer for Mike Newell‘s Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line, 11.16), and you know right off the top that Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s respected romantic novel has been turned into something florid, unsubtle and aimed at women who didn’t graduate from college.

Javier Bardem in Love in the Time of Cholera

I’d been told it doesn’t quite work, but I still wanted to see it out of respect for Marquez’s reputation and for the great Javier Bardem, who plays Florentino Ariza. Then I saw the trailer and said to myself, “No way, not for me.” Why do marketing guys deliberately do this? Is it really necessary to turn off males in order to appeal to females? Here’s a pan by Slant‘s Ed Gonzalez, but Gonzales is a sourpuss — he always seems to be sneering at this or that film — so you can’t really trust him.