The Blu-Ray copy of Crazy, Stupid, Love. reviewed here was provided by Warner Brothers in conjunction with the Blu-Ray Elite program. To learn more, check out my Blu-Ray reviews of The Matrix, Inception, and Contagion.
"This is the sort of film that Oscar generally ignores come awards season. It shouldn't. Crazy Stupid Love is a crazy smart film."
—Tom Long, Detroit News
"'Crazy, Stupid, Love' is, on balance, remarkably sane and reasonably smart."
—A.O. Scott, New York Times
"Crazy, Stupid, Love is the perfect combination of sexy, cute, wise, hilarious, and true."
—Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
Sorry, but what movie were these people watching? Crazy, Stupid, Love. is just bursting at the seams with talent (Steve Carell, Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei, Kevin Bacon, c'mon!), but that's not enough to make up for material this trite and cliched. From the opening scene during which Moore's Emily tells Carell's Cal that she wants a divorce to the just excruciating conclusion during which Cal cops to his mistakes and vows to grow, this film has next to nothing new to offer. The only surprise comes at the film's climax, but it's so contrived that any sense of shock is quickly replaced by eye-rolling disgust.
It's too bad, really, because directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are the minds behind great dark comedies like Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris. And the film market needs more comedies along the lines of what Crazy, Stupid, Love. aspires to. The execution is just all wrong.
The film features four main storylines, all of which overlap with one another. The courtship of Emma Stone's Hannah by Ryan Gosling's Jacob is the most successful, mostly because the two have tremendous chemistry. The Dirty Dancing moment, however, is ... odd.
The awkwardness between Moore's Emily and Bacon's David Lindhagen (awesome name, by the way), who are trying to begin a real relationship after a lengthy affair and Emily's separation, feels authentic. It's when she begins to express jealousy over Cal's sexual escapades that we start to lose sympathy toward her (You're an adultress, lady!).
Jacob and Cal's "man training," which is, for all intents and purposes, the main storyline, is a bit of a mess. There's the obvious problem of this being painfully similar to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, right down to the star both films share. What's worse, however, is Jacob's ridiculous ideas of what a man is—wears expensive clothes, has a dismissive and not-so-subtley sexist attitude, sleeps around a ton. The idea, I guess, is that Cal learns from Jacob, Jacob learns from Cal, and they both ultimately learn that a happy medium between the two of them is perfect. That would have been palatable. But Gosling never goes for laughs like Carell does. He's funny in a charming sort of way, but no one ever mocks his philosophy the way it deserves to be mocked. A mistake, in my opinion.
The film's downfall, however, is the relationship (or lack thereof) between Cal and Emily's son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) and his babysitter, Analeigh Tipton's Jessica. He loves her, she loves his father, and there's something incredibly creepy about the way their crushes manifest themselves. No laws are broken, per se, but they push the envelope in a direction that's brave but completely unsuccessful.
Crazy, Stupid, Love. looks better than you'd expect a pretty generic rom-com would on Blu-Ray. There's something appealing to me when movies filmed in California embrace their setting and kiss everything with West Coast sunlight (see also Greenberg, The Kids Are All Right). Of course, neither that nor the set's special features (which are mostly just behind-the-scenes stuff featuring the actors riffing on one another) can make up for sloppy story development, tepid humor, and uninteresting characters. In other words, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is a major miss.
0 comments:
Post a Comment