Love & Other Drugs (2010)
Directed by Edward Zwick
Maggie is an alluring free spirit who won't let anyone – or anything – tie her down. But she meets her match in Jamie, whose relentless and nearly infallible charm serves him well with the ladies and the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical sales. Maggie and Jamie's evolving relationship takes them both by surprise, as they find themselves under the influence of the ultimate drug: love.
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But at the risk of seeming ungrateful, the way this mashup of Love Story and Jerry Maguire brags about its characters' fantastic sex life is something of a turnoff.
And that's frankly a pity, because there's something sincere and plainspoken at the heart of the film, and you can sense it shooting for the same kind of modern-Zen territory as "Jerry Maguire."
While he's working the foyer - in scenes that recall the real 1996's best film, Jerry Maguire - she crosses the road to a meeting of Parkinson's sufferers.
Tonally, Love and Other Drugs, based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” strikingly resembles Jerry Maguire.
(And the comparisons to Up in the Air are imprecise - it's not nearly that incisive, but it has a bigger heart.)
Love & Other Drugs initially reminded me of Up in the Air, which came out the year before.
Given a different emphasis, the script could have been as sharply satirical as “Thank You for Smoking” or as revealing as “Up in the Air.”
One part corporate slice-of-life, another part romantic dramedy, "Love & Other Drugs" suffers when placed next to the movie it most reminds of, 2009's very similar, far superior " Up in the Air ."
"Love & Other Drugs" is also a window on our time, and Jamie's career antics sometimes have the flavor of George Clooney's high flier in "Up in the Air."
Indeed, the film, though it tries to essay some kind of thesis about the relationship between the human heart and the state of the American economy, is no match for the vastly subtler Up in the Air.
Edward Zwick’s Love and Other Drugs should have taken the title of Emma Kate-Coughlin’s 1996 Aussie Gen X romantic comedy Love and Other Catastrophes for a more apt description of itself.
There's Epic Zwick, the guy who makes films like "Glory" and "Legends Of The Fall" and "The Last Samurai" and "Defiance."
In film, Zwick has mostly occupied himself with epic storytelling such as "Legends of the Fall," "Glory" and "Blood Diamond," with the romance of his 1986 rom-com "About Last Night" really just a distant (and not that great) memory.
A Stanley Kramer for our times, director Edward Zwick has spent much of his career raising social consciousnessabout war (Glory, Courage Under Fire, Defiance), terrorism (The Siege), and human exploitation (Blood Diamond)while lowering pulses.
Edward Zwick, the man who brought us films like Glory, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai and Defiance, brings us Love And Other Drugs, a vast departure from the type of films we usually see from him.
For all its faults, 2008's Defiance was a solid, if solemn, war movie — a reminder of the Edward Zwick who made Glory back in 1989, before he went down the overwrought potboiler trail with dreck like The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond.
Realizing what a tough sell an ironic satire about the pharmaceutical industry would be as a feature film, co-writer/director Ed Zwick ("Glory," "Blood Diamond") has made the move to pare it with a bog standard dramatic romance plot which quickly pushes everything else out of the way to take over the film.
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It's not "Last Tango in Paris," but it's fairly eye-opening by the squeamish standards of latter-day Hollywood.
A Viagra-pimping satyr (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a "neurologically damned" collagist (Anne Hathaway) comprise the young couple in question, horny Clinton-era critters laboring to keep some rom-com version of Last Tango in Paris going until illness strikes.
Given a different emphasis, the script could have been as sharply satirical as “Thank You for Smoking” or as revealing as “Up in the Air.”
Along the way, he bonds with a sleazy doctor (Hank Azaria), and they seem like a couple of funny guys who just happen to be exploiting human misery — kind of like Aaron Eckhart's character in Thank You for Smoking.
Drawn from the same murky well of Hollywood ethical ambiguity that gave us "Thank You for Smoking" and last year's "Up In the Air," "Love & Other Drugs" audaciously defines its slick anti-hero protagonist as beyond reproach.
Love and Other Drugs could have been a brilliant satire in the manner of Thank You for Smoking if only director Edward Zwick and his co-writers had concentrated a lot more on the "drugs" and a lot less on the "love."
It could have been a smart satire, along the lines of Thank You For Smoking, but it never quite gets there.
However, rather than flesh out Jamie's character, or sink their teeth into the pharmaceutical industry Thank You For Smoking style, writer-director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, Glory) and co-writer Charles Randolph instead introduce Maggie (Hathaway), a young, passionate, Parkinson's stricken beauty who calls Jamie on his bullshit and transforms the film into a romantic dramedy.
Its director, Edward Zwick, specialises not in romantic comedies but in high-end action films along the lines of The Way Back – his last film, Defiance, was a tale of escape and survival in the second world war.
There's Epic Zwick, the guy who makes films like "Glory" and "Legends Of The Fall" and "The Last Samurai" and "Defiance."
Zwick is known for socially conscious political epics like “ Blood Diamond ” and “ Defiance ,” so his alternately goofy and somber, once-over-lightly approach to medical malfeasance seems like a wasted opportunity – especially since the film’s forced levity and echoes from “Love Story” aren’t exactly an adequate trade off.
A Stanley Kramer for our times, director Edward Zwick has spent much of his career raising social consciousnessabout war (Glory, Courage Under Fire, Defiance), terrorism (The Siege), and human exploitation (Blood Diamond)while lowering pulses.
Edward Zwick, the man who brought us films like Glory, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai and Defiance, brings us Love And Other Drugs, a vast departure from the type of films we usually see from him.
For all its faults, 2008's Defiance was a solid, if solemn, war movie — a reminder of the Edward Zwick who made Glory back in 1989, before he went down the overwrought potboiler trail with dreck like The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond.
It avoids the cloying, artificial sentimentality of a Terms of Endearment.
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With Zwick and his longtime creative collaborator Marshall Herskovitz putting the final polish on the screenplay, which began with Charles Randolph ("The Interpreter"), there are echoes of the emotional churn that made "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life" resonate so deeply across prime time years ago.
Writer-director Edward Zwick (2006's " Blood Diamond ") and co-writers Charles Randolph (2005's " The Interpreter ") and Marshall Herskovitz (2003's " The Last Samurai ") carry with them impressive filmographies that make their lacking, exceedingly conventional ploys all the more disappointing.
Director Edward Zwick ("The Last Samurai") and cowriters Charles Randolph ("The Interpreter") and Marshall Herskovitz ("The Last Samurai") take Jamie Reidy's nonfiction book "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" and frame it within a fictional love story which takes precedence over outing the Big Pharma sales practices Reidy exposed.
Co-written by Charles Randolph (“The Life of David Gale,” “The Interpreter”) and director Edward Zwick and partner Marshall Herskovitz (“Blood Diamond,” “The Last Samurai,” etc.) and based on a book by Jamie Reidy, “Love and Other Drugs” is a stiff.
Josh Gad (2008's " The Rocker ") opts not to reel in his role's abrasiveness, becoming every bit as irritating as the character.