Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)
Directed by Glenn Ficarra
Cal Weaver is living the American dream. He has a good job, a beautiful house, great children and a beautiful wife, named Emily. Cal's seemingly perfect life unravels, however, when he learns that Emily has been unfaithful and wants a divorce. Over 40 and suddenly single, Cal is adrift in the fickle world of dating. Enter, Jacob Palmer, a self-styled player who takes Cal under his wing and teaches him how to be a hit with the ladies.
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24 films that influenced Crazy, Stupid, Love.
What critics say influenced Crazy, Stupid, Love.
It reminded me a lot of “ Love Actually ” with its multi-generational ensemble and interlocking stories, not to mention its ability to strike a balance between drama and comedy without compromising the integrity of either one.
Because it features an ensemble of people who can't quite get love straight, it reminds me a little of "Love, Actually."
Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (“Bad Santa,” “I Love You Phillip Morris”) and scripted by Dan Fogelman (“Tangled”), the film apparently takes its cue from Richard Curtis’ 2003 ensemble hit “Love Actually” and like its predecessor has a great cast.
An ode to this very topic, "Crazy, Stupid, Love." doesn't exactly rewrite the rule books (didn't 2003's " Love Actually " already beat it to the punch?), but when it's good, it's very, very good, hitting notes of honesty and perception with the precise aim of an ace archer who knows a thing or two about joys and aches of the heart.
Richard Curtis did it splendidly with Love Actually (2003).
It’s a good setup — suggesting perhaps a more sobering version of “Love, Actually” with fewer grand gestures — until subsequent scenes set the deafest tone possible.
Dan Fogelman 's script is snappy, if too proudly referential (it's hard to say if a motif involving the use of Dirty Dancing as a seduction tool was outright stolen from last year's French rom-com Heartbreaker, or if the similarity is mere coincidence).
If Gosling is a bit too cliched as the buffed and armoured seducer, Emma Stone is a fine comedic counterbalance and their Dirty Dancing rip-off is delightful.
Jacob and Hannah close their love deal in a very amusing comic scene that pokes well-deserved ridicule at the final dance sequence of Dirty Dancing with its Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes rendition of Time of My Life.
“Just One Look” and a classic from Dirty Dancing are also well done.
It's a pretty spectacular sequence, written and performed with refreshing candor and hugely funny, to boot (weaving in "Dirty Dancing" as a plot point sounds obvious but is delivered ingeniously).
(My favorite is still when Jacob does his "Dirty Dancing" move on Stone's Hannah.
His Jacob is like a slightly younger, and hunkier American take on Hugh Grant’s Will Freeman from the far better “About a Boy.” Exploring the emptiness of the singles scene and what happens with the lady-killer meets his match is a theme that never gets old.
It brings to mind the romantic comedy About A Boy from a couple of years ago, which had a similar scene that managed to be both moving and unsentimental at the same time.
Stone’s quippy hoyden is even more out-there — crazy line readings, scrunched-up faces, odd rhythms — but it all feels as uniquely effortless as Diane Keaton’s work in “Annie Hall.”
But at 118 minutes it’s longer than “The Philadelphia Story” or “Annie Hall” or “When Harry Met Sally” or “500 Days of Summer” or, well, you get it.
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Warm and yet snarky, its comic tone, if not its story, reminded me of “Parenthood” or “Grand Canyon,” which I guess is a way of saying it’s an ensemble comedy about adults and how they feel.
He’s a ideal protégé/charity case for pickup artist extraordinaire Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a mix of Will Smith’s character in “Hitch” and “How I Met Your Mother” player Barney Stinson—without the need to classify things as legendary, since Jacob’s swagger alone demonstrates when something awesome is about to happen.
Even in the similar Hitch (2005), where a guy with insight into women passed out advice to the hopelessly lost, Hitch (Will Smith) refused to help a guy who just wanted to have sex.
It seems almost as if the screenplay writer has taken his finale from William Shakespeare's jubilant Much Ado About Nothing where despite all the trickery and the misunderstandings, love triumphs and sends us on our way rejoicing!
So instead of providing raunchy moments, she’s like Mena Suvari in “American Beauty” — deluded and fragile.
It would have been easy, for instance, to make Emily some kind of brittle emasculator, the way, say, Annette Bening was in “American Beauty,’’ to name only a virtuosic example.
Schvantz jokes, radically implausible plot twists and a chintzy narrative that plays like a slamming-door farce spin on “American Beauty”?
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This is in that curious sub-genre of films like “The Awful Truth” and “Divorce American Style” in which a couple splits, takes on new lovers, and then begins to wonder whether or not they have made a terrible mistake.
In the remarriage classics (“The Awful Truth,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “His Girl Friday”), the former partners have a way of talking and being with each other that they don’t have—and couldn’t possibly have—with anyone else.
In the remarriage classics (“The Awful Truth,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “His Girl Friday”), the former partners have a way of talking and being with each other that they don’t have—and couldn’t possibly have—with anyone else.
But at 118 minutes it’s longer than “The Philadelphia Story” or “Annie Hall” or “When Harry Met Sally” or “500 Days of Summer” or, well, you get it.