Crazy, Stupid, Love 2011
I got a digital copy of this movie in a giveaway. It gets pretty solid reviews and has a very solid cast, including Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who would appear together in La La Land a few years later. I watched this on my iPad while on a plane and I have wondered before if planes makes movies seem worse. This is a decent movie and the actors are good for the most part (the teen aged actors struggle) but I had a hard time accepting the premise of the womanizing ab model Ryan Gosling character taking pity on Steve Carrell and also Gosling’s transformation. Yeah, maybe Gosling has to do very little to pick up a woman at a bar, but is that really teachable? Carrell is the awkward but sincere oaf that he usually plays, but it seems thin here. There are some not terribly surprising surprises and ultimately womanizing is painted as a bad thing, but not before really glorifying it. While I mostly enjoyed it, I constantly felt underwhelmed. Almost all of the relationships in the movie are very flawed or at least start out that way. The movie pacing is also a little odd and seems to be wrapping up about halfway through only to start a boy loses girl phase that would take the rest of the movie to play out.
Written: 14 Jul 2019
Owned on: Digital