Wednesday 15 July 2009

He's Just Not That Into You (2009) - ickleReview (in-flight movie)

Tame, generic romcom with an all-star cast including Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Connelly, Busy Philipps, Kris Kristofferson, and Luis Guzmán. It brings nothing new to the table but instead peddles the same old bullshit about the game men and women are supposed to play in dating, relationships, and marriage.

The film is structured with inter-titles like "...if he's not calling you", "...if he's having sex with someone else", and "...if he doesn't want to marry you" (lifted straight from the book), and "real-life" documentary-style interviews, which is an idea stolen from Nora Ephron's infinitely superior When Harry Met Sally... (1989), which remains by far the best film in this genre.

As Roger Ebert pointed out, there is at least one good line from Drew Barrymore's character:
I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies.
Nugget: I only watched this because I was on a transatlantic flight and because it had Scarlett Johansson in it. She plays a similar role to her Woody Allen characters in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008): naïve, voluptuous, a siren of adultery. It passed the time, but I wouldn't pay to see it. The flight-edited version contained some amusingly obvious over-dubbed swearing e.g. Aniston saying "bullcrap" instead of "bullshit". Based on the self-help book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, which sounds like one to avoid.

2 comments:

  1. tell me about it. this movie was so lame. it was just about a bunch of superficial people, uninterested in commitment, selfish.
    btw, i found your blog through fweet.org. i hope to talk to you about fw in the future.

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  2. Interesting that you found this through Fweet. Came across a couple of great words in the reading group this week: "Grahot" and "Spletel" (FW 140.4).

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