“What a cliché”

 
the plot

During one of their date nights, while out to dinner, Emily Weaver blurted out that she wanted a divorce from her shocked husband Cal instead of dessert. During the car ride home, she confesses to a one-night indiscretion with a sleazy coworker David Lindhagen. Heartbroken, Cal moved out of his home and into a bachelor pad apartment. He began frequenting a local bar, and one night after getting drunk, Cal makes it known to anyone within earshot that his wife has slept with David Lindhagen. Jacob, a regular at this same bar takes pity on Cal after hearing his story and offers to help him out of this slump. Jacob is a real ladies man, picking up at least one or two women a night and taking them back to his home. Jacob’s idea is to transform Cal into a ladies man like himself, so that he can lose his troubles somewhere inside a bevy of women.       

In a separate story, but within the same town, a woman named Hannah has just passed her bar exam and is now on her way to become a big shot lawyer. She is dating a lawyer named Richard, who she is expecting any day to pop the big question. Hannah goes to this bar one night and meets Jacob who comes onto her, but is shot down, a true rarity. During the party dinner celebrating Hannah’s achievement, she is expecting Richard to propose to her, and when he doesn’t, she leaves angrily, realizing the sacrifices she has made for the relationship went unrealized and that her time was severely wasted. She makes a beeline for this same bar and looks for Jacob with the intention of having a meaningless one-night stand. Yet when she gets back to his place, the two end up talking all night instead of having the meaningless sex and the two wind up getting pretty serious about each other.

Now that Cal has become more like Jacob, and Jacob making moves in his life to become more like Cal, will there, or should there be any consequences to these drastic life changes? Probably not, but you can bet there are when you’re dealing with love that’s not only crazy, but stupid as well.



 
the breakdown


You know, for some time now, Steve Carell has gotten under my skin in a bad way. I’m not sure how it started, or why it stuck so long. After viewing Crazy, Stupid Love, I can hardly remember having those feelings at all. Here he plays the lead role Cal Weaver, yet he’s just really being himself yet again, and for some reason it’s not annoying or sickening. I really felt for him here. Not only is it heartbreaking when your trusted wife  thought it was a good idea to have sex with a stranger, she believed it was worth it to break up a family in which she helped build for at least a couple of decades, but when your wife looks like Julianne Moore, it becomes virtually unbearable. Yes, the sexy redhead Julianne Moore portrays Emily. A thankless slut that Cal can’t help but love unconditionally. Yet the message of this movie is that it’s entirely the husband’s fault anyway. If only he had paid more attention to her or somehow remained the same man he was when he was a high school student, when they began dating, she wouldn’t have thought to offer her vaginal services to the first sleaze ball coworker who comes along. And by the way, what a perfect actor to play that sleaze ball coworker, Kevin Bacon, ever since Picture Perfect where he was cast in a similar role he irritated me, as well as Wild Things, I know he didn’t play a crafty sexual sleaze ball, he was still a monkey wrench in Matt Dillon’s ideal sexual operation he had going on. I hate when they blame such an atrocious and wicked act on a slight imperfection that a spouse may have, usually the husband. What kind of message does this give? That it’s okay to cheat? For me, this is irresponsible and lazy on the writer’s part. So not only does the husband have to forgive her, he has to better himself to build himself back up to her standards and then humbly ask his cheating wife for her forgiveness? Please.

Ryan Gosling plays Jacob, the bar heartthrob who not turned every female head in the establishment, but was an effective mentor to the younger Cal. Ryan had some wonderfully funny scenes as he’s mentoring Carell. A little confusing was Ryan’s New Yawk accent as well as a little off-putting. Emma Stone as always is delightful; I first noticed her comedic capabilities in one of my favorites The Rocker, an early flick of hers. Julianne Moore, an actress who is still politically stunted tends to tick me off just for her illogic biased stances didn’t have to go far here to dislike her even more. Yet it’s impossible to deny her sex appeal despite her diminutive brain, and she is probably one of the few perfect actresses for this role here, her beauty only breaks the viewer’s heart that much more after her sexual discretions. Speaking of sexual, Marisa Tomei is cast as one of Cal’s sexual liaisons; in fact she is the first successful score on his card. I thought her role would have been bigger, surprisingly it was quite limited, yet the movie was dangerously close to two hours as it is. She was just another great casting, as Marisa is also a beautiful actress, who better to bolster Cal’s confidence when it comes to his newfound life in womanizing.    

This movie was smart and funny with a good share of emotional payoff for staring at your screen for two hours. Steve Carell has a couple of great one-liners (my favorite at the top of the review), that are sure to make you laugh; my guess is that they’re adlibbed jokes added by the actor, as it is his way. The movie is rated PG-13, and I would strongly caution to heed the rating. The f-bomb is used as well as some suggestive sexual scenes throughout the film.



Crazy, Stupid Love
Directed by: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris)
Written By: Dan Fogleman (Cars, Tangled)
Starring: Steve Carell (Dan in Real Life, Little Miss Sunshine, Date Night), Ryan Gosling (The Notebook, Mickey Mouse Club, All Good Things), Julianne Moore (The Forgotten, A Single Man, Freedomland), Emma Roberts (The Rocker, Superbad, The House Bunny) Marisa Tomei (Four Rooms, Anger Management, Cyrus), John Carroll Lynch (Gran Torino, Zodiac, Paul)
Length:  118 minutes
Released: July 29th, 2011
Rated: PG-13 (strong language, sexual themes, violence)
Rating: 4 stars

Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Date Movie
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.