Not quite the exception

He’s Just Not That Into You
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“He’s Just Not That Into You” was based on a popular dating advice book, and it shows. The script shoehorns so much self-help dialogue into the script that the characters never become believable human beings and, most problematically, we never come to care about their romantic woes.

They only seem to care about are their love lives (their jobs and families are never brought up in conversation), and they exist either as helpful sources of exposition and information, as exemplars of the film’s various relationship mores or as broad personifications of the rigid gender roles in upper-middle class America.

I just realize I’ve made the movie sound more thoughtful than it is. Let me simplify it: All of the women in the film are desperate for commitment, and all of the men in are afraid of it, and the screenplay presents us with an interconnected series of characters who are always second-guessing their position in life and their selection of significant others.

Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly and Ginnifer Goodwin all work in the same office, yet they can’t possibly be efficient employees, since they just sit around discussing their relationships all day. Aniston is living with Ben Affleck, but he won’t marry her; Connelly is married to Bradley Cooper, but he isn’t keen on having children.

Goodwin plays Gigi, the single girl, and she and her co-workers (the movie doesn’t bother specifying what exactly they do) exhaustively dissect the details of her dates. Did he give you his number before you gave him yours? When he said “Nice to meet you,” was it at the beginning of the date or the end of it? How long has it been since your date, and has he called you yet?

Gigi has “needy” written all over her, and she spends most of the film staring helplessly at the phone, waiting for it to ring. She turns to a savvy bartender played by Justin Long, who has obviously read “He’s Just Not That Into You” and knows all the rules of courtship. If a guy wants to date you, he says, he’ll make it happen. If you sense that he’s not into you, move on.

There’s also Scarlett Johansson as a wannabe chanteuse who begins an affair with Cooper, Kevin Connolly as a real estate agent confused by the Johansson character’s advances and Drew Barrymore as a harried ad executive who pines for the days when our lives weren’t dictated by endless means of communication.

The all-star cast is appealing, made up of actors I admire, but the story revolves around so many of them that they hardly have a chance to develop their characters beyond mere summations of their romantic shortcomings.

“He’s Just Not That Into You” clearly has loftier ambitions than most romantic comedies, but it plays like a faint echo of a Woody Allen picture: Its use of intertwining relationships, pedantic banter, chapter titles and monologues delivered directly to the camera remind us of Allen’s wonderful “Hannah and Her Sisters,” but executed with far less wit, warmth and intelligence.

As cute and inoffensive as this film is, it never produces a moment of genuine inspiration or truly remarkable insight. Since we’re already comparing it to Woody Allen, let us also observe that “He’s Just Not That Into You” is also lacking Allen’s touch for cutting dialogue. Remember Allen’s character in “Manhattan,” whose wife left him for another woman? “I thought I took it rather well under the circumstances,” he says indifferently. “I tried to run them both over with a car.”

What’s the most memorable piece of dialogue I culled from this film? “You have an ass so hot it makes me wanna dry hump.” I’m not too into that.

Grade: C+

Directed by Ken Kwapis. Written by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein. Based on the book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo. Starring Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johnasson, Ginnifer Goodwin, Justin Long, Bradley Cooper, Kevin Connolly and Drew Barrymore. PG-13; 129m.

A few late Christmas gifts

Bedtime Stories
It’s nice to see that Adam Sandler has softened over the years. He has yet to outgrow his penchant for silly voices, but you can’t always get what you want. “Bedtime Stories” is his first PG-rated family movie, and it finds a happy medium between cute and ribald, although it’s never all that funny or enchanting. Sandler plays a hotel handyman who discovers that elements from the bedtime stories he’s making up for his niece and nephew are coming true—gumballs rain from the sky, he’s accosted by a dwarf and the fairest maiden in the land falls in love with him. Kids will no doubt like the bedtime stories themselves, which are rendered in fast-paced special effects sequences, as well as the jokes about horse flatulence and a guinea pig with bulbous eyes, and they probably won’t care (or even notice) that the plot is a by-the-numbers job that hinges on whether or not the local elementary school will be demolished to make way for a new mega hotel. Adults will no doubt appreciate the inspired casting of Russell Brand as Sandler’s best pal, and fans of Sandler’s comedy won’t find the film nearly vulgar enough. “Bedtime Stories” is a mild diversion, energetic and sweet, but also predictable and forgettable.
Grade: C

Marley and Me
“Marley and Me” has a high sniffle factor, meaning it’s the type of movie that sets out to make you bawl your eyes out by the end. I didn’t cry myself, but I did, almost in spite of myself, feel a lump in my throat when Owen Wilson delivered a teary deathbed monologue to his dog (this is not a spoiler, as any film about the relationship between a human and a dog inevitably ends in the canine’s demise). Yes, the hard-hearted cynic in me was won over. I normally hate movies like this, movies that parade around cute puppies and attractive Hollywood stars and expects us to fawn over them and then get all blubbery at the end. But “Marley and Me,” based on John Grogan’s bestselling memoir, is smarter and funnier than most movies of this sort; it has personality and heart (and a good supporting performance by Alan Arkin, which never hurts), and its sentiments seem genuine. I went along with the misadventures of Marley, the world’s worst dog, and Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, who play his harried owners—they chase Marley around the house and fret as he chews on table legs and eviscerates couch cushions. Yes, it’s warm and fuzzy entertainment, punctuated by lots of “awww” moments, but it’s certainly not saccharine enough to engage your gag reflex.
Grade: B-

The Spirit
“The Spirit” looks great. If they had turned the sound off, they might have had something. It is a baffling, hollow, aimless mess, a sort of distant cousin to “Sin City”—it borrows that film’s visual palette (black, white and sepia tones with splashes of bright red and yellow) but can’t reproduce its excitements. It has all the right ingredients for a quirky pulp fantasy: Gabriel Macht has self-aware pluck as the titular masked crime fighter; Samuel L. Jackson is just right as the arch-villain the Octopus, so named because he has “eight of everything;” and the women in the cast—Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Jaime King, Sarah Paulson, Paz Vega—are so gorgeous that they upstage the CGI. But “The Spirit” has enough material for at least a dozen movies, and it juggles so many directionless subplots, empty characters and contradictory tones and styles, and the script never bothers to make heads or tails of it all. The movie has been written and directed by Frank Miller, who has taken Will Eisner’s 1940s comic book series and updated it to look like a pale retread of his vivid “Sin City” universe, but it’s black and white and dead all over.
Grade: D

Valkyrie
Here we have a good historical thriller that is prevented from ever being great because we don’t give a damn about anybody in it. “Valkyrie” stars Tom Cruise as General Claus von Stauffenberg, who led the German Resistance, plotted to kill Hitler and masterminded Operation Valkryie, which would have overthrown the Nazi regime had it been successful. It’s a fascinating story, yes, but none of the characters in the movie are written or acted with a sense of real human emotion. There are some great actors at work here—Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp—but when the famous July 20 assassination attempt finally unfolds in the film, we’re enthralled by its mechanics, not because we really care about Stauffenberg or any of his accomplices. Cruise is so sterile and unmoving that we never get the sense that he’s the great man the movie wants him to be, and that creates a gaping void at the emotional center of the film. “Valkyrie” is a finely-tuned machine, and although it hits all of its marks at exactly the right time, it does so with very little feeling.
Grade: B-

Yes Man
In 1997, Jim Carrey made a movie called “Liar Liar,” in which he played a dishonest lawyer who, by way of his young son’s birthday wish, cannot tell a lie no matter how hard he tries. Now Carrey has made “Yes Man,” in which he plays a negative bank loan exec who gets a new lease on life when he challenges himself to say “yes” to everything. Both concepts are very similar, which makes this movie easy to review: “Liar Liar” was funny, “Yes Man” not as much, so if “Liar Liar” gets a B, then “Yes Man” clocks in somewhere around a C. Remember the scene in “Liar Liar” where Jim Carrey wants to say the blue pen is red but can’t? Or the scene where he beats himself up until he’s a bloody pulp? Or the scene where he goes into the board room meeting and has to tell all of the horrible businessmen what he really thinks about them? There are no sequences like that in “Yes Man,” no big comic set pieces that allow Carrey to tangle up his body parts and contort his face and really steal the show. It’s a mundane plot about a mundane character that quickly develops into a mundane love story, as Carrey courts the beautiful Zooey Deschanel, who, once she catches on to the whole “yes-to-everything” bit, wonders if he really meant his answer when she asked him if he loved her. “Yes Man” is pleasant enough, but it’s missing the big laughs we expect when we go to a Jim Carrey comedy.
Grade: C