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He's Just Not That Into You
(2009)
He's Just Not That Into You is another romantic comedy that struggles with the notion that people are individual, selfish and for the most part, in this particular movie, deluded. Presented here are several loosely interconnecting stories, all based around the trouble and strife that both men and women have with the opposite sex. One doesn’t understand the other, that much is a given. Do we come away then from this movie with some spark of insight? Do we get any kind of satisfaction at its conclusion?
Personally, I would have to say no to both questions. The film is entertaining enough and while the characters are thin and predictable, they are still enjoyable to a certain extent.
Stretching the film to two hours is a not a winning idea. The same could probably be achieved in under ninety minutes. As a huge Jennifer Aniston and Connelly fan, even I was getting sick of the neurotic over-amplification after only an hour. The pace of the film seems laboured and this comes from trying to make yet another film about the simplest of ideas.
Relationships are never simple. Well, not if you’re one of these characters. All of them wander and wonder at either the inadequacies of themselves, their partners or the one that they would like to be their partner, but couldn’t manage to pull it off and actually get it together because all of these people are just so damn complicated. It hurts your head, it really does.
Thankfully, the characters are just about three dimensional enough to cope with, but that still does not stop them from being needlessly infuriating. They are the emotional equivalent of a group of dumb teenagers standing outside a haunted house, deciding whether to go in or not. Clearly, any sane person is not going to put themselves in needless and protracted danger, but for the sake of entertainment, they go ahead and do it anyway. Here, we have people that really should know better and having personally been through most of the circumstances placed before us here, none of them deal with their problems as efficiently as they would be expected to.
The annoyance at them never gets as rabid as fist-waving at the screen, however, and there are positive elements throughout the picture. All of the women involved are beautiful to look at and this may well be on purpose to draw an initially reluctant male audience that normally wouldn’t be seen dead within a hundred miles of such a film. There are sporadic moments of comedy, usually tightly wound in the neurosis of one or more of the characters, that do make you smile, but at no stage are your sides splitting or rolling in the aisles.
Overall, a by the numbers rom-com, aimed at twenty something women with a brain. If you are dragged to this by your partner, then you probably won’t be satisfied by the end of it and will have looked at your watch several times before the credits roll. It brings little to the table and you leave feeling that you have fed, but not enough to stop the cinematic rumbling in your stomach, still hungry for something more substantial.
-Steve Leadbetter
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2004-2009 Thoughtsonfilm.com |
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Director:
Ken Kwapis
Writer: Abby Kohn &
Marc Silverstein, Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Justin Long, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, Drew Barrymore
Distributor: New Line Cinema
Runtime: 129
min
Rating: PG-13
Release Date: February 6, 2009
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