Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
Starring Steve Carell, Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei, Analeigh Tipton, John Carroll Lynch, Josh Groban, and Kevin Bacon

Change of pace this week: it’s going to be a serious review.

To be frank, I was expecting a regular old boozy Wednesday dotted with episodes of Martyn collapsing drunk over rows of unsuspecting moviegoers and me forgetting where I lived and asking the guy at the Kebab shop if he could provide directions to “please which way is me home? I… home? Ben?”

Instead we ended up remaining relatively sober and seeing a terrific movie. Never too late to teach an old dog new tricks, I guess.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a simple tale, some may call it worn, but rendered in a way that is sweet, contemporary, unpretentious, and heart-warming. A brilliant opening scene shows us Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore) at the tail end of a 25-year marriage, surrounded by youthful romance and bankrupt of their own. Within a two minutes of the WB Production logo leaving the screen, Emily is confessing her extra-marital dalliances and asking for a divorce. Cold as ice, right? I had just cracked open my first Peroni. This woman, clearly, was not a time-waster.

Carell: learning the tricks of the trade

The rest of the movie evolves out of Cal’s ensuing tailspin, which lands him devastated in a nouveau-riche California lounge bar observing modern-day Don Juan Jacob (Ryan Gosling) working his magic on any woman around and getting pick of the litter night after night. Jacob, as it turns out, has also noted Cal’s sad-sack antics and, for nebulous reasons of his own, offers to take the new bachelor under his wing.

Married in his late teens, Cal has never had to think twice about dating and sex appeal. Now thrust back onto the market by the slickest womanizer this side of the Sierra Madre, Cal proves to be quick study and more of a catch than he thought possible. 

Unfairly pigeonholed as a supporting or TV actor, Carell here reminds us just how lovely he is as a leading man, and how strong yet subtle a performance he can give in the hands of the right screenplay and director. He never goes over the top with his comedy or his portrayal of a man in total emotional disarray. An early scene where he drives young babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) home having just split from his wife is spectacular in terms of how much weight Carell can deliver when only saying a few words (and being filmed over-the-shoulder, no less).

Carell and Moore: effortless chemistry

Although Cal becomes an able lady-killer in his own right, the movie is, at its core, about the pursuit of romantic love and turns people take on the road to it. It's about him finding his way back home.

Crazy, Stupid, Love takes viewers completely by surprise and separates itself from other like-genre movies in a number of ways. For starters: it is a film without villains. None of these people have set out to harm others; even Kevin Bacon’s homewrecking accountant David Lindhogen is somewhat pitiable in his cuckolding of Cal. Even though the movie is unabashed in its love-conquers-all paradigm, it acknowledges the complications of relationships in a modern world, even when none of the parties involved are malicious in the slightest.

The film is also a rare character-driven rom-com, as opposed to plot existing merely as a vehicle for coupling some eight-figure salary movie stars and dropping lame humour like breadcrumbs along the way. Even Jacob – whose appearances are brief and could have been mishandled by a lesser actor – is three-dimensional and sufficiently tragic in his opulence and solitary malaise that the audience invests in his character too.

Gosling and his winning smile

2011 is Ryan Gosling’s year and he is, yet again, a triumph in this film. A testament to his versatility and onscreen charisma, he is as effective, credible, and human as a trust-fund lounge lizard in light romantic-comedy as he is in heavier fare like Drive or Half Nelson. Even more commendable is his enduring sex-symbol status, since he’s one of the few celebrities who have properly earned it. Unlike Brad Pitt or Hugh Jackman (who, let’s face it, were just born pretty and aged gracefully), Gosling has a young puppydog face (a bit lopsided, even), is not formidably tall or broad, and doesn’t possess strong distinguishing features. What he does have is attitude. He has singular control over his image, his physical presence on camera, and can exude sex appeal on command. As Lars (of Lars and the Real Girl), he is utterly convincing as a completely repressed and introverted small-towner, whereas this latest incarnation of a 21^st century lothario looks sexy eating a slice of takeout pizza. He is seriously one of the great actors of his generation.

While not groundbreaking, Crazy, Stupid, Love is funny and brilliantly acted and fearlessly optimistic. You can’t help but love it.

Next week: The Three Musketeers

SUPER

Written and directed by James Gunn

Starring Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon, and Nathan Fillion

*** WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***

It’s no secret: superhero movies are running out of steam. It was all very exciting to see Sam Raimi’s Spider-man in theatres back in 2002, as graphic imaging technology had progressed to a point where our most beloved masked do-gooders and their heroic tales could finally be given the grandiose scale they deserved.

Ten years later, however, we find film studios scraping the bottom of the barrel with high-budget, low-brow ignominies like The Green Lantern, Iron Man 2, and Thor; the kind of pictures that even a belly full of alcohol couldn’t save. To their credit, the banality of superhero-ness (how oxymoronic, no?) has elicited a response from a small group of thoughtful, indie filmmakers who are spearheading a counter-trend: heroes without powers.

Toronto: national leaders in higher education and taking a kicking

Sure, there are the sleek, big studio pictures like Batman Begins or Watchmen – wherein the heroes may not be superhuman but can still open up a can of Zidane on baddies as required – but let’s not forget Special and Defendor, films that feature protagonists who are delusional, out of shape, and retarded. I’m not kidding folks and that’s not a figure of speech; they sincerely made a movie about a differently-abled superhero and everyone needs to watch it. It’s also filmed in Toronto, so all the retards there will recognize their city and their retardation. Go Leafs!

Super, which plants itself firmly in the latter category, is the chronicle of the Frank D’Arbo/Crimson Bolt (Rainn Wilson) and his crime-fighting exploits. A short order chef whose recovering drug-addict wife Sarah (Liv Tyler) runs off with seedy strip-club owner Jacques (Kevin Bacon), Frank sets into a deep depression in the early stages of the film. Now, I don’t remember this next part of the movie because I’d been drinking but Wikipedia told me it happened and I believe everything I read on Wikipedia: Frank (like recent divorcées do, I guess) watches a lot of daytime TV and gets caught up in a public access superhero saga on the All-Jesus Network. The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion) soon transcends the television screen and appears to Frank in a vision, convincing him that his purpose is to fight crime.

If you haven't considered Evangelism, now's the time to start

Okay folks, I fully realize that all of my reviews thus far have been of films that involve reprisal or vigilante-ism but I can assure you that it’s neither intentional nor a cause for concern because all of them are comedies (except for La piel que habito, which is not a comedy so much as concrete evidence that Jesus died in vain). You could argue that any film you watch while drunk is a comedy, but let’s face it: you need to have a pretty good sense of humour to cast Rainn Wilson as a superhero and Kevin Bacon as the drug-baron arch-nemesis.

Of course, it’s tricky for me to see a sparsely attended movie like this one and not end up feeling self-conscious. As I’ve mentioned in a past column, Martyn has a propensity for mid-movie restroom absences and from now on he’s getting the aisle seat every time because this guy knocks over bottles like they’re bowling pins. It’s like he’s doing it on purpose. When you’re in an independent film at a nice cinema in Central London with about 11 other people in the screening and four or six bottles go clanking across the concrete floor it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly who the alckies are. I almost felt compelled to stand up and recite the mission statement from my blog as an explanation but decided against it because I couldn’t remember it verbatim nor access it on my smartphone due to a lack of cell reception, and also because I was probably too drunk to read. Perhaps in future small screenings I’ll read it pre-picture as a disclaimer of sorts. Surely that’ll go over well.

As if Martyn’s glass parade wasn’t enough, at a later point in the film when one of the main characters bites it in a way that is shocking, brutally violent, and patently un-funny I was about five Peronis deep and started guffawing for a profoundly ill-advised length of time and at an absurd volume. Think Nicolas Cage after a director has just told him he has artistic carte-blanche. It was so uncomfortable and just plain psychotic that about 75% of the theatre started giggling 5-10 seconds later because I couldn’t compose myself. I imagined it being like Mel Gibson watching Schindler’s List. Although I’m sure no laughter would have followed his.

Too young to be hot or too hot to be young?

The Crimson Bolt later goes on to pick up a sidekick, Boltie (Ellen Page), and Ellen Page in movies is always risky. Sure, the girl is only two years younger than me, but no matter how old she gets she still looks 16 or 17. You say to yourself, “Yeah, she’s cute, and it’s okay for me to ogle her because she’s 24 and probably not much smaller than Jennifer Love-Hewitt, who was sort of a big deal back in the nineties and has boobs that I’d love to motorboat.” But then there’s a rape scene in this movie and you’re like, “Nah, man, I was wrong and I’m waaay not drunk enough for this.” Still, as far as rape scenes go it’s more cringe-inducing than shocking or offensive. You’d have to see it to get it, though, folks.

Looking back, this review has been fairly serious (or at least compared to my others). The reason for this is I’m actually quite serious about this movie. It was a fun boozy night out and the film, at its heights, is pretty fucking mental, but also unexpectedly touching and artful in its rendering of a down-on-his-luck, unhinged anti-hero. It’s hysterically funny drunk or sober, performances are strong across the board, and it achieves its artistic and atmospheric ambitions more successfully than nearly any other superhero movie you’ll see, albeit unconventionally.

Oh, and in case it wasn’t clear before: I hate Toronto and I hope it gets consumed by a plague of locusts.

Damage: 5/10 (pre-movie: ½ pint Taddy Lager, 5 measures of Sam Smith pub whiskey; during the movie: 5 x 330 ml Peroni bottles)

Boozy rating: 9/10 (Martyn and I both had a good time despite the fact the we could have drawn less unwanted attention by firing off a signal flare)