Crazy Stupid Love
This entry was posted on 12/2/2011 10:12 AM and is filed under Movies.
Watched Crazy Stupid Love with Josie the other night.
We both really enjoyed it but I'm pretty sure it was for different reasons.
Although, one thing we both really enjoyed is Ryan Gosling, who is very cute.
The character he plays is a pig. A charming, smoking hot pig.
The movie begins with the break up of a marriage. Apparently the wife of 25 years got bored. These days, boredom is a reason to break your vows and tear apart your children's family. I don't know. Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper and more fun to woo your spouse back? Have an affair with each other instead of some random co worker?
but I digress.
So Steve Carell moves out of his house and starts hanging out at a local bar, where he gets drunk and loudly curses the guy who slept with his wife. And when he's not loudly lamenting, he's watching the bar stud, Ryan Gosling, hit on everything with breasts.
We originally meet Gosling's character in the bar using his pick up line with sledge hammer precision on Emma Stone, who not only doesn't fall for it (really, if women these days are as easy as Gosling's conquests, there's something seriously wrong with them) but she laughs in his face before shooing him away.
I told Josie that when I was young (and once in a while got hit on) if any guy had used a line like that, I would've been insulted and most likely thrown my drink in his face. (Or punched him, like MJ did once when a guy groped her at First Ave. She thinks she broke his nose. Good for her. I think it's a sad commentary on society that women no longer know they have the right to slap, throw drinks and kick men who suggest they are easy.)
"What? why? He's so cute!" my silly kid asked.
"He basically just told her 'I think you're the kind of girl who will have sex with a total stranger just because he has great pecs.' That's an insult."
Cue the obligatory eye roll and "Mommm."
Back to the movie; Ryan notices sad Steve and decides to help the middle aged loser regain his footing because all the whining is putting a damper on Ryan's style. The two of them become friends. It's very entertaining.
Best line in the movie is when Gosling tells Carell "The battle of the sexes is over and we won!"
He's right.
Later in the movie, Carell accuses Gosling of objectifying women but that's not the problem; males have always 'objectified' females. It's how they're wired. That's why it was so important that women refuse to allow it and for millennium were successful in forcing men to see them as individual people. The sexual revolution+the 'women's movement' tricked females into thinking they were gaining 'equality' with males but ultimately all they managed to do was make women compliant in the objectification of themselves.
Think I'm wrong?
Ask any under thirty something what's wrong with the behavior of the women Gosling picks up in the early part of this movie. They won't know what you're talking about.*
The war of the sexes is over and everybody lost.
The second best line in the movie takes place later on when Emma Stone decides to take Gosling up on his earlier offer (although in true rom/com style, no sex takes place) and in a late night burst of honesty, he admits that he lives like he does because "I'm wildly unhappy."
There's a third love storyline that involves the 17 year old babysitter and the 13 year old who has a crush on her. I actually found this one to be the creepiest. Maybe it's just me but when I was 17 if some little kid had insisted on following me all over town proclaiming his undying love for me, I would've put up with it for one day before beating the kid to a pulp.
Think I'm exaggerating?
Ask anyone who knew me when I was 17.
Marisa Tomei seems to be making a career as the needy wanna be girl friend who gets used and tossed aside. She played the same role in What Women Want and Factotum and who knows how many movies I didn't see. She's very funny. If the Stephanie Plum movies had been made ten years ago, she would've been the perfect star. Now they've cast Katherine Heigle and I refuse to go see the movie.
Kevin Bacon plays the guy who sleeps with Steve Carell's wife. Kevin is not aging well at all. At all.
Much hilarity ensues, the story lines all come together in a very funny denouement and all together, I gave the movie a big thumbs up.
*I hope I'm wrong and this is just more of the Hollywood fantasy of women behaving like this but I don't think so.
