Definitely, Maybe

I originally figured that Definitely, Maybe was destined to be terrible, because of Ryan Reynolds. I just really believe that the guy peaked with Two Guys, A Girl, And A Pizza Place. I think that was Ryan Reynolds hitting his sweet spot, and what he’s done since then, I simply have not bought. I don’t find him particularly attractive, I don’t usually think he’s funny, and I don’t understand what kind of appeal I’m supposed to find in him, since he’s been presenting the same blank, waxy face for all of his career, to my knowledge. He always has struck me as a guy who should play the best friend. One of two guys. With a girl. And a pizza place.

But then the reviews were pretty good, so I went.

And it’s really dumb. It’s not terrible. It’s ploddingly competent.  Abigail Breslin is cute as his daughter, and Rachel Weisz is pretty. I understand why people were drawn to the gimmick, in which Will (played by Reynolds) tells his cute moppet the story of how he met her mother (heeeeey…) while not quite telling her which of the women in his life was her mother. In the story, he starts off with a college sweetheart, meets a free-spirited wisp, and then falls for a smart journalist. Which is the mother? Well, the good news is that it isn’t totally obvious, and the movie does find a way out of the trap of the whole thing feeling like a game of eeny-meenie-miney-mo.

But the bad news is that I didn’t really care. Who cares who her mother was if I don’t care about her father or any of the women. I wasn’t particularly invested in, nor did I believe, any of the three relationships. I wasn’t hoping that the mother was one of them as opposed to another one, and I wasn’t even hoping he wound up with one of them as opposed to another one. I kept waiting for that airy feeling that genuinely romantic movies have, kept thinking it was going to bubble up between Reynolds and one of the actresses (Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher, and Weisz), and it just never did.

This is the kind of movie I think I cut far more slack when I was twenty. Or even twenty-five. The happy ending, the attempts at banter, the sewn-up tale…in a way, the movie is getting the job done, but there’s nothing there. Romantic comedy, I have said over and over, is so much harder than it looks, and this is why. It’s so easy to think you have all the pieces in place, and to wind up with nothing there. Guaranteed formulas are elusive. Sleepless In Seattle works, and they basically don’t see each other through the whole movie. Pretty Woman works, and she’s a prostitute. The Cutting Edge works, and absolutely nobody knows how that happened. (And when I say “works” in this paragraph, I’m really discussing the movie’s capacity to create the happy romantic-comedy high, not necessarily pure artistic merit.)

You can put all the pieces into the movie, and then either the click happens or it doesn’t, and I would bet that I could name twenty romantic comedies, and you’d instantly know whether the click happened or not, and most people would agree, and you’ve probably never even thought about it until now. This movie never gets any air under it. It’s not bad, but it’s not good, either. You’d be better off staying home and watching something old and reliable on cable.

Two Point O

If you’re here, you probably have realized I’m migrating here from F&D, which will eventually go away. The reason is essentially fresh-start-related. I will at some point migrate some, but not all, of F&D over here. I’ll certainly find a home for That Guy and my Christmas biopsy and all of that. But the eyes are in the front of the head, no? I started that site eight years ago or something. It’s time.

For now, I’ll say only that I love being in New York. Love my café, love having two movie theaters within walking distance, love being able to get anywhere on the train for two dollars, love going to see Enchanted in Times Square and thinking, during the Times Square scenes, “So that’s…outside, then.” Love listening to audiobooks on the train in the morning, love the fact that I’m actually reading real books in my spare time, love all of it.

As you can probably guess, the title of the site comes from thinking that what makes a blog fun is writing about things. “Things? What things?” “Well…things.”