Like Crazy (2011)
A sweet, troubled love story. The troubles come from both the young couple who have to keep their idealized love alive after the woman has to move from L.A. to England because of visa issues. Once the couple is apart they try to find ways of keeping things alive, or keeping things open minded in the meanwhile. Tensions and misunderstandings of course become the meat of the movie, and in ways that are very simple and believable.
I think the goal was to keep the relationship as "normal" as possible even if the situation was slightly unusual. This has two effects. One is it makes you think it's an insightful look at ourselves, or what could be ourselves in a similar spot. The other is that it's a little self-deflating. The whole situation is so ordinary, even though well done ordinary, you don't fully get swept away or rapt.
There are slice of life movies that are about ordinary life that are more successful partly because the slice of life is more interesting to start with. There is more here in the way, however, including some writing that wanes when you need a sparkle or an epiphany. (Even ordinary people have epiphanies.) And the editing or pacing of things lacks what you might just call artfulness--a handling of the unfolding to be more absorbing and emphatic. (Hard to critique editing in a sentence but if you notice you might agree.)
In the end it's not a bad movie--there's nothing "bad" about it. In fact it's charming on the surface. That it doesn't do more might be because it didn't want to. And so we have what we have.
A sweet, troubled love story. The troubles come from both the young couple who have to keep their idealized love alive after the woman has to move from L.A. to England because of visa issues. Once the couple is apart they try to find ways of keeping things alive, or keeping things open minded in the meanwhile. Tensions and misunderstandings of course become the meat of the movie, and in ways that are very simple and believable.
I think the goal was to keep the relationship as "normal" as possible even if the situation was slightly unusual. This has two effects. One is it makes you think it's an insightful look at ourselves, or what could be ourselves in a similar spot. The other is that it's a little self-deflating. The whole situation is so ordinary, even though well done ordinary, you don't fully get swept away or rapt.
There are slice of life movies that are about ordinary life that are more successful partly because the slice of life is more interesting to start with. There is more here in the way, however, including some writing that wanes when you need a sparkle or an epiphany. (Even ordinary people have epiphanies.) And the editing or pacing of things lacks what you might just call artfulness--a handling of the unfolding to be more absorbing and emphatic. (Hard to critique editing in a sentence but if you notice you might agree.)
In the end it's not a bad movie--there's nothing "bad" about it. In fact it's charming on the surface. That it doesn't do more might be because it didn't want to. And so we have what we have.