Movie Moment: Crazy Stupid Love

Nine times out of ten, the trailers spoil the movie. Yet when I went to see Crazy Stupid Love I was surprised to find that it offered more story and more layers than the previews had promised. Part romantic comedy, part drama, Crazy Stupid Love centers around Cal Weaver (Steve Carell), a nice-guy insurance salesman who's just been dumped by his wife (Julianne Moore). Depressed and alone, he starts haunting bars and spouting his sad story to anyone who will listen. Enter gorgeous, confident trust fund case Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling). Taking pity on Cal and his lack of game, Jacob revamps Cal's wardrobe, brings him to a salon, and shows him how to chat up women in a My Fair Lady-style transformation. (Well, if My Fair Lady were a bromance.)

But then Jacob meets Hannah (Emma Stone), the "game changer." Just jilted by her dweeby lawyer boyfriend (Josh Grobin), a guy whose only charm was his security, Hannah sets out to do something reckless only to soften Jacob with the allure of her naivete.

Had things ended here, this would've been a different kind of movie. A more surface kind of movie. But Love isn't about easy hookups or black and white relationships that can be saved on the strength of grand gestures. It's about the gray areas and the complications and the parts that get left in between.

If I say too much I'll spoil it, but this cast of characters, which includes Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon, is unexpectedly intertwined, creating plot twists that are not only entertaining but that deepen the story. And although the ending is marked by a grand gesture, it's more a culmination of the many false starts that came before it than an out-of-the-blue deus ex machina.

Tender and thought-provoking, Crazy Stupid Love is about all the stuff we have to go through to find and keep our soul mates. Yet it's spiked with just enough humor to prevent it from taking itself too seriously.

Movie Moment: The Kids are Alright

Last weekend the bf and I rented The Kids are Alright, the tale of Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joanie (Mia Waskowska), the children of lesbian mothers who track down their biological father. Their mothers, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), have one of those ying yang relationships in which one partner (Nic) is the level-headed, plan-happy breadwinner and the other (Jules) is the free-wheeling, unstructured dreamer. Although different, they're presented as happy and even playful together, fixtures of marital bliss in their magazine-worthy home. Theirs is an order-to-chaos-to-order story in which the kids' father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), rides in on the proverbial motorcycle to shake up the easy and privileged domesticity to which this stable, upper middle-class family has become accustomed.

Ungrounded and devil-may-care, Paul is a college-dropout-slash-loner who has managed to build a successful organic food business. Joanie and (eventually) Laser are charmed by him, and Jules laughs at all of his jokes. Paul even hires Jules to landscape his yard, an event that begins to splinter the fledgling fault lines rising to the surface of Nic and Jules's relationship.

Before long, Paul and Jules start sleeping together. Partly because Paul is that kind of guy, and partly because being with Jules gives him the chance to imagine having the family he's beginning to dream of in his lonely middle age. As for Jules, she falls for the sense of acceptance that Paul provides. Appreciative of her budding landscaping business, Paul seems to respect her in a way that Nic does not, or at least hasn't in a long time.

Nevertheless, Paul and Jules are not meant to be, because The Kids are Alright isn't that kind of movie. Rather, the rift created by first Paul's presence and then his and Jules's affair serves to cast the family's issues out into the open, forcing resolutions and ultimately allowing the four of them to become even more tightly bound to each other than before.

Overall, it was pretty good, as witty, thought-provoking, and rawly emotional as any indie flick worth its salt.