Amanda Peet

A Lot Like Love

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  • Title: A Lot Like Love
  • IMDb: link

Released 20 years ago, A Lot Like Love feels a bit forgotten by time. The romantic comedy starred Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet as affable and charming leads whose lives intersect every few years before finally realizing that each belongs with the other. Kutcher is in full shaggy dog mode, especially early as the good-natured but largely clueless dude compelled to see his “five-year plan” to fruition. Peet (perhaps in her most intoxicating on-screen performance) is the more spontaneous, but also emotionally-distant, burned often by love.

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Sleeping with Other People

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Sleeping with Other People
  • IMDb: link

Sleeping with Other PeopleWriter/director Leslye Headland‘s indie romcom doesn’t stray far from the basic formula of the genre. After meeting, and loosing their mutual viriginity to each other one steamy night in college, Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey’s (Alison Brie) paths cross again years later. Despite their mutual attraction, the two agree to keep things platonic given Jake’s womanizing ways and Lainey’s hang-up on an old college ex (Adam Scott) who she still carries a torch for despite how awful he’s treated her over the years.

There’s little to no surprise in Headland’s script and when Sleeping with Other People works it does so on the talent and likability of its stars and supporting cast that includes Scott, Amanda Peet, Jason Mantzoukas, Andrea Savage, Natasha Lyonne, and Margarita Levieva (in an opening cameo so good she nearly steals the entire film). We know where Jake and Lainey are going, how long it will take to get there, and can guess (pretty accurately) on the stops they’ll take along the way. Thankfully the movie’s cast keeps the predictable story from becoming stale and boring. It’s far from a must-see, but if your girlfriend is determined to drag you to a romcom you could do far, far worse.

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The Whole Nine Yards

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  • Title: The Whole Nine Yards
  • IMDb: link

whole-nine-yards-poster

His role of Friends aside, I’ve been largely unimpressed with Matthew Perry (Serving Sara and Three to Tango come to mind). It’s really a shame he’s made such bad choices on scripts because when you watch this flick you realize how good he could actually be in motion pictures. 

The idea of a comedy starring Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry might not inspire much confidence, but what we get turns out to be pretty darn good. The Whole Nine Yards is a quirky, fun, occasionally dark, entertaining little movie. Full of odd characters and terrific comic sequences, most notably from Perry. And it provides not one but two love stories.

Nicholas ‘Oz’ Oseransky (Matthew Perry) is trapped. He’s living in Montreal with a horrible wife (Rosanna Arquette) who has made his life miserable for years. He continues to work at the dental practice he started with his father-in-law whose debt from an embezzlement scheme he is forced to pay off. 

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Gulliver’s Travels

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Gulliver’s Travels
  • IMDB: link

A BIG DISAPPOINTMENT

I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet the central idea for putting Jack Black in a remake of Gulliver’s Travels was for the express purpose of having him fight a giant robot in the town square as the miniature masses looked on. As ideas go, this one is less than inspired (but, then again, so is the rest of this hapless film).

How you take the talents of Jack Black, Jason Segel, Emily Blunt, Amanda Peet, and Billy Connolly and create something as thoroughly inane and painfully unfunny as Gulliver’s Travels is a mystery. This might be the dumbest movie I saw this year.

Black stars as slacker mailroom worker Lemuel Gulliver. To impress news editor Darcy Silverman (Peet), for whom he’s had a secret crush for years, Gulliver plagiarizes various travel articles earning him a spot to write for the paper. (I can’t imagine how such a well designed plan might blow up in his face.) His first assignment takes him to the Bermuda Triangle. (Cue ominous music.) After sailing into a storm Gulliver finds himself in the land of Lilliput, a kingdom filled with people less than 6-inches tall.

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