R, 2 hr. 4 min. Directed By:
Nicholas Stoller. Release Date:
Apr 27, 2012.
I went to see this with someone I
work with. I had made plans to see Safe and The Raven and he texted me The
Five-Year Engagement as a counterproposal.
I was amenable, despite the fact that he knows I think texting is a pox
on our society, something I only don’t hate doing when I know there’s not going
to be a response or I know someone cannot take a phone call. We get to the theater and the two of us are
the youngest people in there by like forty years and the only guys.
My first thought was, quite
literally, !@#@*. It’s never a good sign
when I show up to a movie and I’m like the antithesis of the majority of the
crowd. You might remember when I wrote
about My Sister’s Keeper I wrote
about how when I figured out why the boy was going to downtown (to ogle the
hookers) I busted out laughing and like 400 women with tear-stained faces gave
me the stink eye. The take away from
this tale is if you are ever in an extreme minority in a theater, you probably
won’t enjoy yourself.
And I kind of didn’t. The
Five-Year Engagement
is so slow to begin I was contemplating suicide by the thirty minute mark. It also kind of reaffirmed my decision to
remain a life-long bachelor. It’s just
not worth it to me. Although, the wedding
in the park would be the wedding I’d chose if I ever decide to break my
bachelorhood vow. It was totally
spontaneous, wasn’t designed to impress anyone, and gave the bride and groom
exactly what they need: a forum in which
they could express their feelings for each other.
I
don’t really like Jason Segel. He has the
occasional funny part, but if he retired, I wouldn’t really miss him. He was funny here, but inconsistently, and
without any real sophistication to his method.
I do like Emily Blunt, and I’ve never found her to be funny. She wasn’t here, but for some reason, they
filmmakers chose to really sex her up.
Think Giada De Laurentiis.
Suddenly, everything she wore created an extreme cleavage moment. I’m not so much complaining as I think there’s
kind of a time and place for that, and most of this was not the time or the
place.
But,
the parts of this that are funny are genuinely so, even if the humor is a
little juvenile. I liked Emily Blunt a
whole lot more than I liked Jason Segel.
I’ve also kind of done what they did: move from California to the
northern Midwest (Ohio in my case, Michigan in theirs). It’s a struggle. People are nice, and come off a little
strange because all their phasers are set on super-friendly, and Californians
are used to a world where they don’t speak to their neighbors, much less random
strangers. It still creeps me out when I’m
in the small town where my family lives in Ohio and random strangers who know
my mother, my grandmother, my uncle, or less frequently, my cousins, and start
talking to me because they hear my name and made the connection. It’s more proof that we need anti-stalking
laws in Ohio, says I. I laughed my ass
off at the snow-windshield scraping scene (because I’ve done exactly that) and
at most of their adjustment to Michigan.
This
movie is… pleasant. It’s not great, and
pretty much the whole cast has been better elsewhere.
