He's Just Not That Into You (2009) -

An astonishingly tedious rumination on the contemporary courtship rituals of the privileged and attractive and heterosexual. The elaborate yet simple-minded plot is exhausting for its dependence on familiar formulas/cliches of the romantic comedy genre. Basically, this is what happens when you try to use Sex and the City's signature episode formula -- a soupy base of recognizable romantic difficulty, a heaping dollop of lifestyle porn, a dash of cute boy/man, and a garnish of flashy/pithy cameos -- and expect it to stand alone. The problem? The heart of SATC -- like Designing Women, Living Single, or The Golden Grils -- is the sustaining friendship shared among quite disparate women. Contemporary American filmmakers, however, find it really difficult to trust female friendship. So these women aren't really friends, just chattery co-workers inclined to shooting glib opinions and half-baked sympathies from their well-clad hips...or they're the other woman. Oddly, the guys in this film are pictured as having much more emotionally anchored relationships, although even those scenes are mostly scaffolding for early exposition with the relationships themselves fading as the film lumbers along. The cast is uniformly appealing. The three chattery coworkers -- 2 Jennifers and a Ginnifer -- are the most tediously scripted, and Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly do well reaching beyond the material to craft adequately appealing portraits of basically unappealing characters. Ginnifer Goodwin, in what is arguably the film's lead role, is way cute -- too cute actually -- for the role Drew Barrymore might have played a few years back. Unfortunately, Goodwin's performance is more annoying than endearing, largely because she's stuck playing such an emotionally monochromatic character. And I guess its the casting of this film that I find most annoying. Everyone's playing their type -- to a one this film is "perfectly" cast. You can almost imagine the screenwriters saying "we want a Jennifer Aniston type for the role of Beth" and then what happens when they get Jennifer Aniston for the role of Beth? It becomes fundamentally uninteresting because there's little discovery left to do. There's one scene in particular -- when Goodwin's Gigi has realized that Justin Long's Alex actually likes her and tell's Connelly's Janine about it -- Janine, who is supposed to be experience the incremental collapse of her marriage, immediately jumps into planning Gigi and Alex's "destination wedding." Both actresses do what they can with this scene -- Connelly playing the move as an desperate expression of Janine's deep denial, Goodwin registering the shock at her friends grasping romantic delusions. Yet the scene trucks on, the actress's "playing against the grain" doing little to actually complicate the sturdy artifice of the scene itself. And this is basically the way the whole film works. The actors's best efforts are for naught, and the film basically depends on how much you crush on the lifestyles depicted. The set decoration is glorious...straight out of dwell. Jobs are glamorous...with little work involved. And the relationships resolve as you expect them to upon first glance. Tedious, disappointing, obvious. I knew I was in trouble in the first scene when a galling "cute" joke about women's refusal to see the romantic truth literally "went to Africa" depicting tribeswomen gossiping. Dumb, racist, not funny. Then in the first real scene between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston -- the couple who's choosing not to marry NOT because of something like a political commitment to marriage equality but because a vaguely anti-establishment mistrust of marriage as an institution -- when their first real fight over the idea of marriage is staged in front of some "edgy" painting with the word "should" written on it about twenty times -- when I saw that I sorta knew that this film's notion of sophisticated/subtle was pretty dumb and that I was in trouble. Sure enough. Dumb dumb dumb. And the film uses gay men and black people as obvious props while leaving lesbians completely out of the picture. (A smarter movie -- or at least Dan in Real Life smart -- would have had one of Aniston's sisters be a happily married lesbian, her partner sitting watching sports with the other brothers-in-law or something.) But then this movie appears to have had no interest in being smart. As MrStinky noted, it's enough to make you worry about the future of the "romantic comedy"...