Every guy is up for a challenge. This one... is different. Sort of.
Anne Hathaway has always been this... enigma in the realm of film. Well, for me anyway. Everytime I see her, thoughts similar to "She's absolutely gorgeous!" fall parallel to "What's the deal with her eyebrows?" It's a curious factor to have in an actress. I love her eyes. Her smile is just a bit to big. But her body is rocking. And Jake Gyllenhaal? Well, he's just one of the most charismatic buggahs I've seen and isn't nearly as big a star as he deserves to be. Hell, he even hooked up the Joker. Or was it the other way around. I can't remember.
Enter Jamie Randall [Gyllenhaal], MVP of picking-up women and selling anything. This guy could sell sex tapes to a nun and have her star in one with him later that day. Yeah. That good. The downside of that is that it makes him not really give a shit in anything, including himself. After taking a gig in pharmaceutical sales, he has a chance meeting with Maggie Murdock [Hathaway], starting the eventual flipping of his world. What turns Jamie onto her is the fact that she is apparently the only woman in this universe that doesn't instantly swoon for Mr. Pretty Blue Eyes. This obviously is where the challenge arises, yes? Him finding a woman that rejects him? Um. Not quite. She actually sleeps with him after a five minute conversation with coffee. Though, she was the instigator. Crazy.
This true conflict here is Maggie has [insert foreboding music] Parkinson's Disease. Well, stage one. So, there are minor shudders and shakes here and there, but nothing too drastic yet. What becomes the challenge for Jamie is dealing with his growing attachment to Maggie while she tries to get rid of him because of her perpetual fear of what the disease will do to her. She truly believes that she will get so messed up that no one could possibly love her and that they'll just leave her later on. She figures keeping things at arms length hurts less.
Why these two don't get together in real life... I'll never know.
This disease takes center stage of the movie, revolving around Maggie's rejection of the world and her emotionally instability because of the "impending doom" of her ailment and Jamie's desperate attempt to stay in her life and "fix" her during a different part of the film.
I was taken aback by this. Now I've learned from many past experiences that you should never, ever take a movie's trailer as an accurate depiction of what you'll see during the actual flick, but I thought this was about a drug rep. I thought this was about a damn dick pill. And a larger emphasis of the comedy aspect of this rom-com. Yes, there's some references to Viagra, including an amusing sequence where it gets "complicated", but it's not until much later on and the amusing part is after Jamie and Maggie's separation. And the silliness is almost nonexistent, carried almost entirely by Jamie's brother Josh [Josh Gad]. Speaking of which, I really think they just wrote him in just to have a comic relief. I mean, hell; they didn't even bother to give his character a different name.
Love and Other Drugs is actually a drama hiding behind the illusion rom-com; however, they didn't do that poorly at executing it. You became invested in Jamie and Maggie's relationship enough to want to see them get back together again. And the interactions with Josh were amusing more times than not. Unfortunately, everyone and everything else was forgettable. I almost completely forgot the subplots involving Oliver Platt as his mentor/sales buddy and Jamie's "golden egg" Hank Azaria. Being a movie adapted after the book 'Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra', there was almost nothing of substance about the selling of drugs.
Though the movie wasn't terrible, it wasn't anything special. I constantly felt like there was something missing from the story, and that I was suckered into seeing something under false pretenses. It did do good putting a face on the emotional trials of younger people diagnosed with Parkinson's, though. You have to give them props for that. Check it out with your usual rom-com partner either at Matinée or as a rental. Plus, Hathaway's boobies are all about the screen.
Hehehehehe... Dick drug...
RATING:
rock hard. live harder. o_O
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