Short Round: Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) ***/*****

Romantic comedies always follow the same predictable formula. A couple of people meet, they chafe against each other at first, but then they fall in love. The problem comes when the screenwriters realize this doesn’t make a complete movie. So, late in the film, some sort of break between the two principles is shoddily crammed in, it looks for a minute like they won’t end up together, and then somebody chases somebody else to an airport so we can get a tear-filled speech and a reconciliation. Romantic Comedies just haven’t figured out what to do in their third acts. Crazy, Stupid, Love. is an anomaly then. What we have here is a really good second half of rom-com shenanigans, preceded by a first half of boring, paint by numbers cliché. We get a really fun romance between two charismatic, young actors in Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. We get a cute, yet doomed bit of unrequited love between a teenage girl played by Analeigh Tipton and a pubescent boy played by Jonah Bobo. All of the characters involved are relatable, and well acted, and their situations and interactions play with a freshness that is rare in these movies. Unfortunately, they’re just the B-plots. What gets most of the focus here is the dissolution of the marriage between two boring characters played by Steve Carrel and Julianne Moore; or, at least, the aftermath of the dissolution. Most of the first half of this movie is an endless, miserable sequence where Gosling’s character teaches Carrel’s to be a ladies man, and it’s positively nap inducing. It’s like somebody sucked all of the fun out of The 40 Year Old Virgin and forced it to have a baby with the montage sequence in Pretty Woman. The results are not pretty. It’s a shame that a movie that goes such fun, chaotic places by its end makes you sit through so much been-there, done-that before you get there. Still, I’d probably recommend romantic comedy fans go see it anyways. One good half is better than the usual no good halves.