A Lot Like Love (Very Late Post)

Last night (*ahem* February 1--ed.) Mehdi & Nusha came over for dinner (read: Nusha used our kitchen to cook for everyone) as they often do, and afterwards we watched a movie we had rented, a romantic comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet called A Lot Like Love. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rotten rating (41%), and some French paper quoted on the back of the movie case gave it three stars, which Mehdi says means the same thing as the obligatory "Two thumbs up!" that some no-name critic has to stamp on practically every film that comes out in America just to sell it.

However, we rather enjoyed it. It began as a quirky and cute piece about chance meetings between two people trying to find themselves. The dialogue was well written, witty, and fairly subtle, with quite a few things left nicely unspoken. There were nice symmetries throughout the film (the exchange of photography and guitar stuff, the breakups, etc.). And the characters were relatively normal people with normalish lives (yeah, middle class, but still normal) containing successes and failures. Also, surprisingly, Mr. Kutcher and Ms. Peet did decent acting work, showing characters that matured well over time and had believable subtle oddities. And their friendship deepened nicely.

The parts I thought didn't work so well were not large enough to make the film rotten, I felt. The soundtrack was for the most part poorly chosen, and felt like a sampling of Greatest Hits of the 1990s radio. Almost none of the music seemed to match the mood, tone, or present events of the film. The sound on the DVD itself was poorly done, so that we had to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue and way down to avoid deafening the neighbors with soundtrack music. And though the film started and progressed for awhile as a quirky and somewhat unconventional romantic comedy, by the end, it seemed to get impatient with its characters, and so forced them into a standard romantic ending, complete with stupid chance misunderstandings and silly reveals.

Roger Ebert has a somewhat harsher view of the film.