IMDB Plot Synopsis: During his son's college graduation, Jane hooks up with her ex-husband, Jake, who's married to a younger woman...
- That synopsis seems to be implying that Jane is a man, although I suspect this was not the intention.
- There was a lot of horrendously stilted dialogue that sounded terrible coming out of the actors mouths, but if they were going for the supreme awkwardness that is a pretty big trend right now in comedy, Nancy Meyers missed it by a mile.
- Alec Baldwin as Jake was a huge douchebag, oh my god. You can understand completely why Jane would divorce him (you know, in addition to his infidelity) but it’s completely incomprehensible that she would ever get re-involved with someone like that. I know, I know, they have decades of history, blah blah, but Jake seriously had no redeeming features whatsoever. I can understand their drunken hook-up in New York, but I absolutely cannot understand the prolonged affair once they got back to California, especially since Jake was so clearly and blatantly acting as if his new wife did not exist. Um, hello, asshole.
- The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I suppose, because the son came across as a total tool as well during his extended graduation proceedings. Speaking of which, this kid must have been teetering on the edge of getting kicked out of school due to an academic probation, because there’s no reason that some white upper middle class kid for whom university is an inevitability and not something hard earned should be getting this much praise and lauding for finishing his undergrad degree.
- I wish my problems in life involved the difficult decision of figuring out which 5-star hotel in New York to stay at.
- I have a tiny kitchen. My friends have tiny kitchens. We all like to bake (and by bake, I mean that my one friend does most of the baking and I get the kid jobs like breaking eggs or using cookie cutters). Obviously, you always want more counter space (and a conveyor belt for pies!) but it seems to me that if I was someone who baked as a profession and had my own restaurant with an industrial grade kitchen, perhaps one of the things I would look for when purchasing a multi-million dollar home after my divorce would be, I don’t know, a kitchen that suited all my baking and cooking requirements? Woe is Jane, whose kitchen (WITH A GIANT ISLAND PERFECT FOR ROLLING OUT TONS OF DOUGH, OMG) is so “small” that she needs to build an entire addition onto her house so that she can get her dream kitchen! Pfft. You don’t need an addition, you needed a better realtor ten years ago.
- Steve Martin is the only one who comes out of this thing mostly morally intact, and since the last thing I saw him in was Baby Mama it’s nice to see him play the straight man here.
- Also, I totally love consequence free drug taking. It’s a really great idea to drive while you’re high! Get high, fine, just stay in your goddamned house.
- John Krasinski’s character Harley (seriously?) seemed very involved for a future son-in-law. Like, almost more involved than Jane and Jake’s children, and I’m not even including the omg-he-knows plot point he was trapped in with this assessment. Also, he was the only one with a nickname for Jane, which was weird. He just started calling her “Boss” one day and it stuck? And she was okay with it? Sure. Maybe she was getting secret revenge on him when she called him “Harls” while high. I was equally horrified and amused by his ladies pyjamas scene.
- Agness was totally inappropriately dressed for the anniversary party at the start of the movie. That said, “Come back, I’m ovulating!” was funnier to me than most of the other dialogue (a feeling I apparently did not share with the rest of the audience).
- There were a lot of really bad, full out face-on camera angles that were upsetting, the most spectacular of which was poor dejected Jake wearing his Sadface of Sorrow while watching Jane dance with Adam. Suck it up, loser.
- Adam eventually finds out that Jane and Jake were sleeping together while accidentally overhearing everything during a not-quite-aborted video chat where Jane forgot her computer was still on. This is the clumsiest piece of storytelling I’ve seen in a long time, I think.
- On the one hand, I want to support movies where women over 50 are the leads (top billed, too!) and where they’re fantastic, driven women. On the other hand, when you pair all that with rampant infidelity (or being an accessory to that infidelity) it kind of ruins it for me. Jane is clearly better than Jake and is not acting accordingly.
- This movie probably could have been better executed as a Facebook update between two fake characters, College Humor style.
Related posts: Extract
, Sex and the City: The Movie
, Julie & Julia
, Dish: Women, Waitressing & the Art of Service
, Whip It
No comments yet.