Posted: 04/14/2005

A Lot Like Love

(2005)

by Clint Fletcher

I’m really starting to feel the affect, folks. I haven’t seen a bad movie in months, and the impact is really taking its toll. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t shower. If I don’t see a movie worthy enough of my bashing soon, I just may fall over dead. With that said, I’ll cut right to the chase:

A Lot Like Love feels a lot like a sleeper hit.

Now all my fans know that I use the term “sleeper hit” loosely, sometimes referring to snoozers such as Sin City that I fell asleep to. Juuuust kidding, film geeks. Now do I have everyone’s attention? Good. While I have the opportunity, I’d like to discuss the situation with Ashton Kutcher and his rep as a bad actor. Where the hell did this start, anyway? Did Ebert say something bad about Dude, Where’s My Car? Is that how it started? After seeing Guess Who and A lot Like love within a two week time span, I decided to do a little research. So far, Mr. Demi Moore now has six major releases under his belt. And according to Fletch (who holds the only important opinion), five out of those six films were kick-ass. Just Married- funny. The Butterfly Effect- awesome. Guess Who- hilarious. Sure, you could accuse me of being biased, but the box office success of these films speak for themselves. The only one that sucked in my book was the dreadful My Boss’s Daughter (in which I’ve still never seen, but I can assume). With that said, let’s move on to the flick.

A Lot Like Love hasn’t been getting a lot of press as of recently, so ‘ll actually take the time to give you a plot summary on this go-around. The movie opens seven years ago. A shy guy named Oliver and a rocker chick named Emily ending up having sex on a flight to New York. Don’t ask me why. She was desperate and he was a geek. End of story. Or so everyone thought… After arriving in New York, they end up running into each other by happenstance, and spend the afternoon together. From then on, the movie moves forward over a seven year time-span as we watch these two love birds mutate into good friends, then lovers, then soul-mates. The most important part to this story isn’t how the journey ends, but how it happens. Its Hollywood, so we can probably guess how it ends. Its how and where the journey takes us that needs to be interesting. In that regard, A Lot Like Love scores big in my play book.

Does the screenplay have anything unique to offer? Of course not. As a matter of fact, if we had a conversation about the events that take place in the movie, you probably wouldn’t be fascinated by any of it. If I were a development exec and I read this screenplay I would’ve thrown it out the window and into the yard below, where my other stack of Amanda Peet films lay. There’s nothing original that happens here, folks. But why does it still manage to work? A Lot Like Love is one of those flicks where a bland screenplay is put into the hands of talented actors and a solid director. Think along the lines of Hitch, but a little less cliche. Kutcher and Peet shine bright in their roles, and their comedic and physical instincts take the reigns instead of depending on their lines to be entertaining enough (because they wouldn’t have been).

In closing, there’s not that much else I can say about A Lot Like Love, except that I don’t think you’ll be disappointed if you check it out. It’s a perfect date movie and an even better flick to reverse this Anti-Kutcher spell that the press seems to be in. Kudos to him and cutie Amanda Peet for really going the distance and turning this mediocre story into something a bit more that everyone is sure to appreciate. Oh…and Kal Penn rules. Peace out.

Clint Fletcher is a writer, critic, filmmaker and gigolo from Chicago.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com