Reviews

Review: He's Just Not That Into You

Reduces both men and women to shrill stereotypes

By PETER KEOUGH | February 4, 2009

0.0 Stars

VIDEO: The trailer for He's Just Not That Into You

And why isn't he? Could it be because you're needy, nagging, and possibly psychotic? And why are you into him, if he's insensitive and deceitful and has unpleasant red fur growing on his pasty legs?

And why will women be flocking to a film that reduces both men and women to shrill stereotypes designed to turn us all into consumers of the items paraded in the film's product placement? Ken Kwapis adapts the book that was inspired by a line in a TV series into a movie that runs 132 minutes. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Connelly play a couple who are married but not happy.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston play a couple who are happy but not married. Single women played by Ginnifer Goodwin, Scarlett Johansson, and Drew Barrymore suffer from varying degrees of clinginess; Justin Long and Kevin Connolly play variations on macho shitheads. Moral: boorish men are punished, crazy women are rewarded, and happiness is a diamond ring.

Related: Review: State of Play, Review: Whip It, Review: Everybody's Fine, More

Review: State of Play
Support for print journalism is coming from an unexpected source: Russell Crowe.
Review: Whip It
Add a dash of the sad beauty contests and kooky, dysfunctional family of Little Miss Sunshine to a helping of the bogus hipness and overexposed star of Juno and whip it good and you get an idea of why Drew Barrymore's directorial debut falls flat as a sappy soufflé.
Review: Everybody's Fine
You'll be forgiven if you mistake Robert De Niro's face for Robert Young's next to Kate Beckinsale's, Drew Barrymore's, and Sam Rockwell's on the poster for Kirk ( Waking Ned Devine ) Jones's remake of Stanno tutti bene .
Review: The Good Guy
Writer/director Julio DePietro's first effort is every bit as obvious as it sounds, thudding from one symmetrically perfect cliché to another.
Review: Iron Man 2
Maybe I’m just relieved that it wasn’t in 3-D, or maybe actor Justin Theroux (frequent David Lynch collaborator and co-scripter of Tropic Thunder ) is just a better writer than the law firm of scribes that pasted together the original, but Jon Favreau’s sequel to his creaky adaptation of the rusty Marvel standby Iron Man restores my lack of faith in superheroes.
Photos: Red-carpet premiere of ''The Town'' at Fenway Park
In the line-up: Ben Affleck, Blake Lively, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Matt Damon, and more
Review: Extract
I'm hard-pressed to say, though, whether Extract is a significant leap forward for Judge in terms of story or just not as funny as his earlier work.
Review: Going the Distance
For a documentary, Nanette Burstein's American Teen felt awfully scripted. But it had a pulse, and characters you could invest in.
Review: The Town
There’s an episode in Chuck Hogan’s Prince of Thieves that I was sure Ben Affleck was going to include in his adaptation of the novel.
Review: The Company Men
Call it compassion fatigue, but I can't muster a lot of sympathy for Bobby Walker when he gets laid off and has to sell his Patriots season tickets.
Fun with Matt & Ben at Central Square
A couple of young women, Brenda Withers and Mindy Kaling (the latter born in Cambridge before graduating to the role of Kelly Kapoor in The Office ), decided to have some fun with the idea that two seemingly unformed guys — one kind of loutish — could strike show-biz paydirt so quickly.
Less

Topics: Reviews , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Movie Stars, More

| More

view all

[ 05/26 ] "Bike Month: Alley Cat Bike Race & After Party" @ SPACE Gallery

[ 05/26 ] No Exit @ College of the Atlantic

[ 05/26 ] "Printmaking Now," works by Pickwick Independent Press artists @ Rose Contemporary

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: WHERE DO WE GO NOW? | May 22, 2012
Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's whimsical film about internecine slaughter has a tone problem from the very start: a group of widows engage in a goofy line dance while the voiceover narrator bewails the death toll of religious warfare.

REVIEW: MEN IN BLACK 3 | May 24, 2012
Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), a fifth dimensional alien, can see the infinite possibilities each moment possesses and the infinite contingencies that caused it to happen.

INTERVIEW: RICHARD LINKLATER MESSES WITH TEXAS IN BERNIE | May 16, 2012
No matter how far he strays, Richard Linklater's heart remains in Texas.

REVIEW: THE DICTATOR | May 16, 2012
Though his PR campaign might suggest otherwise, Sacha Baron Cohen has actually made (with director Larry Charles) a sweet movie, not unlike Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator , if less sentimental.

REVIEW: THE HUNTER | May 17, 2012
Apparently extinct since the 1930s, the Tasmanian Tiger resembled an uncanny assortment of mismatched parts from other animals. Daniel Nettheim's film is equally weird and motley.