“LOVE” WELL WORTH LIKING

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE

Starring Steve Carell,

Ryan Gosling,

Julianne Moore,

Emma Stone,

Analeigh Tipton,

Jonah Bobo,

Marisa Tomei,

Kevin Bacon

Directed by Glenn Ficarra, John Requa

Written by Dan Fogelman

Running time 118 mins.

Rated PG-13

          Surprisingly entertaining.

          Steve Carell does an excellent job being very Steve Carell-ish in a story about a middle-aged man (Carell) whose wife (Moore) decides to leave him.

          To complicate things, they have kids. Their thirteen year-old son (Bobo) has a crush on the babysitter (Tipton), who has a crush on Carell, who in turn finds that his wife also cheated on him with a coworker played by Kevin Bacon.

          Meanwhile, a smooth dude (Gosling) overhears in a bar Carell’s character bemoaning being a cuckold, and so takes him under his Henry Higgins-ish wing–a veritable “Pig Male-ian,” if you will.

          That kind of thing we’ve seen too often. There was a movie just a couple years ago with Will Smith pulling the same basic trip on Kevin James. We’ve seen it a thousand times in sitcoms from the last fifty years. Some poor idiot gets a conventional makeover and winds up looking just right for a catalog. That’s what makes this movie being so entertaining such a surprise.

          The very thing that makes “Crazy, Stupid, Love” work as well as it does is also almost what undoes it. Plausibility doesn’t merely come into question, it gets up and jumps out the window. Thereby coming dangerously close to impairing the film.

          For example–and I’ll remain deliberately vague to not spoil the film–there are certain things that thirteen year-olds have not ever said, not once, and will not say, ever, particularly in public.

          Also, during junior high graduation ceremonies, thirteen year-olds not only don’t get to speak indefinitely, and extemporaneously, they don’t want to. And especially nobody wants any kid’s dad doing that. No way any audience sits still, at a graduation or anywhere else, while some kid’s dad takes the mike and starts speaking extemporaneously indefinitely.

          Sappy implausibility aside, a strong ensemble cast and an intricate script form the overall impression. “American Beauty” meets “The 40 Year-Old Virgin”? Well, it’s not that, but sort of close.

          Carell excels at creating likeable characters who bounce back from adversity. I’d like to see him doing something totally different. He should be a vain, cruel man who doesn’t bounce back from anything at all. Sort of a modern-day King Kong, perhaps.

          Something to consider.

“LESS” IS MORE

30 MINUTES OR LESS

Starring Jesse Eisenberg,

Danny McBride,

Aziz Ansari,

Nick Swardson,

Dilshad Vadsaria,

Michael Pena,

Bianca Kajlich,

Fred Ward

Directed by Ruben Fleischer

Written by Michael Diliberti

Based on a story by Michael Diliberti and Matthew Sullivan

Running time 83 mins.

Rated R

          Seventy percent funny, thirty percent serious. This is the ratio that worked with “Stir Crazy,” and it works for “30 Minutes or Less.”

          Upshot: A pizza delivery guy (Eisenberg) gets a bomb strapped to his chest with instructions to deliver up a hundred grand stolen from a bank in under nine hours or he’ll be exploded.

          That actually goes to the serious. What makes it even funnier is that the guy who comes up with the idea is played by Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express,” “Land of the Lost”). That dude’s dad (Ward), whom he hates, got ten million bucks from the Lottery back in the ‘90s, and has been blowing through it so fast, now he’s down to only one million. So the McBride character decides he better kill his dad in order to get the one million left.

          Except, way he figgers, if he does the actual killing, that’s not thinking like a millionaire. Lucky for him, there’s a gal at a strip club who knows a guy who’ll off the dad for a mere hundred grand. Hence the bank robbery, which McBride also does not want to do, in the manner of a millionaire.

          Meanwhile, both McBride and Eisenberg each have a best pal. Most of the laughs come from these two sets of friendships, both of which are hugely dysfunctional.  Think Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton from “The Honeymooners” in the case of the murder-plotters.

          But if Danny McBride steals the show in “Pineapple Express,” it’s Aziz Ansari who does that here. As the buddy of the guy wearing the bomb, he has a film presence which needs to be seen to be appreciated. Like Kal Penn in the hilarious “Harold and Kumar” movies, Ansari plays an Indian-American with hardly any of the stereotypes—he doesn’t sound like Apu from “The Simpsons” at all.

          It’s just a different kind of movie. And entirely refreshing at that. With only a bit a drawback, which is wholly subjective on my part: I have a hard time listening to Jesse Eisenberg speak. Almost every utterance comes out sounding very clipped and whiny. He sounds all the time petulant. Like fingernails raked down a chalkboard, it’s just hard on the ears. Same problem with the otherwise excellent “Zombieland” (also directed by Fleischer). I specifically didn’t watch that Facebook movie where he plays Mark Zuckerberg because I saw the trailer where he sits at a table and says, “What part don’t you understand?” With that damn tone that makes Woody Allen sound like James Earl Jones.

          But everybody besides that guy is great. Even the premise itself. So much trouble for so little money. How quaint. True, hard to imagine what a woman could see in this movie. Other than the token female thrown in. And that’s about the way it was with “Stir Crazy.”

          You just never see a movie with scroungy chick pals skimming leaves out of a pool for ten bucks an hour plotting to kill anybody at all. Why is that?