Movie review: Man Up
Feb. 3rd, 2016 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madbakerThis spent about three weeks in theaters last year. I guess it was too British to do well? Anyway, the WSJ film reviewer said good things about it and it has Simon Pegg. Also Lake Bell, whose "In a World..." I liked quite a bit more than I expected to.
The good: it's a fluffy rom-com that doesn't pretend to be more than it is. Pegg and Bell have extremely believable chemistry. (She also makes a convincing Brit, but she's good at accents.) It was nice that the leads were not callow twenty-somethings; Pegg played a broken 40-year-old recent divorcé and Bell, a cynical 34-year-old who hasn't dated in years. Yeah, still an age gap but at least the 40yo guy didn't end up with the Hollywood-pretty 22yo girl.
The bad: it's a fluffy rom-com. If you don't like that sort of thing you'll hate this.
Bonus points for the extras including the scriptwriter explaining "the seven beats of rom-coms" that they hit to make the story work. She was nerding out; it's from Billy Mernit's scriptwriting book. I found it fascinating.
The good: it's a fluffy rom-com that doesn't pretend to be more than it is. Pegg and Bell have extremely believable chemistry. (She also makes a convincing Brit, but she's good at accents.) It was nice that the leads were not callow twenty-somethings; Pegg played a broken 40-year-old recent divorcé and Bell, a cynical 34-year-old who hasn't dated in years. Yeah, still an age gap but at least the 40yo guy didn't end up with the Hollywood-pretty 22yo girl.
The bad: it's a fluffy rom-com. If you don't like that sort of thing you'll hate this.
Bonus points for the extras including the scriptwriter explaining "the seven beats of rom-coms" that they hit to make the story work. She was nerding out; it's from Billy Mernit's scriptwriting book. I found it fascinating.
