In Contention

Tag: He’s Just Not That Into You

  • Things of beauty: Guy’s best of 2009

    Julianne Moore and Colin Firth in A Single ManThe year of the woman. The year of animation. The year of science-fiction. Depending on who you read (and believe), the final year of the decade has been an awful lot of things.

    If you’re with Kris, it’s also the best cinematic year of the last ten. If you’re with an awful lot of others, it’s quite the opposite. I’ll stop short of rewriting the first page of “A Tale of Two Cities,” but suffice to say it’s been different things to different people.

    What kind of year has it been for me? I think I’ll need another year to figure that out in detail. But as I compiled the list you’re about to read, I happily concluded that it’s been, at the very least, a good one: the 25 titles gathered here were jotted down with minimal brain-racking, with still more fighting from the sidelines.

    None of them are grudging inclusions, either: I sincerely liked most of these titles too much to allow room for popular or critical phenomena that are worthy of respect, but nonetheless didn’t connect with me personally. There was a sufficient range of quality work in 2009 (following a lean 2008) that any film lover could afford to construct his own playlist of future treasures without resorting to consensus.

    Before we begin, a note on the construction of the list. In addition to my Top 10, there are 15 honorable mentions here, five of them singled out for extra consideration. Some of you will quibble that I opt to include international or festival releases that have yet to surface in the U.S.

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  • Jennifer Aniston: best comic actress of her generation?

    Jennifer Aniston in The Good GirlApropos of nothing really, since the article is a week old and even I have no intention of seeing “Love Happens,” but my friend Jamie — who knows, albeit not very supportively, of my longstanding admiration for Jennifer Aniston — sent me this interesting Independent piece, and I thought I’d throw it out there.

    As some of you may have read before, I’ve long held the belief that Aniston is a genuinely gifted actress — and I haven’t had an awful lot of company on that one. Ben Walsh, however, joins me on that limb, saluting her consistently valiant contributions to largely unworthy films:

    These cynical, quite often facile films may lack depth, subtlety and, well, imagination, but Aniston never lets anybody down. In fact, now that Meg Ryan appears to have imploded, Aniston is probably – and this is a tad bold – the most gifted American comic actress of her generation. Her comic timing is immaculate and she could muster up playful sexual chemistry with a sideboard. And while her acting range isn’t huge, she’s never less than compelling.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 first-half releases that deserved better

    Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston in He's Just Not That Into YouAround this time last year, we did a mid-year stocktake of sorts, wherein the site’s various contributors named the best (and worst) of what the cinematic year had presented thus far. You may have noticed that we haven’t offered up a similar piece for 2009. Time constraints may have had something to do with it, but given the slow start we had to the year, I suspect regular readers won’t have found it particularly hard to pick our favorites from the crop.

    As we’ve made clear on these pages, Kris and I are united in our admiration for such 2009 releases as “Public Enemies” on the large end of the scale, and “Sugar” on the much, much smaller end and, of course, “The Hurt Locker” somewhere in between. On our own individual tangents, Kris loudly declared his love for “Star Trek,” while back in May I went to bat for Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous “Summer Hours” – with the caveat that it wasn’t a 2009 release for me at all.

    (Release dates play havoc with such lists – using the U.S. release calendar as my guide, I could just as well hand year-best status to something like “Hunger,” if I hadn’t already done so in 2008. Even in the list below, I’ve technically cheated three times by including films that saw the light of day in my neck of the woods last year.)

    In any case, all of these are films that, wonderful as they are, either have already built devoted critical and/or public followings, or (as in the case of “Enemies”) hardly need further exposure. (Do you really need one more critic this summer to remind you about the wonders of Pixar?)

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  • He’s just not that f***ing into you

    Okay, so Kris promised there would be no more Bale-related posts. But as the guys at Vulture pointed out, this is too good to ignore. In any case, it’s about another movie altogether.

  • Into it

    I’m not exactly waiting with bated breath for the Greg Berendt adaptation “He’s Just Not That Into You,” but I will say that I like the visual concept of the teaser poster:

    New Line Cinema's He's Just Not That Into You

    Check out the full poster here.