Does this image remind anyone else of a Hollywood-style Hydra?
The critics have spoken, and with tomorrow’s release of He’s Just Not That Into You, they’re having an all out pun-fest this week. While it comes as no surprise that most of them are just not that into (we had to!) the A-List/B-List ensemble rom-com, Roger Ebert’s willing to throw Drew Barrymore a bone for her “superb” monologue: “She calls at home but he doesn’t pick up. She calls on his cell, and he e-mails her. She texts him. He Twitters back and leaves coded hints on MySpace. She tries snail mail. He apparently never learned how to open one. She yearns for the days when people had one telephone and one answering machine, and a guy had either definitely called you, or he had not.”
And he’s not the only one feeling her performance. After the jump proof that in spite of recent missteps like Lucky You and Music and Lyrics, America will always be into (doh!) Drew.
1. “Some of the players comport themselves better than others — Barrymore is sweetly wistful in her minor role, while Johansson, as a confident go-getter who sets out to steal her crush object rather than moon over him, is sexier than the whole cast put together.” [Chicago Tribune]
2. “The most relaxed, and amusing, performer is Drew Barrymore as a lonelyheart frustrated — convincingly — by the technology of modern dating, which she correctly nails as a series of walls people hide behind. She makes that complaint a cry from the heart.” [EW]
3. “There isn’t much chemistry, thanks to the limited screen time the couples have to share with many other couples. Many of the players are old pros at this sort of material, but only Drew Barrymore, as a sales rep at a gay magazine, lands consistent laughs. She makes her riff on texting, My Space, Facebook, voice mail — ‘just to get rejected by seven different technologies — it’s exhausting’ sing.” [Mercury News]
Ok. Maybe not everyone…
“Drew Barrymore, also an executive producer on the film, has a supporting role as the sales rep who helped place Conor’s ad in the local gay newspaper; with the help of her flamboyant co-workers, she laments the way technology has actually made dating harder, but her observations aren’t particularly funny or insightful.” [AP]
This reviewer also called it “a Robert Altman movie on Botox” so take the hate with a grain of salt.
On a related side note, IFC’s Matt Singer has an interesting post about other movies that were born out of non-narrative works.