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| they tried to combine the "Love, Actually" poster design with an Apatow design |
Watched: 02/14/2026
Format: Netflix
Viewing: First
Directors: Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
Two time stamps on Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) stick out for me.
The first was that I had my first chuckle at 22:00 and change. In a 2 hour movie. This did not bode well for the "comedy" I'd put on.
The second was that I paused the movie to do something thinking there was maybe 10 minutes left and there was still 54 minutes of movie, and (a) I could not believe how long this movie felt and (b) I had the passing thought that this was the sort of movie critical milksops like Owen Gleiberman used to wet themselves over in the 90's. Movies that think they have something to say, some poetic statement about life and love, but are just absolutely hollow and maybe kind of rotten inside.
Gleiberman, then plaguing Entertainment Weekly, gave it an A.*
When people say "what happened to romantic comedies?" - this is what happened to them. We decided what rom-coms needed to be were bleak melodramas starring Steve Carrell as a sad sack who keeps taking hits someone thought were funny, but just seem kind of sad, really. Yes, we all liked The 40 Year Old Virgin, but that was a movie where he was surrounded by really funny people and managed by Judd Apatow. Here, he's just miserable for two hours.
This is supposed to be hilarious. Instead, it's occasionally punctuated with a moment of humor. Up top, the three funniest people in this movie are Marisa Tomei, Beth Littleford and Emma Stone, and only Stone is a pre-title credit on this movie.
Like another of the endless Love, Actually clones, this movie intersects multiple storylines about romance, two of which are just cringe-inducing in their goofy, "only in the movies" clunkiness. Only one I had any real affinity for and rang at all true.
The problem with the Steve Carrell/ Julianne Moore storyline is that it doesn't treat Moore's character as a human (or really any of the women in this movie). She's a cipher, and it's unbecoming someone of Moore's talent. We're told she's unhappy and she slept with Kevin Bacon (understandable. Dude remains cool and handsome.). We're never given any insight into the slow death of their relationship - which Carrell does not believe is true. He's as in love with her as he's been since high school. So... what went wrong? Or did she just decide she was curious about other men? We're never told. Instead we spend a whole movie watching two people who don't seem to want to be apart being apart.
I also would say - if the first woman you successfully pick up after your wife dumps you is Marisa Tomei, you are running forward into the unknown and not looking back. And, indeed, why *didn't* Cal call her? She seemed very game.
It's these kinds of things that just plague the movie.
But the plot/ joke of the movie is that he meets Ryan Gosling playing a 90's movie pick-up artist character in 2011 - the kind of guy who hangs out at the same bar and picks up different women. And Gosling transforms Carrell into his middle-aged clone so he may do the same.
So - part of the movie is Carrell picking up drunk girls 10-20 years his junior and bedding them because he bought clothes in layers. And in this fantasy land, a haircut and $2000 or so on clothes are all it takes for him to go from middle-aged dad to pimp.
Oh, also, his 17 year old babysitter is infatuated for him. For reasons. A real post American Beauty moment. Why is she infatuated? Because the writer wants it to be so. Also, it makes one clockwork scene in he movie work. But, yeah, this was one of two storylines that felt more like a middle-aged dude writing a script and believing he's still attractive to anyone at all, let alone teen girls (shudder).
There's a college thesis one could write about economics, gender, the male gaze, masculinity.... all the hot Film Studies 101 topics. And it would not be kind to this movie. It's kind of shocking this came out as late as it did. It feels very 2004 or so. And the unexamined turn back to the sanctity of hearth and home at the end? Just chef's kiss.
Anyway, Gosling meets a girl, Hannah (Emma Stone), who is having her own romantic issues because she's dating Josh Groban. After that falls apart, she goes for Gosling for casual sex, and instead, the two actually fall for each other.
Somewhere in Crazy, Stupid, Love there's a pretty good screwball comedy with these two at the center. These two are ridiculously good, and sell some insane stuff (they clearly left them to just goof with the camera running and Stone does half of the infamous High Point coffee commercial with Lauren Bacall).
The last storyline I found just dumb-as-shit was the 13-year-old son's infatuation with the babysitter, which was worrying on so many levels. I mean, from the "I think about you while I masturbate" (hot tip kids, not your best opener) to humiliating the girl at school to the girl getting into the idea at the movie's end? What the fuck even was that? That's not cute or funny - half of what he does would have most teen girls freaked out and eventually the cops would get involved.
But give it an "A", Glieberman, you @#$%ing wank.
There is one great comedic sequence that almost makes the whole thing worth it. All of the the threads come together in one huge, wacky moment that felt like the pay off.
A smarter, better, less soppy movie would have known - this is the climax. We wrap it up here. I won't spoil it, but it's pretty good stuff, and my guess is that's all most folks remembered on the car ride home.
And that's kind of the movie. They'll hit what could be a good comedic beat, and that's where we choose to move on. But in every scene like that, they just keep going until it's just... sad. What could have been a pretty tight 90 minutes of movie is, instead, 2 hours of soggy mess.
It also is one of those movies where we get the "crazy" in people doing insane movie things, or as my pal Marshall would say "novelistic nonsense", like coming back and taking care of the yard at night, and somehow no one hears him or notices?
I just felt like the whole movie was so dishonest about how people actually work, it just undercut itself over and over and over. I don't need realism, but I do need some emotional honesty about what you're showing me.
The other thing that I think kind of happened to romantic comedies is the same thing that seems to have made studio Christmas movies what they are now - something so detached from anything resembling a normal human's perception of Christmas that there's a weird version that exists only in movies (what does Red One have to do with anything?). And I'll argue that the concept of "love" in movies is so weird and warped in movies in the 21st century, and chasing successes like (the frankly abysmal) Love, Actually made studios lose sight of what place rom-coms held from the earliest talkies.
But if your movie ends with (spoilers) your lead interrupting an 8th Grade Graduation where a speech is being made by his 13 year old son about how love is a sham (like... fucking whyyyyyyy?) to come restate his love for Julianne Moore... and it's never commented upon how wholly inappropriate this is, or that no one cares... that's not funny. Even Hallmark would think this was some hokey bullshit.
But the movie has very high audience scores and I think is riding over 60% on metacritic, so what do I know?
*my war with Gleiberman will end when one of us is dead but not before
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