Like Crazy: The painfully-honest relationship movie 500 Days of Summer wanted to be

Like Crazy pulls a dirty trick. It makes you fall in love along with two cute little college students, then tears them apart, and spends the rest of movie dangling their perfect, mutually-adoring relationship just out of reach. DAMN YOU, LIKE CRAZY! CAN’T YOU SEE THESE ATTRACTIVE CAUCASIANS WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER?! THEIR HAPPINESS IS ALL I’VE EVER WANTED!

It’s totally manipulative and obnoxiously effective, but somewhere in the midst of watching two lovelorn honkeys fight desperately against time and geography to recapture the magic of the honeymoon period of their relationship (are we soul mates? were we just young and stupid? is it true love or hormones? are we in love with each other or just youth?), is something absolutely true and timeless and affecting about the nature of relationships. It hurt to watch at times. It hurt to write that. Frankly, it turned me into a big ol’ girl, and that’s no small feat when you’re a burly lumberjack.

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Drake Doremus’ film Like Crazy won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in January and opens in limited release this October. It stars Anton Yelchin (CURLY-HAIRED MEN ARE TAKING OVER!) and Felicity Jones as two college kids who fall in love and then struggle to maintain a relationship. They say it’s a love story, but to me it looks more like a mystery. The main mystery being “WHAT THE F*CK ARE THEY SAYING?” Seriously, I watched that twice and understood maybe 65% of the dialog.

The Grand Jury prize went to Like Crazy, starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as a young couple who fall in love in college and struggle afterward to maintain a long-distance relationship. Directed and co-written by Drake Doremus (Douchebag), the film was largely improvised.
“We had a 50-page outline and rehearsed for two weeks and let things happen organically,” Doremus said. “The key was to do 30-minute takes for the five weeks we shot.”
The story is not clear-cut — intentionally.
“I wanted it to feel gray,” Doremus told a Sundance audience. “I wanted you guys to decide for yourselves.” [USAToday]

Oh boy, I can’t wait to watch a meandering narrative where I get to be the guinea pig who decides whether it’s actually about anything. Like Crazy? More like Like Lazy.

HD available at Apple.

I tried to find a good image of David Tennant, but I liked this screen grab too much.

Over the weekend, the cast and crew of Fright Night, the remake of the classic 1985 horror film of the same name, hosted a panel at Comic Con, which I’m starting to think is a pretty important event. I wish they advertised it better. Either way, fans were treated to an exclusive extended clip, and to multiply the geek factor immensely, David Tennant set the clip up. Tennant plays supposed vampire expert and TV host Peter Vincent in the new film, but he’s better known as The Doctor from BBC’s Doctor Who series.

In the clip, Vincent is confronted by Punky Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) for the first time, as he needs help in stopping his vampire neighbor, played by Colin Farrell. At least he thinks he’s a vampire. He could just be a lawyer. Ahhh, that’s some good legal humor right there.

Clip after the jump, and there’s plenty of David Tennant in tight leather pants for all you female Doctor Who fans. All two of you.

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As soon as that Beaver trailer hit the web, you knew it would be fertile ground for parody.  Still, you have to hand it to ItchyBarracuda here for realizing how much better the puppet would be with Samuel L. Jackson’s voice. Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction plus Mel Gibson — hell, if you added a dog wearing clothes to this, it might break the internet.  And again, I can’t help but notice that the funniest part is someone yelling at Anton Yelchin.  I think for the next mash up, we should just cut together 100 clips of Anton Yelchin getting belittled and screamed at.  It would be so cathartic.  WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION, NUMBNUTS!

[via Buzzfeed]

The trailer for The Beaver, the Jodie Foster-directed film about Mel Gibson and his talking beaver puppet has finally hit the web, and you’ll be happy to know that for the first time, googling “beaver” and “trailer” doesn’t pull up a picture of your mom.  Anyway, I was really looking forward to this movie, and I was worried a little thing like Mel Gibson insulting all the races of the world might jeopardize us ever seeing it.  Luckily, not everyone’s a sensitive little flower like the cast of The Hangover, and it will reportedly hit theaters in Spring. (Unless the theaters keep running their mouth and end up buried in the rose garden).

So, now that we’ve seen the trailer… uh, what the hell is this?  Call me crazy, but when I heard Mel Gibson would play an alcoholic who starts speaking through a beaver puppet he found in the trash can, I was expecting a comedy, not uplifting piano music and some bizarre version of The Blind Side.

MEL GIBSON, YER CHANGIN’ THAT BEAVER’S LAAHFE!

BLOOOOW ME!

"The way you're dressed, beaver, you're lucky there's only one white fist up your ass."

[Apple via FirstShowing]