IHAO on ... Young Adult

Patton Oswalt is great.  Charlize Theron is pretty good.  Patrick Wilson is pretty great.  This movie had one line I thought was a nice idea that was interesting and really thought provoking, spoken by Patton Oswalt: “Guys like me are born loving women like you.”  All right ... I’ve said everything good I’m going to say about this movie.

This movie is emotionally bankrupt.  It plays with chords and strings of complex emotions but what is plays isn’t music, just plucking and then exclaiming “Look what I did, it is so brilliant and wonderful!”  We are watching an emotional journey of a “stunted” adult, Mavis Gary, who comes back to her hometown because she wants to get back with her former blah blah blah stupid stupid seen it a million times before.  We are supposed to watch her make an emotional journey, except she doesn’t, at all.  She continues.  We are supposed to feel a sense of “comeuppance” because her life isn’t good.  Except it IS good.  Her life is pretty great, except she is written to think it isn’t.  And that’d be fine if it was deserved.  But we just watch her go through this charade with the MOST OBLIVIOUS EX-LOVER IN THE WORLD trying to break up he and his wife at their baby’s naming ceremony, and she DESERVES it! 

This movie, when it came out, got compared to Bad Teacher, a comedy about an irredeemable woman getting her comeuppance and going through an emotional arc.  That movie, which had roofie jokes and pot jokes and inappropriate sexual jokes and all that, had a stronger emotional resonance and backbone that this film does.  And it was funny on top of it!  It was entertaining!  It wanted to be watched.  Watch it to get a way better version of the same protagonist.

Ooo, you think you are so smart, Diablo Cody, writing another stupid quirky female protagonist in a pregnancy based plot.  Go make Jennifer's Body 2.

And let me go down this train of thought a minute: it is a DISGRACE that the plot of this film writes itself into such a way that the nerdy guy gets the hot chick in a moment of shared emotional pain and baggage.  That is @#!(*&$!!  How incredibly short-sighted and pandering, not to mention insulting to anyone who could even begin to relate to the Patton Oswalt character.

This movie makes me angry on so many levels that exclude acting and general “how it is shot” attributes.  The movie looks fine, and the actors all act fine, with Oswalt being a stand out.  This movie fails in a moral and emotional way that has me fuming at the mouth.  I could never recommend this film.  Thank god for good to great acting making me keep from just shutting my television off while watching this turd.

Grade: C---