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Year: 2011
Genre: Romance, Drama
Country: United States
Language: English
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence, Alex Kingston
Director: Drake Doremus
Run time: 90 minutes
DVD distributor: Paramount Home Entertainment
There was a commercial once, I think for jeans, that you might remember. Two people, a hot young guy and a hot young woman, get on an elevator together. They look at each other and this entire life together flashes in front of them. They fall in love and get married have a kid get all blissful. Then the elevator doors open and they go their separate ways. I found it, here it is:
I kept thinking about that commercial while watching Like Crazy, which comes to DVD March 6th from Paramount Home Entertainment. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this movie was just that commercial, stretched out from thirty seconds to ninety minutes. It stars Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as a young couple who fall in love. There is a montage to show us they are in love. Music plays and they run on the beach and take a bike ride and sit and talk under trees.
Then she has to move back to England and there are problems with her immigration status and they are kept apart by circumstances beyond their control. When they DO see each other, their relationship is strained by the distance between them. We learn this through another long musical montage as they sit apart from each other under…a tree. And mope about sadly on…a beach.
There is (a bit of) a surprise ending and some very good performances in Like Crazy. Yelchin is good, and Felicity Jones and Jennifer Lawrence are both exceptional. But I just couldn’t get into the film, because these constant long montages made it feel like it was taking an hour and a half to tell me a two minute story.