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Film
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“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”
– Sigmund Freud
The people behind Crazy, Stupid, Love have never read the above quote; or, if they have, its meaning didn’t quite sink in. They are the kind of men who would marry their mirrors, if they could, and their entire film is a childish exercise in narcissism.
Alongside No Strings Attached, When in Rome, It’s Complicated, Just Go With It, Leap Year and The Zookeeper, it stands as a tragic testament to the downfall of the Romantic Comedy: a genre once expertly practiced by Frank Capra and Billy Wilder, now sucked dry of all innovation into an intellectual wasteland where any rational individual with ambition or purpose cannot exist.
The people in Crazy, Stupid, Love are searching for their counterparts, which is admirable; but, given their IQ’s, they’d really do better to focus on their own survival. How some of them have made it to middle-age is beyond me. Here's the laundry list of contrivances that comprise their self-serving, inconsequential lives:
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If you're an outgoing person, like myself, chances are you've wound up at a party or BBQ or social gathering of some sort, and chances are that this has happened to you:
You strike up a conversation with an eccentric but interesting person, and he begins to tell you a story. He tells it with broad strokes, with gusto and passion. And, at first, it seems exciting. You're genuinely interested; you want to know more. At about the five-minute-mark, however, you start to find it dragging on a bit too long, and a strange, horrible doubt creeps into your mind: does this story actually ... (*gulp) ... end?
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Woody Allen has usually been influenced by the women in his life; we tend to feel their presence in all his movies. His early 1970's films are tinged with Diane Keaton's zany frivolity, his 80's films with Mia Farrow's sophistication, etc. It was an unfortunate turn of events that in 1993, he met another woman. Soon Yi Previn seems like a perfectly nice person, but she's not about to win a "Best Muse" award any time soon, and it doesn't take a mathematical chart to demonstrate the nose-dive in quality taken by Allen's work post-1995 when the two married; Soon Yi is sweet but simple, and Allen's films became as such.Tweet this article !
