Let's get the trailers out of the way first...
1) I understand if you don't want to talk about
What To Expect When You're Expecting. It is certainly very upsetting. But I can't remain silent about this any longer: as a somewhat engaged moviegoer, I can practically see the expression of strain on the marketing team's face as they build a way to spin this film as entertaining for guys. See? It's about a group called The Dudes! And kids fall down! And guys get hit! And kids eat cigarette butts and drag around dead cats that meow, I guess!
I realize this is all content included in the movie, so it's not as though the blame solely lies with the marketing; a lot of the blame clearly lies with the movie, which looks awful in ways that gives me hives. But something about the cynical way it is packaged, with snippets of "Big Poppa" and "Walk This Way" made me want to tear the movie screen apart with my bare hands. I love some of those comedic actors, but God almighty, I don't ever want to see that trailer ever again.
Also, I refuse to believe this movie only had two screenwriters.
2)
The Lucky One, a movie based on a Nicholas Sparks "book" (in that, I suppose, it was a bound volume of words, though I bristle that his particular version of glopping melodramatic circumstance and convenient, manipulative disease or death together is really defined as anything resembling...anything), appears to be about former soldier Zac Efron (okay, movie), who loves dogs (ugh), and travels thousands and thousands of miles to find a girl he met through found art (or a dusty photograph in a war zone, which is one of those premises that seems romantic on celluloid, purportedly, but in reality is fucking creepy as shit). And then she's a mother of a delightful child actor, runs a kennel, and has an ex played by Jay R. Ferguson. Romance and sex and probably some kind of ironic mauling death ensue.
Seriously, have any of you seen
Nights at Rodanthe? Fuck that guy Sparks. He's the worst.
3)
The Five-Year Engagement, which I will actually see, despite a child shooting an adult with an arrow; I think I covered my feelings on such
Old Dogs shenanigans in 1).
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So
Friends With Kids. As I was telling someone in another social media venue, I feel very ambivalent about the film. I know
Kissing Jessica Stein is a divisive film, in that most people either found the lead heroine played by (and written by) Jennifer Westfeldt too annoying, or people like me found her ability to play "neurotic" as a quirk that is genuinely annoying a lot of the time brave and unapologetic and made the relationship building more interesting.
In
Friends With Kids, I feel like there was more determination for a story to follow very specific beats, and within that pat storytelling, the characters were more strident, shrill, and unlikable than they were intended to be on the page. Some of the actors overcame it with their natural charisma, but a lot of the time, it felt like I was squirming to get away from everyone in the story and was trapped with them--not in a
Blue Valentine way, where I felt anxious and voyeuristic and subjected to gritty emotional drama, but in a crappy-party-where-I-sort-of-know-these-people-and-can't-gracefully-exit-a-conversation way.
I feel like Jennifer Westfeldt has a tendency (based on this movie and
Kissing Jessica Stein) to aim for male characters that are "regular guys," but they often come across as direct or indirect assholes 65% of the time, soft-hearted, good, emotional human beings 35% of the time. And it doesn't always work. Also I feel like it puts the women characters in a nearly perpetual position of shrieking or fighting or weeping because their feelings are hurt, which is sort of gross.
I liked the general idea behind the film, a story that shows parenthood and marriage are not universals that work the same for each person or couple combined with a love story about two very good friends. I thought Adam Scott was terrific as Jason, even though he got handed the hard business of being one of those commitmentphobe, borderline misogynist characters I don't really like to spend time with in any romantic comedy or dramedy. Westfeldt had her moments as Julie, though her scenes with Edward Burns made me die inside, with the one-two punch of Westfeldt leaning on her Steinian talk-too-much crutch and Edward Burns existing with his stupid face. I liked that the characters played by Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd's were shown as a lasting, ultimately loving relationship, existing through peaks and valleys. It felt like Kristen Wiig was wasted and that Jon Hamm...I don't know what that was all supposed to be about. I felt like all that business was poorly executed (save the unintentional laugh that escaped me when Hamm's character dismissively referred to Megan Fox's character as Titty McTitterson).
And Megan Fox... I was torn, because she wasn't actively terrible, but her character was like having life breathed into all of Megan's super, super annoying interviews where she's all "I'm just like a boy! I like video games and comic books and probably farting! My boobs are amazing, right! But I'm really smart!" And I didn't blame Westfeldt's character for disliking hearing about Megan's character...but I also resented Westfeldt for writing the character like that in the first place.
There was one moment I keep thinking about that felt very genuine and reminded me of a similar-yet-different scene in
Kissing Jessica Stein: Julie's mom, preparing to babysit her grandson while Julie gets a night out with The Bachelor Burns, says to her grandson, "That's my baby," indicating Julie, "You are your mama's baby, but she's my baby." And something about how tenderly it was delivered, not long after Julie's mom says that she wishes she could babysit more often with no passive-aggressive guilt trip attached, was really touching. Westfeldt writes those mother-daughter moments that exist in her romantic journeys so well, that I wish she'd do a movie more focused on a mother-daughter relationship as a primary story and shenanigans as a secondary.
