Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I Love You, Man.

Good comedies aren't hard to come by. You just have to know what to look for. And lately what to look for has been Paul Rudd. Who would have thought the creepy step brother from Clueless would become one of comedy's surest things nearly 15 years later? Jason Segel is great, but of the two leads it is Rudd that steals the show in I Love You, Man.

It's another in a series of films about children in adult bodies, and while this one is in no way Judd Apatow related, it does so many of the same things right that Apatow does. Chief among those is awkwardness. No one plays awkward like Paul Rudd. He perfectly captures the difference between asking a woman on a date and asking a guy to hang out. He also does a great job with awkward pauses and trying so hard to be cool when you are really just the world's biggest nerd.

Jason Segel isn't half bad either. For a guy that has made a career out of playing the good guy (How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) he plays the jerk well too. And his character Sydney isn't really a jerk. He just has the confidence that Segel's past characters have lacked. A role in I Love You, Man may not seem like a stretch for an Apatow veteran, and I guess it isn't for Segel. I mean Sydney is just a more developed version of his character in Knocked Up, but it is nice to see Jason Segel doing something so different from what he does each week on TV.

The real gold in the movie comes from two angles. First, the range in emotion in Paul Rudd's Peter is priceless. (Boy, I didn't mean that to read the way it does.) Peter is a completely different person around his co-workers, his family, even his fiancee than he is around Sydney.

The greatest thing about the movie is the number and quality of cameos. Plenty of faces you know pop up in the movie. Jamie Pressley and Jon Favreau play a great married couple. J.K. Simmons has become Hollywood's go-to dad. Joe Lo Truglio and Thomas Lennon are each amazing in their scenes as potential best friends for Peter.

Finally, Lou Farigno does a great job just playing himself. This kind of stunt casting could have really hurt the movie, but Farigno is hilarious and the filmmakers did a great job of making him central to the plot without relying on him - something the minds behind Will Ferrell's Kicking & Screaming clearly didn't get when they decided they needed Mike Ditka for their movie.

There are very few flaws in I Love You, Man - kind of hard to believe considering it comes from one of the writers of Eddie Murpy's Dr. Doolittle series. I Love You, Man does everything it sets out to right. My only complaint is that it is a little predictable, but then again most light hearted comedies are.

It's the funniest movie of the year so far, and while I am optimistic about Apatow's Funny People (due out at the end of July), I have been let down before. Plus, it stars Adam Sandler, so that one could go either way.

As for I Love You, Man, the Greek gives it an A.