film criticism by maryann johanson, not an AI | since 1997
Nice Guy garbage man Josh Lucas negs sad sack Katie Holmes. Based on the pernicious self-help philosophy that insists that everything wrong with your life is your fault. You know: feel-good romance!
A winning (if overearnest) depiction of manly friendship, with some pretty thrilling (if only technically so) racing stuff. But it doesn’t see its potential to be actually culturally significant.
Simultaneously sharp and tender portrait of longstanding family squabbles and resentments finally coming to a head. Achingly affecting performances and poignant details ground it in melancholy authenticity.
By turns hilarious, absurd, offensive, and insulting, this is all rote action that will pique your interest only when it is being completely ridiculous.
This is a movie about Josh Lucas and a dog. Which makes it the best movie I have ever seen or even heard about.
That is all.
Another kind of fall can kill ya, too…
Josh Lucas and Matthew McConaughey have never actually appeared onscreen together before. It had been entirely possible, up till this moment, that they were the same person, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of way. Would this be how the universe ends, with parallel-universe versions of the same actor causing all of infinity to collapse into some hellish singularity?
First of all, any movie that kills off the smashing Christina Hendricks in the opening 20 minutes deserves to be shot down on the basis of that alone. But that’s only the tiniest of the many cinematic crimes of Life as We Know It, which pretends to be something hip and fresh and is in fact relentlessly conventional, even retrograde.
Josh Lucas! Like Matthew McConaughey, minus the skeeve and plus lashings of actual talent.
