Crazy, Stupid, Love

This 2011 comedy features Steve Carell as Cal Weaver, a forty something man who married his high school sweetheart and has the life he wants. As he and his wife Emily, played by Julianne Moore are out to dinner one evening she abruptly tells him she would like a divorce. On the way home while she drives out of nervous energy she keeps talking and spills details that she slept with her coworker David. Cal is stunned and eventually jumps out of the car.

Cal moves out right away and soon takes to spending his time in bars at night. He settles on a bar and each night as he imbibes talks loudly about his wife leaving him, cuckolding him, cheating on him. Eventually a lothario who often frequents the bar named Jacob Palmer calls him over to his table and tells him he is embarrassing himself. He offers to help Cal learn how to get women, change his image, to become a player. Cal agrees to the deal and soon starts spending time with Jacob. Ryan Gosling does a great job as Jacob as night after night Cal watches him pick up a different women always ending with his best line, " You want to get out of here." After a week or two Cal begins to doubt the effectiveness of his " training" until when Cal offers him a couple of questions he realizes he has absorbed it all.

Eventually Cal starts picking up women too and soon word filters back to his ex wife that he is a dating machine.

Emily did not really know what she wanted when she asked for a divorce. She had cheated on Cal but did not love or really even like David. Kevin Bacon plays David as a shady womanizer and does well.

In the meantime Emily and Cal's 13 year old son has fallen for his babysitter Jessica, a 17 year old, that upon hearing of the separation of his parents comes down squarely on the side of Cal, in fact she has developed a crush on him. Cal, oblivious to this says things that make her love him even more. In the meantime Robbie, the son, keeps professing his love to Jessica. As you can imagine this is a very tangled web.

We also have Hannah, a young woman who at the beginning of the movie turns down Jacob, one of the few women who does. She is getting ready to take her bar exam but upon passing is disappointed to find out that her boyfriend's, played by Josh Groban, promised big question is not to marry him but to become a permanent lawyer in the firm. Upset and embarrassed by this she walks into the bar where she had met Jacob and asks him if HE " wants to get out of here." He of course complies but strangely when they get back to his place instead of the expected they end up talking all night.

Soon Jacob is in a relationship, foreign territory for him, with Hannah.

In the end all of these story lines tie together, surprisingly, in one uproarious scene that is very very funny.

Emma Stone as Hannah plays an attractive and likable character, Moore is always strong, and as I have said before I just enjoy Steve Carell.

There is nothing in this movie that makes it great and it is not, it is however a very good movie. One I strongly reccomend.