“Sony Pictures Classics announced that on June 22 it will release Woody Allen’s latest film, the newly titled To Rome With Love . To Rome With Love was a name selected as an homage to the eternal city of Rome where the film was shot on location last summer. This will be used for its worldwide release. The film’s former title, Nero Fiddled , while an appropriate and humorous phrase in the U.S., is not a familiar expression overseas and many international territories preferred a more globally understood name.” [ SPC ]
For an independently produced comedy that mostly revolves around adults talking to each other — sometimes with child accessories — in varying degrees of inebriation, Friends with Kids is finding a modest amount of success. It’s not perfect , but somehow it manages to be funny without any accidental drug trips, grandmas shooting guns at the dinner table, or Tom Cruise rescuing Cameron Diaz from a crashing plane. Writer-director-co-star Jennifer Westfeldt has returned us a bit to the days of comedies of manners, instead of the awful dichotomy between shrill “romantic” comedy and Apatovian gross-out comedy where Hollywood seems stuck these days. In that spirit, here are four lessons future adult comedies should take from Friends with Kids . [Spoilers ahead.] 1. Skip (most of) the bathroom jokes. Bridesmaids it isn’t. While there is one major on-screen poop joke in Friends with Kids, it actually made me breathe a sigh of relief, because at least we didn’t have to see the bodily function in action. As soon as Megan Fox walked across from a baby with “explosive diarrhea” — diaper ominously absent — I started dreading seeing an explosion in her direction. Hence my gratitude, and surprise, when it never came. (This is an admittedly low bar — eventually I’d love to see Adam Scott or Kristen Wiig in a romantic comedy that ignores the bathroom altogether — but hey, small steps.) 2. Write romantic comedies about the occasional decent human being. Sure, Scott’s Jason spends most of the movie as a Barney Stinson-like asshole, but the story ultimately hinges on his growing up. I wish Westfeldt had given her Julie a little more to do, but she’s at least a relatively sensible woman who, when rejected by the person she loves, moves away and tries to move on. Even the protagonists’ respective Ms. and Mr. Wrong, played by Fox and Edward Burns, are written with a bit of sympathy. Compare that to most of the romantic comedy heroes in recent memory — Natalie Portman’s poorly characterized commitment-phobe in No Strings Attached and the all-around loathsome denizens of Something Borrowed and How Do You Know come to mind, not to mention anyone played by Katherine Heigl – and it was a pleasant change to actually understand and sympathize with the characters of Friends with Kids. 3. Sex can be funnier off-screen. For a story that revolves around adults trying to procreate while maintaining their recreational sex lives, most of Friends with Kids ’ sex was more heard about than seen. Which was great. Sure, there are ways to make sex funny on-screen, and I laughed at the awkward bedroom machinations when Jason and Julie tried to conceive their child. But my apparently universal Adam Scott crush aside, I didn’t feel cheated by the lack of nudity. That scene and other references to sex in Friends with Kids were funnier, sharper and more adult than most of the shenanigans in last year’s dueling sex-friends rom-coms, No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits . 4. All you need is a good dinner party or two. As you may have read , Friends with Kids is not the much-marketed Bridesmaids reunion, but the returning cast plays a great collective supporting role. The actors have good chemistry as a group of friends, with all the tensions and alliances therein, and some of the best parts of Friends with Kids depict their various gatherings, including a climactic, verbally-explosive dinner party during a group vacation. Westfeldt’s characters argue like real people, and the drama of those arguments powers her story – no need for rogue hot-air balloons , incompetent bounty hunters, or even spy partners fighting gun battles over Reese Witherspoon. PREVIOUSLY : What Wanderlust — and Hollywood — Just Can’t Get Right About Women Maria Aspan is a writer living in New York whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Reuters and American Banker. She Tweets and Tumbls .
Jennifer Westfeldt’s sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt’s directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein ), and it’s polished to the point of shallow glossiness — it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier. But the picture at least attempts to wrestle with the notion that there’s no single right way to raise a family or navigate a partnership. And it acknowledges, if only fleetingly, the way very well-meaning people who are parents can often be incredibly smug toward those who aren’t, insinuating that their own lives are somehow more meaningful because they have kids who run them ragged. At one point Westfeldt and Adam Scott, who play best friends Julie and Jason, ponder how much their friends changed after they had kids. “I don’t know these people anymore,” Jason says, bewildered after he’s just attended a dinner party where frazzled, distracted parents did nothing but snap at one another and at their children, completely unable to enjoy themselves or one another. “These people are mean and angry.” The tide shifts when Jason and Julie decide to have a child together without becoming romantically involved. They’ve been close friends for years, and they live in the same apartment building — why not? The experiment goes surprisingly well, and the two end up with a pretty good kid who really does seem to be enriching their lives. In one of the movie’s most gratifying sequences, their traditionally coupled friends, played by a Bridesmaids reunion cast including Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm (Westfeldt’s partner in real life), speculate about how out-of-control the new parents’ lives must be, only to find that Jason and Julie’s unorthodox arrangement is extremely efficient and agreeable. But Friends with Kids winds up turning on itself, becoming a more conventional comedy than it sets out to be. In the end, Jason and Julie do fit themselves into a mold, although at least the transition doesn’t come easy. Westfeldt’s Julie is too adorable by half: She’s a cutie-pie neurotic, and the appeal wears thin quickly. (You can hardly blame Jason for falling, temporarily, for a shallow vixen played by Megan Fox.) But as writer and director, Westfeldt has at least done right by Adam Scott, a fine comic actor who, until now, has been relegated to second-banana roles. A highly unscientific poll conducted here and there among my women friends, straight and gay, has revealed that all women love Adam Scott. I have not been able to determine the source of his charm, but it appears that in addition to being good-looking (but not too good-looking), he tends to come off as the kind of guy who has flaws you could live with: He’s a little smart-alecky but also smart and funny; he might leave his underwear on the floor, but he remembers to hang up his towel; and so forth. As I said, it’s all unscientific. Friends with Kids proves that Scott can carry a movie: His comic timing is crisp and on-point, but he’s also capable of playing it straight when he needs to. He’s marvelous in one revelatory scene where he enumerates Julie’s best qualities, and as written, it’s the sort of dialogue that could head right into pukefest territory, fast. Scott gives Friends with Kids some necessary edge, and though the picture overall could still be much sharper, from scene to scene, he’s key to its integrity. No wonder his Jason is superdad material. [Editor’s note: This review appeared earlier, in a slightly different form, in Stephanie Zacharek’s Toronto Film Festival coverage. ] Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Try as she might up in Toronto, Madonna just can’t shake the stink of Hydrangea-Gate. Despite a quasi mea culpa for her insensitivity to the flowers and their provider, a new video from the singer-filmmaker suggests that not only is she not remorseful, but she will also not hesitate to kill again. “It’s a free country!” she “roars” in the silent short scored to the Godfather II theme. “So f**k you I like roses!!” Classy. Click ahead for the video and more Buzz Break.
Jennifer Westfeldt’s sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt’s directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein ), and it’s polished to the point of shallow glossiness — it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier.
