must love dogs...

okay, i'm ready now... i am a strange individual... i have come to accept this... what follows are my thoughts on must love dogs... to some, it will seem strange, but that's okay with me... i never claimed to be normal...

i didn't know what to expect in choosing to see the sneak preview of must love dogs... i love john cusack... i am a fan of many of his films - say anything, high fidelity, grosse pointe blank, america's sweethearts, the journey of natty gann, better off dead...

his characters seem to have this quirky awkwardness that seems refreshingly normal in comparison with the slick smooth talkers that seem to invade hollywood... and instead of this hunky hot-stuff guy, he's an attractive in an uncoventional way and normal guy way... there's cusack, normal, quirky, awkward, and cool... i want to be friends with him... i want to have that kind of friend in my life... so i think the cusack appeal to me is that he seems like a normal guy in many ways... but the cool normal guy...

when i went to see serendipity, i didn't like it at all... i wasn't quite to the status i'm in now, with relation to john cusack... but i didn't like the storyline... i just didn't like it... but sometime in the last year, i caught it on tv and i really liked it... it was strange... all of a sudden i really liked this movie i originally hated... maybe i wasn't ready for it, or maybe seeing the actors in different roles changed my mind... along with loving john corbett...

but back to must love dogs... i didn't know if i'd hate it the same way i hated serendipity at first... in my quest to see every john cusack movie ever made, i've realized that he's played some very dumb roles... he's made bad movies... they're not all great... and so here comes another rom-com... seemingly the same as every other rom-com... and it seems like another opportunity for johnny-boy to play another mediocre character...

i can honestly say i was pleasantly surprised... i don't think it's a great film, in the academy award sense of great... but it was refreshing... the characters are real to me... they're not young, post-pubescent teenagers or early twenty-somethings with the starry-eyed hope of love, but older, more mature characters looking for love and trying to recover from broken hearts...

i was impressed with john cusack and diane lane... i read a trivia bullet that said that the director gave john cusack the script and told him if he wanted to add/change anything his character's dialogue to better suit him, that he could... he reportedly added 35 pages of dialogue for his character... it was evident... it was that same awkward character who is awestruck at a beautiful girl and always saying the wrong thing... which was perfect and normal and fun... it didn't seem scripted, but seemed honest... and diane lane did an excellent job, too... it wasn't like an old maid, but more of a youthful, but mature woman who was learning how to live and love again...

as i get older (i know i'm not that old, but where i come from, getting married late is getting married at 23), i hope less for the dreamy ideas of love and more for the companionship and honesty of a deep, heartfelt, intimate lasting relationship... and i feel like this movie captures more of that than the "star-crossed-lovers who finally get together at the very end and supposedly live happily ever after but what's going to happen in 6 months or even just after the credits roll" type of rom-com...

i had planned a trip for everyone to go see must love dogs on opening night and i gladly kept the plan after seeing it... i worried about content as so many movies have crazy and unnecessary sexual content, but must love dogs is surprisingly clean and i feel that it's gender-friendly... yes, it's a rom-com, but i don't think it's too girly...

i am sure there is something bad i could say... but i don't want to...

some more good stuff - i felt like the music was a good fit... there were a few times when i thought, "great song for the moment"... and i loved the deli guy... and i thought there were some very great and thought-provoking statements on love and commitment... and stockard channing did a great job in a supporting role... many times i leave a rom-com feeling sad... depressed... but honestly, last night i left feeling light-hearted... even though it is typical and predictable, it was good... great... i will buy it when it comes out on dvd...