It’s Complicated

You see this one mostly for Meryl Streep, and how many times could I have written that line over the last 20 years? Here is another case of a movie that no critic got very excited about, but few actively hated. It scored a perfect 50% at Metacritic. It cost $18 million to make and in two weeks has grossed $60 million. That’s pocket change to James Cameron, but a nice little profit for the studio, and it will earn more, maybe as much as the iconic $100 million that pretty much defines a hit these days. And why is that? I think it’s because we late-middle-aged, almost-ready-for-Medicare … okay, I’ll say it, we boomers, are starved for a decent romantic comedy. There are four new teenage or young-adult comedies released every week, and 3.9 of them suck, even for their target audience. If we get one old boomer comedy every six months we’re doing pretty good. So we take what we can get, and if it stars Meryl Streep, so much the better. There were a lot of good laughs in this, and though it skated very near to what I think would have been a disastrous and dishonest ending, it managed to avoid it. Put aside the unbelievable fact that Meryl was living alone in a house slightly smaller than Buckingham Palace, and was adding on to it … this is the movies, okay? This is romance. People in romantic movies have nice things, nice cars, nice houses. If you’re my age or older, you will probably have fun. If you’re younger, I don’t have a clue what you’ll think.