Like Crazy

It's a classic tale: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl's complete lack of self-control, and overwhelming need of controlling selfishness causes them to be separated, and puts their relationship on a rocky, one and a half hour melodramatic ride.

Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones two great actors, and two of three reasons why I watched this movie.

Anna (Felicity Jones) is British, in L.A. to go to college, where she meets Jacob (Anton Yelchin). They fall in love. They cuddle a lot. He, a furniture designer, makes her a chair. She, a writer, writes him poems. They would be "that couple" whose PDA makes everyone else around them uncomfortable -- if they ever hung out with anyone else. (PG-13 level inappropriate content is infused throughout the movie, as you may expect.) And then they graduate, and she has to go back to England. Except they cannot bear to be separated, so, she doesn't. She stays with him all summer, until she flies over for a week and her friend's wedding, and then flies straight back. And that's when those pesky customs people won't let her through security because she overstayed her visa last time. Whoops. Cue many lingering shots of two depressed, lonely faces, thousands of miles apart.

The fact that they're sitting apart in this picture is nothing short of miracle. They were like magnets.

Of course the movie isn't the two of them pining for each other the whole time -- although sometimes it seems like it is. I took it all as a cautionary tale; a list of things you should not do once you found the person you think you're going to spend the rest of your life with. In fact I'm having a hard time thinking of anything these two did right. Their selfishness and impatience caused nothing but heartache (for more than themselves I may add) and it was a little unsettling, because it was so realistic.

And that unsettling, realistic feeling, for better or for worse, was enhanced greatly the performances. Both the characters seem like really nice, likeable people. They're actually likeable throughout the movie, though they do many dis-likeable things. The acting really is very good, and without Yelchin and Jones playing the characters, I probably wouldn't have managed to watch the whole thing (actually I wouldn't have started it in the first place). Oh, and there's also Jennifer Lawrence in a small portion of the movie. Now you know all three reasons why I wanted to see this. And because of those three, I don't regret seeing it either -- if they didn't make it enjoyable in a happy sense of the word, they at least made it interesting, and very, very well acted.

Just because my choices of pictures imply it, there were actually very few scenes on the beach... everything else these photos imply is accurate.

And I guess it's not completely unthinkable that this may be enjoyable as a romance for someone, I mean there's lots of romance -- shallow, sappy, selfish romance, but people do seem to like that occasionally; look at Romeo and Juliet. Less people die in Like Crazy, so I guess that's good for them, but then again, Romeo and Juliet is considerably more poetic, and a Shakespeare classic, so really there's no point in comparing them... except to prove that Like Crazy is supposed to be a romance, and I think that's done. Moving on.

Actually I guess that's it. This movie was very successful and making not much content be interesting with character study; teaches a lesson that I already knew, but teaches it very well anyway; and was made with thoughtfulness, and just as much care as its characters were careless. And while it's by no means a feel-good romantic movie, I wouldn't say either that it was at all bad -- artistically at least. And I finally understand the title (I thought I did before, but I actually do now) because those two kids were, like, crazy.