Full Title: Going the Distance
Director: Nanette Burstein
Year: 2010
Comments: Typically, I am not a fan of “Romantic Comedies,” with very few exceptions and this is one of them. Though, I did not love this film, I think it is respectable and worthy of some accolades. It certainly has its own little charm in a mixture of affectionate, gentle raunchiness with a practical love story. In brief, the plot concerns Garett (Justin Long), a young idealist/worker for a record label, who has just ended a long relationship, finding himself falling into another relationship with Erin (Drew Barrymore), the (Summer) girl of his dreams. Just one problem Summer ends… and this means Erin must leave New York and return to San Francisco for work. The remainder of the film centers around the two struggling to maintain this long distance relationship while also feeling conflicted between choosing love or following their careers. Overall, this movie is quite funny, but it drags on and does not really bring anything new to the table; it is quite typical and even a bit cliched: young, off-beat, idealist couple cannot decide between what’s best for each other or what’s best for themselves. And having the guy work at a label and complain about how young, cool, bands are not getting noticed is pretty standard and/or expected. The dialouge is overly cheesy at times to boot. But, there is plenty of quality aspects to this flick to save it from being an average Romantic Comedy. As I stated before, the humor is fairly strong here, not the funniest by any means, but definitely offered me plenty of laugh out loud moments, particularly from Dan (Charlie Day), the wacky best friend of the main character, Garrett, who unto himself is a cliched character, but I’ll forgive it because the performance of Charlie Day is so hilarious that it works. Essentially, he plays a toned down version of his character Charlie on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Being a huge fan of that show and that character specifically, this gave me a little personal reason for liking this film more than perhaps I normally would. So, will this be a movie we remember years down the line? Highly doubt it, it is far from the brilliance of (500) Days of Summer (2009), but it is in a league higher than most “chick flicks” and certainly worthy of a KLYAM recommendation. If this is your kind of a bag, then why not?

Grade: B-, I kind of feel like I am being too easy here, but I think I will stay with this grade for now.

Coming Next a review of Machete