Definitely, Maybe

I know it's been a bazillion years since my last post, but I haven't felt much inspired by anything I've seen enough to post about it. I'll work on a quickie reviews post of the flicks I've seen in the theater in the last few months. In any case, I had been wanting to check out Definitely, Maybe since it came out last year, mostly because of my monster crush on Ryan Reynolds. So when I saw it in the previously viewed section for $6.99, I snatched it up.

Written and directed by Adam Brooks, the film is a romantic comedy about a recently divorced man, Will Hayes (Reynolds), telling a story to his daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin), about his past loves and in essence, his life. Also starring Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher and Rachel Weisz as the three women from Will's past.

The story begins when Will's daughter, Maya, has learned about sex in health class and wants to know about how her father and mother met and how many girlfriends he had before meeting her mother. Will makes a deal with her that he will tell her the story, but will change the names and some of the details and she will have to figure out which one in the story is her mother. The story takes place over a twelve year period of time beginning when Will has to leave Madison, Wisconsin, and his college sweetheart to go work for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in New York City. Over the course of the story, told in flashback, we meet all three women, Emily, the college sweetheart (Banks), Summer, the sophisticated friend of Emily (Weisz), and April, the spunky co-worker (Fisher).


I really liked this film a lot. It was a very fresh take on the tired, romantic comedy formula. Reynolds dubbed it a "romantic who dunnit?" in his audio commentary with director, Adam Brooks and I like that assessment. One of the user comments on IMDB says this is predictable and formulaic, but I have to disagree. I honestly did not figure out who was Maya's mother until Maya did. I liked seeing the growth and progression of Will from a fresh faced, idealistic small town boy arriving in the big city to an unhappy, stuck in a rut, recently divorced man. I've always loved Ryan Reynolds but now I love Isla Fisher even more....sooo adorable! Everybody was well cast and Kevin Kline was a nice surprise as Hampton Roth, the well established, alcoholic novelist who sets up Will and Summer. Also good were Derek Luke as Russell, Will's roommate, co-worker and later on, business partner and Adam Ferrara as Gareth, Will's short-tempered supervisor on the Clinton campaign. I highly enjoyed it.

Ending with a quote from the part where Will is practicing proposing marriage to Emily on April.....

Will: Will you um, marry me?
April: What do you mean, 'Will you, um, marry me?' I haven't seen you in weeks! You don't look happy or excited about the prospect of our marriage! You're asking me to give up my - my freedom, my joie de vivre for an institution that fails as often as it succeeds? And why should I marry you anyway? I mean, why do you wanna marry me? Besides some bourgeois desire to fulfil an ideal that society embeds in us from an early age to promote a consumer capitalist agenda?

More to come......