Yeah, I think I liked it more because I HAAAAAAATED Kissing Jessica Stein, thus my expectations of Jennifer Westfeldt were set relatively low. And it's too bad, because I keep thinking of other really minor things that could have rescued the movie from its problematic gender roles. Like, the part where she's moving to Brooklyn and she says it's because she can't afford private school because she doesn't make as much money as he does and it implies this whole history of it being an issue that he makes more money than she does, and it's like, uh, wait, they both live in Manhattan in the SAME APARTMENT BUILDING, how disparate can their incomes really be?
But anyway, the combination of imagining it was actually slash kidfic and also the surprise of the ending left me with a net positive feeling about the movie as a whole. (I don't mean surprise as in "they got together" but I was pleasantly surprised with the exact point in time when the movie ended. With the whole flow of the narrative up to that point, I totally expected that the sex scene would fade to black, we'd move an additional three or four years in the future, be in the backyard in Brooklyn at Joe's birthday party with all the friends in the background and the last line of the movie would be the kid asking his parents how they fell in love or something. As much as his character's "oh I could NEVER EVER EVER be attracted to your small breasts ... oh, no, wait, I changed my mind!" pivot was annoying, I liked that he was like "I love you, I love our kid, I love our family" and she was like "Prove you actually want to bang me and then we'll talk." When the movie rolls to credits, you can still imagine that they had sex and she was like "Eh, you know what? Not so much."
But anyway, the combination of imagining it was actually slash kidfic and also the surprise of the ending left me with a net positive feeling about the movie as a whole. (I don't mean surprise as in "they got together" but I was pleasantly surprised with the exact point in time when the movie ended. With the whole flow of the narrative up to that point, I totally expected that the sex scene would fade to black, we'd move an additional three or four years in the future, be in the backyard in Brooklyn at Joe's birthday party with all the friends in the background and the last line of the movie would be the kid asking his parents how they fell in love or something. As much as his character's "oh I could NEVER EVER EVER be attracted to your small breasts ... oh, no, wait, I changed my mind!" pivot was annoying, I liked that he was like "I love you, I love our kid, I love our family" and she was like "Prove you actually want to bang me and then we'll talk." When the movie rolls to credits, you can still imagine that they had sex and she was like "Eh, you know what? Not so much."
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