Like Crazy ***½

Director: Drake Doremus
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence
Charlie Bewley, Alex Kingston, Oliver Muirhead, Chris Messina

Why is it that the most romantic films always have to tear through your soul, grab your heart from your chest and then smash it to pieces? Like Crazy does this and more, yet even with the eventual feeling of devastation that remains, one can't help but fall in love with it.
Call it masochism, call it hope, or call it plain insanity, but the movie proves just how humans seem drawn to misery and pain in the search for a larger truth, proof, perhaps, that we are not alone.
Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play Jacob and Anna, star-crossed lovers who must battle the evil forces of immigration to be together. Anna is a British student who overstays her US visa to be with Jacob over a languorous summer in Los Angeles. When she tries to return to the US, after attending a family thing in the UK, she is denied entrance and sent back to England, creating an obstacle for their blossoming relationship.
The rest of the film then divides itself between the two countries, as we see the young lovers trying to remain together even if they're apart.
Despite the Victorian sounding nature of the plot twist, the film is far from being an exercise in forced romance, instead it goes to the heart of love and wonders out loud, what makes one commit such inhuman acts in order to fulfill a romantic longing. Is love really that important in the face of emotional destruction and practical living?
Watching Jacob and Anna try to survive without one another is often more painful than inspiring, which makes the movie ring true in a universal manner. Yelchin once more brings his down-to-earth ease to Jacob, providing him with a stoicism that works as a perfect reflection of his heartbreak and Jones is just astonishing as Anna. She breathes violent life into the movie, making her character's actions ring true in a way that's both extremely cinematical and hurtfully realistic. She can be compared to Kate Winslet's delicious Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in how you can see how flawed they are, but still can't help but fall for them. The supporting cast is also great, including Lawrence as a girl in love with Jacob and Muirhead and Kingston as Anna's supportive parents.
It doesn't require much film knowledge to realize that Like Crazy draws deep from its writer's personal experience. In fact Doremus, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ben York Jones, has revealed that the film was inspired by one of his relationships; however do not look into his biography further if you want to have your own idea of what happens after the uncathartic finale in the movie.
With all of its pain and bitterness, Like Crazy somehow escapes pure tragedy by drawing from the power of humanity to remind us that our most important love affair is the one we have with ourselves.

Julie and Julia ***

Director: Nora Ephron
Cast: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams
Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, Jane Lynch, Erin Dilly
Mary Kay Place, Linda Emond

Meryl Streep is to acting, what Julia Child was to cooking: a master of the craft, who never forgets to enjoy her work.
This is why it's no coincidence that Streep was chosen to play Child (this and than the fact that she's the greatest imitator ever and even seems to grow a few inches to play this part) but because watching Streep act, like watching Child cook, is a delight.
You might not learn how to cook and you might not learn how to act, but your day sure will seem richer after being with them.
Streep plays Child during her stay in Paris after WWII, where she moved with her diplomat husband Paul (Tucci), enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and began writing what would become her masterpiece "Mastering the Art of French Cooking".
Fast forward fifty something years to New York City where aspiring novelist Julie Powell (Adams) comes up with the idea to write a blog detailing how she masters Julia Child's book in one year.
From this basis, Ephron shapes a charming story that often draws parallels between the women (think "The Hours" light, very light) to show us how inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of sources.
Graciously paced and crafted, the film evokes the charming, harmless spectacles of classic Hollywood that intended only to give pleasure to its audience.
In this film the pleasure is mostly owed to the performers. Adams, who's impossible to hate, even when playing a self pronounced "bitch", brings her kind of innocence to a part that would've been damaged from being played like the cynical idea we have of NY writers.
Her part of the story might be the least appealing, but with Chris Messina who plays her husband, they do enough justice to portraying our generation's need of fulfillment.
With Tucci and Streep however; you never can get just enough. Their chemistry is magnificent-rarely do movie marriages seem so convincing, loving and natural-and Tucci is a natural scene stealer, even if he's forced by the screenplay to subject to his wife's desires.
And how could he not? Streep is literally larger than life as Child. She nails the elongated vowels, the accent and most amazingly the spirit of the cooking icon.
Even when Ephron tries to give her as little dramatic conflict as possible (her biggest problems include learning to chop onions) Streep is always ahead of the game and gives Julia little things that transform her into an actual human being.
She might've constructed the performance from videos and recordings, but Streep gives her a something extra.
Remarkably though, she also is able to deliver a meta performance of sorts. By now, she knows people will have a hard time getting over the fact that it's another Meryl Streep performance and the genius actress draws on the primordial concept behind this to turn out the sort of performance that sums up the entire movie's spirit.
"There's nothing wrong with her, she's perfect" says Powell of Child, to which her husband replies "the Julia Child in your head".
And this is exactly what Streep is playing, watch how she gives us enough internal conflict with her eyes, but stops just in time to take us back to Powell.
Someone refers to her as Julie's imaginary friend and this might be all she's actually playing, like a Harvey we can see perhaps...
Streep isn't only playing someone who lived, she's playing her version of what she thinks Amy Adams' version of Julie Powell thinks she is.
In the very same way both women are figured out by the written word. For Powell (and Adams playing Powell) people judge her based on her blog (which is based on a book...and you get the idea).
With this Ephron has something very interesting to say about how our society decodes celebrity and the places they can take in our lives.
But other than this semi-existential conundrum, nothing ever goes seriously wrong in "Julie and Julia". Sure stews get burnt and McCarthyism threatens to spoil the fun at Julia's sister wedding, but other than that there is zero conflict, therefore the movie feels like enjoying a soufflé; where we seldom have the time or desire to learn how the hell the chef avoided deflation. We just savor it and for a second or two have no cares in the world.

Away We Go ***

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph
Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan
Carmen Ejogo, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton
Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey, Paul Schneider

Leaving behind his sterile formalism and working in a very relaxed style, Sam Mendes directs his first movie that feels refreshingly un-directed.
For someone that has specialized in the deconstruction of characters surrounded by pristine art direction and/or obvious camera moves, this tale of two people looking for a home, comes as a delightful surprise.
Burt (Krasinski) and Verona (Rudolph) are a couple in their mid-thirties who are expecting their first child. They live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere where they indulge in practices they have carried on from their college days.
But this won't do for their baby. With that in mind they set on a journey across North America to find the perfect place to settle.
First they go to Burt's parents (played splendidly by O'Hara and Daniels) who reveal they are moving to Antwerp and are just starting to live the lives people in their twenties desire.
Then it's off to Phoenix where they are greeted by Verona's former boss Lily (Janney) and her husband (Gaffigan). Lily calls herself a nutcase and insists that her little daughter is a dyke while her husband listens tolerantly.
After their awkward meeting they take a detour to see Verona's little sister (Ejogo) in Tucson with whom the film takes a turn for the purely bittersweet as the sisters remember their deceased parents.
After this they go to Madison to see Burt's childhood friend Ellen (a loopier, and oddly sexier, than ever Gyllenhaal), a college professor, who with her husband Rod (Hamilton), has taken to New Age-y parental practices that include them having sex in front of the kids.
They run away from this all the way to Montreal where they encounter college friends Tom (Messina) and Munch (Lynksey) who seem to have the perfect married life, but actually have deep pain.
Last, but not least, they go to Miami to see Burt's brother Courtney (Schneider, great as usual) whose wife recently abandoned him, leaving him alone to raise his young daughter (Isabelle Moon Alexander).
After life shows them all the possible people they can become, conveniently arranged in cinematic moral hierarchy, they have to decide where to move and who they most want to resemble.
As if they'd forgotten to decide the destination of their journey before leaving, they might always end up finding themselves where they began.
Luckily for such an aimless road trip, Krasinski and Rudolph keep the movie grounded and fascinating at every moment.
Even if the supporting characters are comprised of archetypes, weirdos and plain indie quirky clichés, they make Burt and Verona real people.
More than that, they make them people who are genuinely in love with each other ("I will love you even if I can't find your vagina" says Burt in a way that sounds breathtaking), for whom the problems of finding "the one" are done and over with.
When most movies settle for making the discovery of love the ultimate goal of life, this movie reminds us there's more than that and that life is a process.
"We're not fuck ups" they say at the beginning of the movie and they spend the rest of it showing us people who might as well be.
This comparison isn't condescending because truth is anyone watching the movie will try to empathize with them and see that after all they are not that bad.
In a lovely scene Burt proposes to Verona for the umpteenth time (she doesn't think marriage is necessary). She rejects him once more, but to ease his fear she ends up making promises from a list Burt comes up with spontaneously.
Mendes' delicate direction here isn't intrusive, but we know we are witnessing a making of vows more significant than anything we'd see at a wedding.
This is the film's best thing, not the big scenes with lots of characters, but the small intimate moments when we see Burt and Verona cuddle and lie quietly next to each other.
When they have to travel by train, they lie awake in their bunk beds, Ellen Kuras' spare cinematography suggests a void, and before long Burt has moved down to be with his girl.
Musicalized with Alexi Murdoch's lovely songs and with art direction that feels lived in more than anything, "Away We Go" is the kind of movie that indie filmmakers would die to produce, but has none of the pretentious resolutions we find in them more and more.
Perhaps a strike of good luck, or mere exhaustion (as the film was shot during a break Mendes took from "Revolutionary Road") we might leave not knowing if Burt and Verona found what they seeked.
But Mendes has finally achieved maturity.