Moderately filthy romantic comedy, moderately amusing in compensation, about a young man with commitment issues until he meets a loosey-goosey gal who holds the high score on the Centipede machine at the neighborhood watering hole and whose favorite movie is, hold your breath, The Shawshank Redemption. (Takes all kinds.) Only problem, she’s but a summer intern at the New York Sentinel and returns to grad school at Stanford in a matter of weeks. Half an hour into it, the movie arrives at its launching pad: how to maintain a relationship from opposite coasts. The cast of characters is filled out from stock: a couple of slacker male friends and a reptilian boss for the hero, a controlling older sister, a henpecked brother-in-law, and a curmudgeonly editor for the heroine. Pretty well all of them speak as if they were reared on nothing but television sitcoms (cable ones included, for freedom of expression), and their dialogue in consequence sounds not so much like conversation as like recruitment of eavesdroppers, a concerted effort to be overheard, admired, envied. Millions — well, hundreds for sure — will doubtless want to identify, in particular with the well-chilled Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, whose passion for one another, undetectable at close range, can scarcely be diminished at long. With Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Christina Applegate; directed by Nanette Burstein. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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