Saturday, April 12, 2008

Movie Review

"Definitely, Maybe"

"Will you marry me?", "Definitely, maybe?" From a line exchanged in the movie, this romantic comedy film directed by Adam Brooks, is a love mystery novel retold with a dash of twists and turns, how one man met three women. His precocious little daughter will guess the woman he married. William Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) is going through divorce and gets to see his 10 year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) once or twice a week. On one of these occasions, she had just finished first sex-education class at school. Flushed with questions on sex, she started to quiz him about his love life before marriage. Maya wants to know every details about how her parents met and when he decided to get married. In an attempt to add a sense of sensationlization and leave sexual exploits out of his story, Will changes the names and some facts. The story he tells Maya is depicted in long flashbacks with occasional pauses from time to time and switches back to the present, where Maya comments and asks questions. The story unfold in the year 1992, where a young and aspiring Will Hayes dreams of becoming the President. He made a decision to move away from his college sweetheart, Emily (Elizabeth Banks), embarking on a trip to New York to work on the Clinton campaign. She gives him a wrapped package and asks him to give it to her reporter friend, Summer (Rachel Weisz). In New York, he meets April (Isla Fisher), the photocopy girl for the campaign while he was performing menial jobs as the toilet-paper/coffee boy. They formed an instant attraction immediately. Out of curiosity, Will could not resists opening the package. It was Summer's diary. He reads it and comes across pages describing a love affair between Emily and Summer. Intrigued, he visits Summer to bring the diary, meets her roommate and sometimes-lover, her college professor and famous writer named Hampton Roth (Kevin Kline). April and Will met outside work while buying cigarettes. The connection grew when she tells him its her birthday and Will responded by buying her dinner but settled on accompanying her to a party. On the rooftop, Will eventually practices a proposal to Emily on April and she is taken aback by his words. They go back to her apartment, where April has multiple copies of Jane Eyre in her collection, explaining that her father gave her a copy with an inscription in the front shortly before he died, and the book was shortly lost. Will and April eventually kiss but Will left quickly while berating himself. Emily visits earlier than expected and expectedly, Will proposes in the park. Startled, Emily turns him down by telling him that she slept with Will's roommate left him devastated and heartbroken. Time past and Bill Clinton becomes president of the United States and Will moves up to become speech-writer for a candidate to be Governor of New York. April travels the world, and she and Will become pen-pals. Summer and Will's path crossed once again. Eventually, with the encouragement of Roth, Will and Summer become romantically involved. But it ended abruptly when she writes unfavourably about the politician Will works for. Will becomes disillusioned about his choice of profession when Bill Clinton is implicated in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He hates his job and starts to heavily drink. On his birthday and in a drunken rant, he confesses romantic feelings towards April but in the process, ends up hurting her in a fight with her where he tells her to "go to life rehab".Will eventually chance upon the copy of Jane Eyre that April's father gave her. He goes to give it to her, but left when he finds out that April and her boyfriend are living together. Summer and Will bumped into each other while he is at a cafe, and she invites him to a party where he meets Emily, now living in New York. They end up starting up another relationship and Emily turns out to be Maya's mother. Will signs the divorce papers served to him. Maya is happy that she figured out the story, but also realizes that her father still loves April, as even though Will changed the names of Emily (Sarah in real life), and Summer (Natasha in real life), he did not change April's name. Encouraged by Maya, who wants her father to be happy, he goes to try to win April's heart. The movie ends with Will confessing he held on to the copy of Jane Eyre because it was the only thing he had of hers. Maya and Will go to April's apartment to reconcile. The movie ends with April jumping into Will's arms to kiss him. Wonderfully scripted and never a dull moment, watch it with a romantic date. Ratings 3.5 out of 5.

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