Must Love Dogs
Ok, I watched this movie last night and--good, lord--are there actually families like this? Because this story is all about this family nagging the forty-year-old extremely good looking (Diane Lane) and apparently extraordinarily well-paid pre-school teacher into dating again after her divorce. And by nagging, I mean never talking about anything else, ever, posting pictures on her refrigerator of marginally eligible men, and calling her at all hours of the day and night to see if she's dating yet. Because in this movie it's clear that 'I just want you to be happy' means, 'I can't stand to see you living your life without attaching yourself to a man'. What they tell her is to get a life and it's clear that one cannot have one (a life) if one isn't dating a man.
Also, where do these people get their money? Diane Lane is a pre-school teacher living in California in a huge 1920s bungalow that would cost more than a single pre-school teacher in Iowa could afford, let alone California. John Cusack's character builds boats that he never sells and lives in a huge and beautiful loft with a huge and beautiful work space downstairs. He does nothing else and there's no indication that he's ever done anything else. Just builds boats. And doesn't sell them.
Stockard Channing is the best character in the movie as a love interest for Diane Lane's character's father, Christopher Plummer. But although Christopher Plummer is allowed to date billions of women and invite them all to his house at the same time (which the women put up with because in California it appears that it's against the law for any woman ever to date any man who is younger than she is. And since they all must have a man all the time--which we learned from the previous family intervention scene--they just have to put up with dating a man who has several dates at once). Stockard Channing's character handles this with a fair amount of grace (as she's the most mature character in the movie), but good lord, tell him to go jump.
The women act like idiots. The men act like idiots. And I don't get why anyone would want to be with anyone. The best couple in the movie is sixty-one year old Stockard Channing's character and the fifteen year old who meets her on the internet and thinks she's sixteen (because he read her age wrong) and 'so mature.'