Going the Distance

I cannot really put my finger on why I wanted to see this movie, but I really wanted to see it. I felt like there was a chance it would be surprisingly funny, or genuinely sweet or something. It was like there was something beneath the trailer that was pulling me into the film. I am not particularly fond of Drew Barrymore and buying Justin Long as a romantic lead proved difficult in He's Just not that into you, so I really have no idea why I being drawn to it. A friend saw it and loved it, so that kind of solidified my need to check this flick out. With the summer movie season coming to an end and no real great comedies birthed out of the season, would this movie give me the kind of laughs I had craved? Or at least the warm romantic side of my being satisfied?

Erin(Barrymore) is a 31yr old summer intern in a dying field(newspaper reporting) She is in New York for the summer, but Stanford's Grad program awaits her. Garrett is a man unable to truly commit to a girl and is also working in a dying field(music A&R). The two meet one night, get incredibly drunk and have a great time together. They have such a good time, they decide to spend the rest of summer, 6 weeks, together, with the knowledge whatever they are doing will end when Erin goes back west. At the end of the 6 weeks, neither wants it to end, so they decide to give a long distance relationship a try. Both people have relatively non-supportive friends and family, and the time difference and expensive plane tickets complicate matters, but they really love each other. Erin tries to find Newspaper work in New York and Garrett tries to find music work in San Francisco, but when Erin gets a job opportunity at a paper in San Francisco, tough decisions have to be made.

If I were to tell you that Going the Distance is the funniest movie I have seen all year, you probably would think I was kidding, right? Well I am not kidding, it is flat out the funniest movie I have seen all year. It is raunchy, hilarious, kind of sweet and just flat out a great movie. The trailers are misleading like crazy. I did not know this was rated R, but it is a hard R with great dirty jokes that are clearly inspired from the Judd Apatow school of film making, but here the girls ge to play as well. Barrymore and Christina Applegate, as Barrymore's sister, have this great conversation about how they hate when a guy looks up while going down on a girl, which Barrymore acts out, to surprisingly hilarious results. Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day play Garrett's best friends and every time either one is on screen, hilarity will ensue. Day has great subtle comic timing and Sudeikis's loud bold humor blends perfectly with that. There are moments where the guys are just sitting at a bar having these hilarious conversations or asking ridiculous questions, or discussing how Day never sees baby pigeons anywhere.

Aside from the great conversations, there are entire scenes where funny things keep building. In the trailer you get a glimpse of the scene where Justin Long is fake tanning, but that scene builds a lot more into the next scene where there is table sex going on, which you also get a glimpse of in the trailer, but the scene keeps going and getting more absurd and bleeds into more scenes and just keeps getting funnier. Jim Gaffigan provides Gaffigan style humor to Erin's brother-in-law and that is always appreciated. Long and Barrymore are no slouches in the comedy department either. While they are the "straight man" roles, they get plenty of funny stuff to do.

The romantic part of the movie is nice as well. The 6 week montage is a little labored, but I believed the rest of it and I believed the challenges of the long distance thing, but also believed these two loved each other and wanted to make it work. I like that the movie did not take the easiest way out possible. I think the climax was inevitable and the resolving event also pretty inevitable, but they went about it in a different way than I was expecting, which is nice. I know Barrymore and Long are a couple in real life, and that is nice, but their on screen chemistry does, at times, come off as too friendly. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it really helps the first 25 minutes, but I guess I was hoping for a bit more heat.

Going the Distance is a surprisingly hilarious and at times, shocking movie that can easily enjoyed by both men and women. The first 25 minutes are absolutely laugh out loud funny and as the movie settles in it offers plenty of other funny moments. I was disappointed by a lot of the comedy thrown at me this summer, but this makes up for it in many ways. Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis deserve to enjoy the breakout success Zack Galifinakis enjoyed after The Hangover last year and I hope to see them in a lot more movies in the near future. Do yourself a favor and check it out!