A Case of You

"You could become the man of her dreams if you wanted to." Sam (Long) is a struggling writer who has a crush on Birdie (Wood), the barista at the coffee place he frequents. He has no idea how to approach her until his friend brings up the idea of looking at her Facebook profile. Sam studies what he sees and becomes everything she is looking for. When she begins to fall for him Sam rethinks his choices. I am really becoming a Justin Long fan. In every movie he is in he is very easy to like and very funny. After the amazing Best Man Down movie I was looking forward to seeing this. While this wasn't as good as that one this was still very enjoyable. What could have been a generic cookie cutter romantic comedy was changed just enough to make it interesting and fun to watch. The best part was that it wasn't 100% predictable, more like 90% but still... The movie is more or less about a non-creepy (not totally at least) stalker who gets the girl by not being himself. It had the possibility of being totally creepy and borderline scary but the performances and the writing made it sweet and funny. I did like this quite a bit and recommend it. Overall, the sweetest and least creepy stalker movie I have ever seen. I give this a B+.

I'll admit right up front I quit watching after an hour, not because it was bad but because it was nothing new. If you're unfamiliar with the "manic pixie" story, think of Natalie Portman in "Garden State" or Zooey Deschanel in everything she's ever done. Or if you want to get right down to it, there's the original and greatest manic pixie that ever was: Audrey Hepburn. The formula is you take 1 lovable loser guy, usually stiff, awkward or outright lame, and you pair him with a girl who is hazardously spontaneous and carefree as if she's still suffering the effects of novacaine from the dentist an hour earlier. Personally I love these kinds of films, but I love them because it's interesting to see the unique angle each one offers. But here in "A Case of You" there is no angle.

So what we get are endless scenes of the guy making a fool out of himself and the girl pirouetting through the scenes not noticing. There's a very weak, contrived "conflict" (the guy is facebook stalking her), but I don't have to watch the last 20 minutes to guess exactly how it ends. I'm guessing: revelation, confrontation, reconciliation. It's the standard formula just like the rest of the story was up to the point I turned it off.

You might enjoy this movie if you're not familiar with the manic pixie formula, but if you are, then watching this flick is sort of like reading a teen vampire book. You know exactly how it's going to go but you read it anyway because War & Peace gives you a headache.

Where this movie fails, beyond simply being a lukewarm copy of all the others, is that there is nothing quirky about the manic pixie (Evan Rachel Wood). There is no depth, no bizarre secret past, no soul. For example, in the excellent "Garden State" we get Natalie Portman who is a manic pixie on the surface but we soon learn that she suffers from a spectrum of problematic mental issues like pathological lying. It gives her character complexity and makes her interesting to us. Similarly if we look at Audrey Hepburn's manic pixie (take "Breakfast at Tiffany's") we get the same superficial happy-go-lucky exterior but we are fully aware that she is more or less a prostitute. Again, tremendous complexity to an otherwise predictable character.

But here in "A Case for You" there is absolutely no complexity. There is nothing out of the ordinary about either of the two, except that he's an awkward loser and she's a social butterfly.

I do give it points for some excellent (yet all too brief) cameos by Sam Rockwell as a hilariously egotistical guitar teacher, Peter Dinklage as a riotously funny coffee shop barista, and Vince Vaughn as a fast talking corporate suit who ought to have a Bluetooth headset surgically attached to his head. These scenes absolutely carried the film, but ultimately the story itself gives us nothing new.

Instead of this I would recommend any of the others I mentioned, as well as an unknown Japanese gem "Shiki-Jitsu" (Ritual) written by, and starring, Ayako Fujitani who is Steven Seagal's daughter (NO RESEMBLANCE!).

On paper the story might work but in the film it does not. He fakes it until he makes it? That's not making sense. It's a recipe for disaster, likely to end in murder-suicide. Also, not credibly acted, and the is girl much too consistently nice to be real. Fake on fake!

As I've stated before, there's nothing worse in life than (a) a wasted talent and (b) a wasted opportunity on film and, unfortunately, A Case of You is a misstep in what could've resulted in a film with a strong commentary on our over-connected society. Its issue right off the bat is it takes an idea that isn't really romantic and makes it the subject of a romantic comedy. The idea of a man using a woman's social networking profile (a woman he just met, mind you) to make an attempt to model himself after a man who likes the same music as she does, the same books, and the same activities so he can come to have a chance with her.

This movie shows qualities of a man I'm sure few women appreciate: disingenuous behavior, dishonesty, possible invasion of privacy, etc. Not exactly the traits you'd want to find in your significant other. Let me offer a question to the girls that enjoyed this film, what if you current or future significant other did the same thing that the lead male character in A Case of You to you? Would you still find his qualities ones to relish and his character worthy enough to date? The man in question is Sam (Justin Long), an ambitious writer confined to the uninspired job of penning the novelizations to hit movies (confession: I collected those like antique comics as a child). The female he falls for is Birdie (Evan Rachel Wood), a barista he meets one day who is subsequently fired the following day. Sam then asks the flirtatious, presumably homosexual dwarf who works there (Peter Dinklage in the kind of role he should avoid if he wants to try and break any stereotypes) about her to which he provides her last name, leaving Sam's option to go from socializing to social-networking.

Both Long and Wood give adequate performances because their charisma as actors rarely allows them to do otherwise. Since both actors have started, each have taken a wide-variety of roles, Wood especially, whose riveting performance in Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen as a delinquent teen I'll never forget. However, it is Long's character who is unlikable in the picture, one of the only movies next to his film Taking Chances a few years back that I recall not being fond of his character. Long's character, for starters, is one of the writer-types that likes to write three to five sentence before deleting them in disgust. Furthermore, he's also the kind of person in a romantic comedy that has the gall to get angry at the girl for liking the person he pretends to be rather than the person he really is.

This is where my optimism and likability for Long's character went out the window. Here's a guy who fakes his entire personality for this woman and convinces her everything she likes and dislikes mirrors his personal likes and dislikes before getting mad at her for not having anything else to talk about besides her specific tastes. To put that in some perspective, that'd be like if I was a filmmaker and mentioned a movie not my own that I really loved and enjoyed to my girlfriend. Say we talked about it for a long while. Trying to follow the abrupt change in emotions portrayed in A Case of You, it'd be like after fifteen minutes of discussing the film I got mad at my girlfriend for not mentioning my movie.

Cameos are littered in the movie, including Sam's pest of a boss played by Vince Vaughn, Brendan Fraser in questionably necessary role, and Sam Rockwell as a guitar teacher who is called by Sam once he learns Birdie finds nothing sexier than a man who can play guitar. It's depressing to note that Rockwell's performance here is shockingly unfunny and so over-the-top and out of place in the film that it's a blessing he's only in one scene. Never again do I want to say such a thing about Rockwell.

The film wants to make a case for the unhealthy qualities that arouse when there is a bias or larger focus on one person in a relationship, but by the third act, when the problem is recognized, it's hard to have any sympathy for the lead character since he brought it all upon himself. The only sympathy one can have is for Wood's character, who is just sucked into this mess by an insincere man wearing sincere clothing. Director Kat Coiro seems to understand human relationships, given her tract record of short films and feature-length films concerning love, personal struggles, and dating, but Coiro seems to make A Case of You into a case for background checks and further research on people's life partners.

Starring: Justin Long, Evan Rachel Wood, Vince Vaughn, Sam Rockwell, Brendan Fraser, and Peter Dinklage. Directed by: Kat Coiro.

This is a pretty good movie if there was an app to write movies using a vast template of clichés, stereotypes and characters and scenes you've seen a few thousand times before. It's not awful and its very well put together. Almost flawless. Technically it's like the robot version of a movie. And without irony, snarky, self criticism either. And to be fair it has some pretty funny small moments. And in a way it's refreshing to see a technically soulless perfect execution of an idea in an era of awful indie anarchist hipster junk still doing bad sound, shaky cam, weak lighting and an incoherent story.

But if you're looking for either something very good or new or interesting or even high drama, sitcom level high drama then no. You'll be disappointed. The machine isn't that sophisticated or adventurous for that. And that's a good thing because it will be entirely predictable, like comfort food.