The Five Year Engagement Movie Review

Posted by Charmaine Blake on May 2nd, 2012 in Romantic Comedy | 0 comments

The Five Year Engagement Movie Review

The Five Year Engagement is a romantic comedy starring Emily Blunt and Jason Segel. The two couple has been engage but it seems that going through the actual wedding continues to be delayed over the years. The Five Year Engagement hit theaters last April 27th 2012 and it was able to garner great ratings from critics all over the country. Let’s take at a movie review provided by Richard Brody on this new movie “The Five Year Engagement”

“The Five Year Engagement: A Modern Romantic Comedy

Jason Segel has the wary, searching look in his eyes of a person who has known humiliation; the nervous, wide-eyed gaze seems to worry, “what’s next?” Though he’s tall and muscular, he has soft and saggy flesh that invites derision. The scintillating, psychologically reverberant result is his bent for mortification, a cinematic self-scourging through exposure—facing embarrassment through em-bare-assment. His onscreen notion of love (romantic love, and, by extension, the love of viewers) entails pain and punishment; he becomes the joke of his own butt. The submissive side of male romance has always been a part of Judd Apatow’s moral universe, and Segel, who has risen to stardom in its compass, takes that idea to a poignantly personal extreme with his performance in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he wrote, and, now, in “The Five-Year Engagement,” which opens today, and which he co-wrote with the director, Nicholas Stoller.

The subject of the film is couplehood, compromise, and power. The film’s very definition of love is what you can bear to be with someone; and its vision of equality in a relationship is a succession of imbalances that ultimately even out. It’s got a Hawksian symbolic castration like the one in “The Big Sky” (one of the great Westerns, not on DVD), a slapstick-style smearing that brings to mind I don’t even want to say (but you get the idea), and surprising gender ambiguities and reversals. It’s also got a fascinating day/night dynamic (the man is a chef and the woman is a student—he works nights, she doesn’t) that calls to mind another tension, between entertainment people and office people (and the movie makes some surprising suggestions regarding how to resolve it). It’s also about secrets and lies—though Segel offers a sort of prefeminist, garlicky wisdom, in the vein of Apatow’s, regarding the mysterious and irrational bond of spontaneous intimacy that a lasting love is based on. And he doubles it with a modern, equitable ethic of honesty and psychological, rational reconciliation. Which is a long way of saying briefly that “The Five-Year Engagement” is an exemplary modern romantic comedy, personal and symbolic, goofy and substantial, tightly imagined yet loosely strung, wise in bewilderment. It opens today and it really should be seen (what’s more, Segel’s chemistry with Emily Blunt has the ring of a pure metal).

Then there’s Richard Linklater’s “Bernie,” which I wrote about here yesterday, and where the wrinkled skin of Shirley MacLaine and the attention to dead flesh of the title character, a funeral director, give the action and the story (two different things) a resonant carnal substrate.”

Read the rest of the article at the New Yorker

Browse through the latest movies, pictures, trailers, videos and recent movie reviews right here at newmovielaunches.com

Charmaine Blake loves movies, musical theater listening to music and taking pictures of anything that she finds interesting. She is a voracious reader and writer, and enjoys her time writing for New Movie Launches. Charmaine loves spending time with her pets and currently has a Siberian Husky, a toy poodle and a cat.