Why I Hadn't Seen It: Heartbreak Kid's hook is it's a modern-day Middlemarch [1], taking the conventional happy-ending as only the starting point to relationship troubles. The thing is, I never finished Middlemarch.Why I Just Did: Starting this week, Michelle Monaghan is in Made of Honor as Hannah, which was just alliterative enough to jog my memory.
Why I'm Glad I Did: Ben & Jerry Stiller[2] are adorable together, and Rob Corddry is funny in that "Ha, and he wanted to leave 'The Daily Show'!" sort of way. The seemingly inexorable happy ending to the story is exorabled [sic], if only slightly.
Why I Wish I Hadn't: Even accepting that Eddie's new bride Lila is somehow unfit for marriage, still-even accepting Eddie and random co-vacationer Miranda are completely compatible, even-even accepting that Eddie's premeditated equivocation is excusable to extricate himself from this mess, this movie still has one inexcusable flaw:
It cheats.
For the film's last half-hour, the script keeps skipping over important events by having a character walk up and say, "Boy, these last X weeks have sure moved the plot along." There are successive 2, 24, and 72-week jumps achieved this way. It's like watching Lost in 8:15, but 300% longer and one-third as coherent.
[1] The real reason I'm writing this entry is to proudly note that nobody's made this connection before, if only because George Eliot doesn't really resonate with readers like she used to. Maybe if I looked at reviews from 1973, when the original came out?
[2] Now that joke is darn near 10 years old.
