Radio Lady Reviews: "Definitely, Maybe" (OPENS Thursday, February 14, 2008 -- Valentine's Day)

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Thu Feb-14-08 08:38 AM
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Radio Lady Reviews: "Definitely, Maybe" (OPENS Thursday, February 14, 2008 -- Valentine's Day)

Edited on Thu Feb-14-08 09:10 AM by Radio_Lady

DEFINITELY, MAYBE
by Ellen Kimball

The new movie “Definitely, Maybe” opens nationwide today. It’s an intricate romantic comedy – and totally appropriate for this February season of love.

Director and writer Adam Brooks puts together a film that tugged at my heartstrings. It could easily do the same for you, your friends, lovers, spouses – maybe even an ex-spouse or two. Ah, love IS grand, and complicated, too!

Let’s hear some applause for the folks at Universal Pictures. It was an absolutely brilliant decision to release the film on Valentine’s Day during the primary season of a presidential election year. How very appropriate!

“Definitely, Maybe” is an intriguing fictional love story that's been cleverly inserted into the REAL political events that actually happened in America more than a dozen years ago. The director weaves in visual snippets we’ve already seen on TV, which increases the film’s poignancy and relevance. It will help if you are old enough to remember this time period.

The story features actor Ryan Reynolds as Will Hayes, a thirty-something Manhattan father in the midst of a divorce. He has a ten-year-old daughter, Maya Hayes, played by the skilled young actress Abigail Breslin, who received an Oscar nomination for her work in “Little Miss Sunshine”. Maya is at that age when kids begin to realize that Mom and Dad had a full life before marriage. This sweet young daughter insists that Dad tell her absolutely everything about how her parents met and fell in love. The film is done with flashbacks, and updates between father and daughter as his bedtime story becomes a puzzling and intriguing game. The political backdrop and the personal stories are woven together very cleverly and the effect works completely.

Actresses Elizabeth Banks, Isla Fisher and Rachel Weisz provide the pizazz as the three young women who populate this sassy story. Look for the remarkable Oscar winner Kevin Kline as a dissolute author-professor and older lover to one of the women. Kline continues to perform so brilliantly in character roles with great depth. The movie was filmed in New York City, which really enhanced the experience for me. I have been married to two New Yorkers, and actually lived in Manhattan for seven years from 1962 to 1969.

I’m giving it a “B-plus” on Ellen’s Entertainment Report Card. I'll definitely see it again with my third husband -- or as he puts it, my "current" husband of 35 years. He was ill the day the movie screened for reviewers. Plus we had had a fight at the dentist's office in the morning. But it's Valentine's Day and we've made up.

Love's really like that for everybody, I think. Do you agree?

The film is rated PG-13 for sexual content, including some frank dialogue, language and characters who smoke cigarettes. Runtime on this movie is 105 minutes.

This is Ellen Kimball for Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Accessible Information Network.
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Ellen Kimball is a pioneer talk show host - one of the first women to host her own four-hour daily AM radio call-in talk shows in both Miami and Boston. Ellen and her husband Al are now retired in Oregon where they have resided since 1998. Ellen contributes a weekly interview program, as well as her reviews on film, books, and theater, to Portland's Accessible Information Network, which is heard locally in Oregon and southern Washington and on the Internet.