{"id":244060,"date":"2010-12-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-13T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdnews.com\/movie-review-love-and-other-drugs\/"},"modified":"2010-12-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T08:00:00","slug":"movie-review-love-and-other-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/movie-review-love-and-other-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: ‘Love and Other Drugs’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Por Scott Marcas | Cr\u00edtico de cine SDUN<\/p>\n

Why ruin what has the potential of a powerhouse expose of the drug industry with a tragicomic disease-of-the-week subplot and a tragically unfunny Jack Black celebrity impersonator (Josh Gad) for comic relief?<\/p>\n

We meet the beguiling and sexually irrepressible Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) just moments before he loses his sales job at an electronics store for diddling a co-worker in the stock room. He has wealthy parents to fall back on (George Segal and Jill Clayburgh in her last role), but Jamie, unlike his slovenly brother\/loathsome comic relief Josh (Gad), is driven by power and success. After attending a seminar, Jamie scores a job as a drug rep for Pfizer. It\u2019s 1996: Psychotropic drugs are in, and a little blue pill is poised to give TV talk show hosts enough punch lines to last a lifetime.<\/p>\n

\"Movie<\/a>
Free spirits Maggie (Anne Hathaway) and Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal) are surprised to find themselves under the influence of the ultimate drug\u2014love\u2014in the emotional comedy 'Love and Other Drugs.'<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The always-welcome Oliver Platt plays Jamie\u2019s boss Bruce, a road weary salesman eager to land the Chicago territory in order to spend more time with his family. Bruce views his booming\u00a0new charge as a ticket home.<\/p>\n

This lively, insightful repartee between teacher and student is about as good as it gets. Enter Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a free spirited photographic artist who makes her living transporting seniors across the Canadian border to help save money on their prescription meds.<\/p>\n

How\u2019s this for a meet cute? Jamie masquerades as an intern for what turns out to be her breast exam. She later catches up with him in the parking lot and begins beating on him with her purse. Unless she had x-ray vision or was stalking her handsome prey, how did she know from a distance that his trunk was filled with samples and that he was a rep not a doc? Maggie also comes out swinging over their first cup of coffee. Jamie whips out the old \u201cyou have beautiful eyes\u201d come-on to which the unfazed Ms. Murdock bats her peepers and spits back, \u201cIs that the best you have?\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, yes. Did I mention that Maggie has stage one Parkinson\u2019s disease? Neither did the theatrical trailer. If anything, the preview did its best to cut around her illness in hopes of not sending out any lethal box office vibes. (The finished product more than makes up for it with an abundance of cutaways to Maggie\u2019s trembling hand.)<\/p>\n

Everything in the film is either suffocatingly adorable or pitched to network TV junkies. (Zwick\u2019s small screen ties, he acted as executive producer on \u201cThirtysomething\u201d and \u201cMy So-Called Life,\u201d are apparent.) Jamie covertly replaces doctors\u2019 samples of Prozac with Pfizer\u2019s Zoloft and trashes the competitors\u2019 drugs in a local dumpster much to the delight of a homeless guy. After three or four visit\u2019s the dude shows up sporting a fresh haircut and informs Jamie that he has a job interview.<\/p>\n

Mercifully it\u2019s not \u201cLove Story,\u201d but by the same token it\u2019s not really a love story. There\u2019s plenty of steamy sex on display, but Parkinson\u2019s prohibits Maggie from making a commitment and Jamie is your basic fatuous pretty boy suddenly smitten by a beautiful woman simply because she was the one to put the brakes on their relationship. This is one film I\u2019d liked to have judged by its trailer.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Scott Marks | SDUN Film Critic Why ruin what has the potential of a powerhouse expose of the drug industry with a tragicomic disease-of-the-week subplot and a tragically unfunny Jack Black celebrity impersonator (Josh Gad) for comic relief? We meet the beguiling and sexually irrepressible Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) just moments before he loses […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1292,"featured_media":244061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"Movie Review: 'Love and Other Drugs'","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}