Product: Someone Like You [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 3.0
Sweet romantic comedy
Granted, the novel upon which this romantic comedy is based (Animal Husbandry) is much more intricate and intelligent then what appears on screen here, but for the casual viewer on a rainy night it's a satisfying and perky little movie that hits all the right buttons and then sends you home feeling cozy. Ashley Judd plays an assistant to a go-getter television host (Barkin) who falls in love with a new co-worker (Greg Kinnear) and embarks upon the best relationship of her life with him. After selling her apartment to move in with him, she discovers that it's over between them and the only place she can find to live on such short notice is rooming with her oversexed, bad attitude work colleague (Hugh Jackman), a guy who goes from one girl to the other in an effort to prove that the true love he once had with his girlfriend doesn't exist. While moping around in her misery, our heroine stumbles upon a theory that equates men and their need to swap partners with research done on bulls who refuse to have sex with the same cow twice. She takes off on this and decides it's worth writing about, but is it really true? Or is she just compensating for her own personal feelings of unworthiness? Judd's character will come off as a dipstick to some because the emphasis on her character is that of someone who deals with the sadness of breakups in a very self-destructive way. Some have called her character idiotic and offensive; I just thought that the fact she reminded me of myself making the same mistakes in the same situation made it hard to watch her without wincing (which is probably why it would be easier to call her idiotic and offensive). What I also find odd is how director Tony Goldwyn seems to want to suppress his characters' quirkiness; coming from the guy who directed A Walk on the Moon, a film that was about people who stuck out from the enforced norms of their times, this seems rather a cop-out way of telling a film's story. Other than that, the film's ending is too much-too soon, but throughout the bulk of its running time Someone Like You is a free-flowing film with much to recommend it. Marisa Tomei is excellent as Judd's chatty best friend, Barkin is surprisingly not as her misguided boss and look for a cameo by Judd's mother Naomi as her makeup lady.