Your Love Is a Drug

First things first, since I know what is most important to everyone. Jake Gylenhaal is naked in this movie. A lot. Even a brief full-frontal glimpse. He has a fine specimen of a body, if a bit a little too over-worked on for my taste, but still - only a fool would push him out of bed. And he is in bed a lot in here, this way and that way, that angle and another one. Amidst all that flesh, though, I had a realization: he isn't as good an actor as I thought he would be. Maybe because I expect too much from him. In LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS, he is given such a multi-faceted role, yet in the words of Dorothy Parker, he "runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." You know what gave him away? Anne Hathaway. She has truly become one of the best younger actresses working today. She brings a welcome effervescence to a role which is basically one of those heroine-in-medical-predicament types that Bette Davis used to play. You never truly feel sorry for her, yet you undoubtedly feel her pain. Maybe, i the end, she was just too good a match for him. On a better movie, it wouldn't have mattered. But this one is flawed, so it stood out like a green thumb.

The movie is four movies in one, and director Ed Zwick could only be given an A for Effort. Make that a B+. He wants to make an adult romantic comedy, a la "Love Story" perhaps, but he peppers it with imbecile boner jokes, and a juvenile sub-plot straight our of a Judd Apatow movie. The other major storyline, a satire of the pharmaceutical industry seems to be fighting with the tome of his romantic angle. Whenever the movie went there, it get interminably boring. Half the movie is good enough, the other half was a paint to sit through. Even the aforementioned naked bodies of Anne and Jake couldn't keep me awake. 

Jake and Anne have pretty electric chemistry, and they try their damnedest to give the movie more weight. I especially liked the last part of the movie, when it got "serious." Love is a drug, for sure: it cures you of your ailments, yet at the same time it could be the one most debilitating thing you could give yourself.