Rent This: Romantic Comedies

 The Five Year Engagement

If you like: Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall or 40 Year Old Virgin

This movie was both hilarious and sweet, which is what I expect from Jason Segal. Jason Segal and Emily Blunt are a San Francisco couple (he’s a chef and she is a Psych Post-Doc) who get engaged after a year of dating and decide to put their wedding on hold when she is offered a job in Michigan. Obstacles keep them from getting around to the wedding. It definitely has some moments of boy, gross out humor that you expect from this crowd but it is a great meditation on what makes a successful relationship and the compromises that are required. There are so many hilarious people in this movie (Kevin Hart, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pratt, Rhys Ifans, just for starters), there plenty of spontaneous giggles and guffaws. I definitely think this will go into my “if it’s on cable I will stop what I am doing to watch this” rotation.

Think Like A Man

If you like: He’s Just Not That Into You

This movie offers some relatively well traveled relationship advice through a series of vignettes of couples in different types of relationships. There is the wealthy woman with the blue collar guy, the couple that’s been together for so long that it’s unclear what they have in common anymore, a momma’s boy with a single mom, a player who falls hard for a girl who is trying to stop sleeping with men before they respect her and a divorced guy telling all of them to stay away from marriage. It’s all very cliché but somehow still brought me a lot on joy, especially when quoting from the movie to my friends over dinner. 

This Means War

If you like: Pretty much any Reese Witherspoon movie

Reese Witherspoon plays a product tester who decides to try dating two men (Tom Hardy and Chris Pine) at once. Turns out they are both spies who work for the same government spy agency and turn their resources towards keeping each other from winning the girl. Chelsea Handler plays her married friend with some interesting advice. It was entertaining and did the job of a romantic comedy but wouldn’t be something I would return to. And that’s without even spending too   much time contemplating how weird it is to set up a romantic comedy where government resources are used to monitor someone’s date.