OTBKB film critic Pops Corn begins the new year with a review of the Meryl Street/Alec Baldwin "comedy" It's Complicated. Read Pops' best of the decade and best of 2009 columns. His unusual lists provide great suggestions for your Netflix queue.

The storyline of a woman who falls back into an affair with her re-married ex-husband should provide plenty of comedic fodder.  The middle-aged love affair should have been refreshingly adult and the love triangle cast of Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin is irresistible. But It’s Complicated, the new movie from writer-director Nancy Meyers, is rarely funny, often childish and consistently sour with nearly every character being unlikeable.  On the surface, there’s really nothing to like.  So if you, like me, ignore the comments of critics and friends and decide to see it yourself, here’s a guidebook of subtext to ward against brain rot or thinking of your shopping list. 

1.    Characters You Can’t Like – Meyers’ chief concern seems to be to show her characters flaws and neuroses.  This may seem like a bold choice to make a picture about unlikeable people, but truthfully it seems that Meyers just went overboard in demonstrating the flaws and neuroses of the film’s inhabitants.  Based on the wall-to-wall music seemingly programmed by a Clear Channel robot, it’s obvious that the film is simultaneously trying to pander to its audience, so why is every character worse than the next?
2.    Women Don’t Know Their Own Bodies –One comedic conversation in which a gaggle of middle-aged women demonstrate their lack of female anatomy knowledge may send feminists and post-feminists running from the theater.
3.    Millenials Can’t Grow Up – The adult-age children of the Baldwin and Streep characters are unable to comprehend adult emotions (hey, it’s complicated).  Only John Krasinski, as the beau of one of the daughters possesses the emotional depth to comprehend the situation, clearly indicating that either divorce is impossibly hard on kids or that they were raised in a home where emotions are not to be explored.  In one disturbing scene the kids are so freaked at their parents’ relationship complexity that all three of them sleep in the same bed.