À la folie

This film was beautiful. I saw it at the Sundance Film Festival and fell in love with it Like Crazy. Everything from the acting, to the cinematography, to the story line was amazing. And to think it was shot on the Canon 7D is incredible. I saw 14 films at Sundance and this was my favorite film in the festival. During the Q&A after the film the director made it clear that this film is about the true story of his own relationship with a girl. I would recommend this film to people who have experienced a long distant relationship and to teenage/young adult audiences. This film is the Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Competition Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. I think it deserved this prize. This film made me feel all sorts of different emotions. This film really is a beautiful story and I am excited to see it coming out in theaters.

"I thought I understood it. But I didn't. I knew the smudgeness of it. The eagerness of it. The Idea of it. Of you and me." Anna (Felicity Jones)

Like Crazy is about the craziness of love without a Hollywood spin but with a conventional story that tells it like love is: unadorned, raw, a puzzle, and a disappointment. Director Drake Doremus handed the outline to actors Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin and the rest was an organic script, albeit weaker than ones Brit director Mike Leigh develops with his cast.

Although the dialogue is spare and prosaic, the realism is spot on as the young couple struggles most of all with long distance. She is on visa from the UK to study in LA. He meets her at college; she overstays her visa time and is banned from returning to the US until a lengthy process of appeal is followed.

Those who have struggled with that distance demon know how right the artists get the frustrations and changes that plague those who challenge cupid across the pond over too long a time.

Although many traditional moviegoers will not like the ending, they can be comforted that it is, alas, only too true. If nothing else, Like Crazy is a textbook study of long distance love that should be a caution before young lovers attempt the navigation.

Not fair to put an audience through all that and then muddy the ending. Not fair to the characters. This film deserved a strong ending and so did the characters. Extremely lazy and disappointing.

Just saw it at the Sundance Film Festival here in Park City, Utah.'Like Crazy' is a love story about the ups and the downs, the euphoria, the heartache, and the sacrifices. For those who don't know the plot, basically a British student, Anna, falls for Jacob, an American student. They fall for each other right away, and spend the summer together. However, she violates the stay of her student visa, and when she tries to return to L.A., she is denied. Thus, our two lovers are separated by distance and multiple levels of bureaucracy that prove to be most unfair. Can they make it work, and should they? Some have compared it to '500 Days of Summer,' and there are a few similarities. The major difference is the lack of any unique narrative devices and that it is, in fact, a love story. First and foremost, let me say that Felicity Jones as Anna is a revelation. She owns the screen and was utterly charming and devastatingly beautiful. There's a scene in the first 10 minutes after they spend their first evening together, and they sit on her bed, and a sense of tension but young awkwardness that fills the room. When the conversation falters out, she gives him a look that was filled with such delicate longing; fueled by the power of young love and the possibilities before them. It was in this moment that Anna, and Felicity, won me over. The chemistry between her and her co-star Anton was realistic and powerful. Much of the film was improvised; the director said he would often leave the camera rolling for twenty to thirty minutes at a time just to capture them together. It shows. I felt myself hoping and wishing for them to work it all out, to end up together.

The music is fantastic. It provides the heartbeat to the film and is a wonderful compliment. It's well edited - the film ultimately takes place over what seems to be a couple of years. Unlike early versions of the film, title cards have been removed and a series of jump cuts progresses the time. You have to pay close attention at times to have a firm grasp on the passage of time. There are moments when they are happy and together that are so iconic. Walking the streets of London, at times they looked like the cover of a Bob Dylan cover. Quick cuts of them together whether in LA or London are quite beautiful.

This film was obviously made based on real experiences, and the filmmakers admitted that it was the combination of many of their experiences. It's a realistic film. Things aren't easy. You will smile and laugh and other times feel just as much despair as our characters. There are no easy answers in this film, and your ultimate interpretation and perhaps enjoyment of the film depends on what you bring to the table, and your feelings on love, and just how much you believe in it. This film should make Felicity Jones a star in the way that 'An Education' benefited Carey Mulligan.

This is a love story that was quite interesting to me, because the parts that didn't work were the parts dealing with the actual love. Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin were both excellent on their own, burning with pain while trying to move on with their life and just exist with this hole inside of them. However it was when they were together that the film lost it's appeal for me. I couldn't feel any chemistry between them, so I had no stake in a large majority of it because I didn't understand why they wanted to be together. Even with their first meeting they seemed so dour together, I never once felt any genuine love there.

The conversations between them were good and honest, albeit typical, and the fact that they improvised a lot of their dialogue makes it more impressive. Unfortunately the premise hinges on an event that I couldn't realistically buy for a second so any sadness the characters felt didn't have enough of an impact on me because there was always this looming anger towards them for being so dumb and getting themselves in this situation. The ending is a smart move, but it's also a pretty straight Graduate rip-off, so I can't commend it too much.

I'm harping a lot on the things that I didn't like about the film, but I think ultimately there were more positives than negatives for me. The actors really shined individually, even if they didn't sell the core relationship for me, and quite a few of their separate scenes gave me an emotional reaction, albeit not to the extreme that they should have hit me. So I'm pretty lukewarm on it overall, but I at least admired the acting.