Perfect Opposites

I loved this movie! Usually these test screenings are painful for me because I am a critical person. This movie worked for me on so many levels-chiefly the casting was flawless and their performances hugely satisfying. What is most surprising is that the movie succeeds in creating that old fashioned romantic comedy where the leads are true 'movie stars'. You love them because they have charisma, screen presence and chemistry and you simply can't look away! In these movies, the supporting players are true character actors that, due to the generosity of the leads, steal every bit scene they're in. It's been years since a romantic comedy has had any success or appeal to me. Usually these are tortured films with post-Freudian/post-modern angst attempting to re-invent the genre by making the leads as unattractive and neurotic as filmmakers think audiences can relate to. "Love and Sex" is a case on point of the nadir post-whatever romantic comedy. This film stars the improbable coupling of the ex-bond girl/Woody Allen alum/model Famke Jansen struggling to be modern in NYC and having a warm and fuzzy time with Jon Favreau the once favorite anti-movie star. Or "Happy Accidents" the Marisa Tomei-Vincent D'onofrio romantic comedy which suffers from and even greater desperate need to attenuate the genre by making its lead a space alien without having watched the wonderful "Starman" with Jeff Bridges for pointers. These and others like them represent the soulless grasping of clueless filmmakers trying to re- invent the wheel only to end up with a sloppy, narcissistic acting exercises on tape.

It seems to me that these "quirky" indie romances have a chip on their shoulder; as if they had been backed up into an angry corner, screaming their head off. Their look and style is usually suffocating and claustrophobic. I found "Piece of my Heart" refreshing and familiar, the way old fashioned movies with their movie stars and predictable formulas always promised a good time, a true escape. At the screening there were a group of fourteen year old girls. The film had been an obvious success with them and someone commented that they were the true audience of this film. I disagree. I have sat through films designed for this demographic, replete with ribald fart jokes and enough stupidity and insincerity to last them through High School. " A Piece of my Heart" is too sincere and guileless too do that. It succeeds despite the obstacles of a jaded 'post-modern' audience because it truly has the elusive ingredient that love stories (no matter when) have always reached for-Chemistry!

And yet, as old fashioned as it seems it has such verve and modern flair. The characters are totally contemporary. The look is a fun kaleidoscope of LA living. The editing has all the wit and modern vernacular youth culture has come to expect and love. All that is no simple achievement in my estimation. What comes through is true movie magic!

this story which revolves around Martin Henderson and Piper Perabo's characters Julia and Drew is about two college students who fall in love. Right before graduation they fall helplessly in love and they decide to move to Hollywood to start Drew's career. While Julia is completely in love with Drew she begins to regret putting her life on hold for him. The story then centers around whether or not they should break up. Overall the film does have a predictable plot but Henderson and Perabo have great chemistry which makes the movie worth watching at least once. This straight to video romantic comedy is good to watch with you spouse or special someone but don't expect to watch a great romance classic.

this movie wasn't the greatest most spectacular movie I've ever seen, however it does have that certain hopeless romantic predictability one feels like watching sometimes. it's one of those movies u can sit and watch on a lazy Sunday morning when nothing else is on. overall, it was cute even though u know what's going to happen, but it's one of those movies u watch and think wow if only it was real life. the story was pretty much inevitable but it was cute, the clichés thrown in got a little much at some points, but they did have to do with the story so I guess they were okay. Overall Piper Perabo is a much better actress and doesn't need to do made for TV movie but if it's one of those days when u don't feel like getting out of your pajamas this movie is for u.

In "Perfect Opposites," Drew and Julia, two college grads from "a school in the Midwest," decide to head to L.A. to start life together as a committed couple (not much of a move, as it turns out, since the college scenes were actually filmed at USC). However, in no time at all, the pressures of trying to establish their careers, combined with Drew's innate fear of commitment, end up putting a serious strain on the relationship.

"Perfect Opposites" is a fairly conventional romantic comedy that does at least offer a few flashes of insight into the complexities of man/woman relationships, even though the motivations for some of the characters' actions are strangely arbitrary and inscrutable at times. Nevertheless, as the complications arise, we find ourselves identifying with the two main characters more than we expect to at the beginning of the story. Unfortunately, the film insists on parading a bunch of cutesy L.A. stereotypes before the camera, severely undercutting the sense of reality it establishes in the scenes between Julia and Drew. There is one very funny scene in which Drew's old college roommate lays out his theory about where men and women fit in the evolutionary scheme of things, but the film doesn't achieve that level of comic cleverness very often.

As Drew and Julia, Martin Henderson and Piper Perabo make an attractive, likable couple, and the secondary performers do what they can with the characters they've been handed.

"Perfect Opposites" is a hard film to call because it feels both artificial and realistic in roughly equal measure. It takes a slightly more mature view of the world than most films of its type, building to a final scene that is a tad more thoughtful than what we are accustomed to in a romantic comedy. For that reason alone it deserves some recognition.

Any movie that begins with a title in written like: "A film made by everyone who worked in it", is a movie that was realized with people having fun; people enjoying the term of "filmmaking". It shows in "Perfect Opposites" that everybody worked with happiness and dedication. It's a comedy, but it's well made, funny and good.

The story is told by Drew, played naturally and confidently by Martin Henderson. He wants the viewer to know what happen to him and a girl he is in love with. He places himself in Los Angeles about to get it on with her, but suddenly the movie stops. Drew has stopped it; to go back in time and tell us how both of them met (it has been done before, but it's constantly repeated here and it works every time)…Julia is the name of the girl.

There was a movie I saw a long time ago about some girls struggling for their life and trying to be independent, and one of them wanted to be a singer. It was called "Coyote Ugly", and I don't remember liking the movie very much, but the girl in the main role; a beautiful and talented actress called Piper Perabo who illuminated the screen and still does today, here as Julia.

Julia and Drew suffer every couple's problems, and the movie does a very good job putting them on screen. Drew's friend Danny (Jason Winer) has a theory about the monogamy of men: "They can't have sex with one woman only". And Drew starts to think about that and concludes that if he stays with Julia he'll have sex with only one woman in his life.

But he loves her, and although she loves him and it should be enough, we know that most of the time it's not. They become friends of an older couple (a null Jennifer Tilly and a wonderful Artie Lange) who gives advice to each of them when they go through rough times. It happens that we know what we want but we are not able to show it.

The movie is an example of the comedies with pleasure we should be getting every week in theaters. Pieces about people with feelings and aspirations…Like Drew, who works for Louis (an excellent Joe Pantoliano) and forgets about Julia. But we laugh then, because they are very similar and they find themselves because of it; and we smile when they kiss with passion.

Director Matt Cooper causes that effect on us, and he should be proud. Stewart Zully, who wrote the picture with Cooper, should be proud too. They do their best to skip the clichés of the genre, and they skip a lot of them. And the few they show are so in the tone of the film that they don't seem like clichés. They are connected to the characters and their forms of being, and we believe it.

Because in every romantic comedy, whether good or bad, the clichés are just clichés because they need to be in the film. Not here; this is a comedy at a different level, away from everything you've seen lately. Take my word.