BLU RAY REVIEW: SOMETHING BORROWED

posted on
09.12.2012

BUY FROM AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
MSRP $19.98
RATED PG-13
STUDIO Warner Bros.
RUNNING TIME 112 Mins.
SPECIAL FEATURES

Something…Old?
On Location Tours with Emily Giffin
Marcus’s Guide to the Ladies
What is “Something Borrowed?”
Left off the Guest List: Additional Scenes, Gag Reel

The Pitch

Rachel is turning 30 and is still unmarried. After her best friend Darcy throws her a surprise birthday party, Rachel accidentally meetcutes back into the bed of Darcy’s fianceé/Rachel’s college friend Dex. Rachel is fraught with guilt, with no one to turn to except her best friend Ethan. Soon, things with Dex evolve into something more, throwing everything into question for everyone involved. Is it true love or just pre-wedding jitters?

The Humans

Ginnifer Goodwin, Kate Hudson, Colin Egglesfield, John Krasinski. Steve Howey, and Victoria from How I Met Your Mother

The Nutshell

“Man, we need a lot more rom coms about affluent white late 20-somethings avoiding decision making when it comes to romance. Should it be in New York or LA this time, though?”

The Lowdown

Snarky nutshells aside, I love bad rom coms. It’s a crime, going all the way back to Degrassi (the newest one, sadly) and allowing my heart to rise every time a romance blossoms. Do I go out of my way to find them? No, not particularly. However, if it’s an option between a cheesy rom-com or, I don’t know…jogging, I’m going to choose the cheesy rom-com. And genuinely like it. Honest.

The film was nice enough, but the “2 Girls, One Cone” sequence made me have strange feelings.

So with Something Borrowed, we have pretty white people having problems. They’re never going to face one iota of serious hardship in this movie. Never will they worry about paying bills or having to choose work over family because of the lack of paycheck. Something Borrowed isn’t an issue movie. Of course, Kate Hudson typically doesn’t do issue movies. That should’ve been your first clue as to how light and fluffy this film is.

For being a light and fluffy film with no ethnic diversity, I was not bored by it. I was pretty entertained. This movie is designed to be a distraction, hence the clean, polished look on everything. There are some quite lovely images featured within. Potentially far better than this film deserves. Like this one:

My favorite part was when they were pretty and white.

An absolutely breath taking image for two pretty people fighting to figure out if they’re in love or not. And, for a light and fluffy film, there is a significant amount of care paid to the narrative. Maybe it’s just my predilection for soap opera type events unfolding, but the story here is just meaty enough to engage the heart without engaging the mind. For starters, Rachel is an inherently likeable character and you absolutely get why she and Dex would get together in the first place. Not only that, but that they belong together. It makes sense. You also get a legitimate sense of why Dex and Darcy would be together and why they don’t belong together. The plotting is just dense enough and the characters just smart enough to not be completely void of intelligence. Again, perhaps I’m just looking at it through a Guiding Light sheen of haze, but while the tension and conflicts are cliché, the execution is just nice enough to forgive.

And the film is cliché, no doubt. We have this:

Hip band to make the film seem relevant.

And this:

Unnecessary choreographed dance sequence so as to signify bonding.

And this:

That part of the movie where the protagonist looks at a thing sadly against a wall/cabinet.

All requisites for any romantic comedy are here. Throw Kate Hudson in there and you have a rote formula that performs its job to a T. You already know if you’re going to watch this and you know if you’re not. Nothing I can say is going to convince you otherwise.

The most engaging performance here, surprisingly, is John Krasinski as best friend Ethan. I say surprisingly not because he has to overcome a well of talent, but he’s genuinely entertaining here. Platonic male-female relationships are always incredibly fascinating here (and it threatens to devolve, which sucks, but it rectifies itself). Krasinski is really slumming it, packing an immense amount of Jim Halpert-type charm in just his facial expressions. It’s unfortunate that he is type cast as a charming guy. While there are much worse things to be type cast as (David Hasselhoff as…himself?), his performance here is one of the reasons I want to see him anchor something with some meat. Some of the best laughs and the most touching moments are just from Krasinski emoting in a manner far different than his TV counterpart.

Not to say that the rest of the acting wasn’t fine. Again, Something Borrowed is an adequate movie. A fine movie. If you are doing laundry two years from now and happen to have this movie on TBS and it’s in the background, there are a lot worse channels you could change it to. It’s diversion, it’s fluff, and completely non-threatening. Unless you’re threatened by John Krasinski’s charm. In which case, stay far away.

He knows filming is almost done. “Just grit your teeth and bare it,” he says.

The Package

For a pleasantly mediocre movie, we get less than pleasant special features totalling about 30 minutes and only on Blu-Ray. In “Something…Old?,” we get the cast waxing rhapsodic about being in their 30s and what it means to them. “On Location Tours with Emily Giffin” is a fluff piece about the author apparently being really excellent to her fans, but mainly just comes off as a PR piece. “Marcus’s Guide to the Ladies” takes the largely unfunny character from the film and stretches him out to six very unfunny minutes. “What is ‘Something Borrowed’?” is the cast answering the custom and what it means to them. Capping it off are some deleted scenes and a gag reel, both adding nothing. They’re all fluffy special features for a fluffy movie.