Doesn't that feel good.

Add "romance" to your next grocery list.

According to a map of the most common Craigslist missed connection locations, most Americans are looking for love while running errands.

For Psychology Today, Dorothy Gambrell mapped out the most common missed connection locations by state. Her study, which was based on each state's most recent 100 postings, reveals an interesting glimpse into the psyche of stranger love.

Some results were unsurprising. New Yorkers, for example, tend to post after a subway sighting.

In California, land of pumping iron and fro-yo, most missed connections occurred at 24 Hour Fitness.

Other locations were just plain weird.

In fifteen states, including Ohio, Florida and Texas, a mega-market stocks the most romance-seekers. Yes, Walmart is the land of low prices and high libidos. Baby's got rollback.

Oklahoma wins the award for least creepy and most romantic—the majority of postings involved state fair rendezvous. What could be more amorous than fried butter on a stick and Tilt-a-Whirls amplified by land-locked isolation?

In Rhode Island, most missed connections occurred on parking lots. Because nothing says sexy like "I sat on the curb and watched you get into your car last night."

And Indiana, the most frequent postings occurred "at home." Wait, at home? What does that mean? "I watched you through your window?" or worse, "I am a member of your family?"

There's hope for all you hopeless romantics out there —ditch the dive bar and look no further than aisle 14.

Ivanir, Hoffman, Keener and Walken in A Late Quartet.

In A Late Quartet, a somber, moody and uneven film about chamber music and the dedicated professional musicians who devote their lives to playing it, Christopher Walken takes some getting used to as a renowned cellist with Parkinson’s disease who is forced begrudgingly to end his career as leader of one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets. A far cry from the lurid and sloppy addicts, psychopaths and serial killers he usually plays as though walking in his sleep, it’s not the kind of role I would personally think of as perfect casting for him. Also, the movie is too slow, highbrow and sophisticated to draw the youth market that loves to see Mr. Walken play violent and stoned in trash like Seven Psychopaths. But playing the cello is such a pleasant change of pace that he eventually grows on you, scene by scene, proving for the first time since his role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled father 10 years ago in Catch Me If You Can, that he really can act. He—along with the rest of the elegant cast—keeps A Late Quartet in tune when it threatens to go flat. 

The Fugue, a famous ensemble much like the Guarneri Quartet, has been filling concert halls for 25 years. It consists of cellist-concertmaster Peter Mitchell (Mr. Walken), first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Robert’s wife, Juliette (Catherine Keener), on viola. As the new season begins, they are rehearsing all seven movements of the intricate Beethoven String Quartet, Opus 13. As soon as you realize the film runs the length of most chamber music concerts, you might panic at the thought of being forced to sit through the whole thing. Not to worry. Director Yaron Zilberman soon makes it clear that he is more interested in the emotional upheavals in the lives of the four high-strung musicians than he is in the music they play. It takes a long time to get around to the program they’re rehearsing, and by then you might wish they had started earlier. As soon as Peter’s crippling disease is diagnosed, the theme becomes “Move Over, Beethoven.”

You know it’s coming when Mr. Walken starts stretching his fingers to strengthen the grip on his bow. Clearly his reflexes and coordination are failing. The others, who have been with him for a quarter of a century, look the other way. But this is a pragmatic perfectionist. He starts to plan his farewell concert and seek a replacement. Robert, the second violinist, takes this inopportune time to announce his long-festering resentment of Daniel, the first violinist, who refuses to alternate solos.

The tension grows, opening a floodgate when Peter announces his plan to hire Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), who is a talented and promising cellist on her way to stardom, to replace him. Further complicating the volatility of an already complex situation is the fact that without Robert and Juliette’s knowledge, Alexandra, who feels neglected and ignored by her parents, is sleeping with the sensitive and petulant Daniel, her coach, who years earlier had an affair with Juliette, now causing a rift between mother and daughter. Worse still, Juliette, who never fully committed to her husband, catches Robert working out his frustrations in bed with another woman, and their marriage collapses. What began as an intelligent film about real music (instead of the junk that poisons contemporary rock soundtracks) loses its way and collapses under the weight of a shameless soap opera. With so much sturm und drang,it’s a miracle these musicians ever find the time to play a simple adagio.

Everyone ends up emotionally shredded, with the future of the Fugue Quartet endangered. Like all passionate artists, however, they come to their senses in time to realize that craft comes first and personal lives are a lower priority, and in the final minutes, we at last get around to the Beethoven. The movie sometimes gets stuck in its own awkward groove like a needle on a warped phonograph, but it has its moments. The script, co-written by the director Mr. Zilberman and Seth Grossman, contains technical information about how to construct, polish and cherish a good violin, and the four actors make you believe they actually know how to play their instruments. They skillfully demonstrate how each member of the quartet brings to the table one of the four legs that hold it upright: Mr. Ivanir has enough precision and driving perfectionism for four, Mr. Hoffman adds color and texture, Ms. Keener provides the mournful passion, and Mr. Walken is the patriarch of the group, with the heart, soul and discipline to keep the music balanced. The pileup of romantic entanglements and competitive egos gets in the way of the music, but the soundtrack is glorious, even if it is truncated. The final concert was filmed on the actual stage at the Metroplitan Museum, where the Guarneri Quartet gave its final performance after 45 years together. In A Late Quartet, life imitates art in more ways than one.

rreed@observer.com

A LATE QUARTET

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener

2.5/4

Thirlby in Nobody Walks.

The last film by novice indie director Ry Russo-Young was an empty bottle called You Won’t Miss Me, about an alienated 23-year-old misfit just released from a psychiatric hospital. Her new film, Nobody Walks, is an empty bottle about an alienated 23-year-old misfit from New York who is making a video about insects for her art thesis. She seems to have a thing for 23-year-old misfits. Too bad she can’t find a way to make a movie about them that will keep anyone awake. Co-written by Lena Dunham, whose TV sitcom Girls is another guaranteed cure for insomnia, Nobody Walks is 82 minutes long—and I was snoozing 30 minutes in. This is not good for anyone anxious to build a reputation or entertain an audience. 

In this meandering take on the wasted lives of dull people on the fringe of the movie industry, set in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, a shrink named Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt) lives with her two children by a former marriage and her current husband Peter (John Krasinski, from the TV sitcom The Office), an audio editor who synchs sound effects to silent films. Peter’s career must be a flop, because, for some reason that is never made clear, he takes on a boyish art student named Martine (Olivia Thirlby), agreeing to provide the soundtrack for her short experimental video, and in the bargain (to his wife’s amazement) invites the cute East Coast visitor to be a houseguest. (She’s the only person in Los Angeles who can’t drive, which explains the title of the film.) Peter’s assistant is a young hunk named David (Rhys Wakefield). Julie’s daughter Kolt (India Ennenga) is in love with David, but he falls fast for Martine. So does Peter. While searching for the right noises ants make when they’re moving bread crumbs and making love, Martine seduces Peter. Watching the bugs in Martine’s film fornicate, Peter gets hot (duh!) and starts humping Martine on his editing board. Frustrated, Julie turns to one of her screwy patients (Justin Kirk) for sex. Sixteen-year-old Kolt starts experimenting too, with her Italian tutor and a doofus schoolmate. In no time, a gamine interloper throws a boring family out of whack, but there’s no mourning their loss, because they’re such one-dimensional cardboard clichés to start with, and their sell-by dates have already passed. By the time they throw Martine out and she heads back to Brooklyn, everyone is miserable. Their house, by the way, is terrific—a lot of glass looking down on the lights of L.A., which presents a Windex nightmare.

With her boyish Buster Brown haircut and eyes big and dark as black olives, Olivia Thirlby looks like a cross between Anne Hathaway and the young, wide-eyed and innocent Liza Minnelli when she was first starting out in The Sterile Cuckoo. But, although men find her irresistible, she’s about as naive as a scorpion and sexy as a 10-year-old grocery bagger at Grand Union. The actors are all completely wasted in this dumb travesty of fumbling, unfocused, oversexed numbskulls who work in the movie business. Everyone connected with Nobody Walks should have done just that—early and quickly.

rreed@observer.com

NOBODY WALKS

Running Time 82 minutes

Written by Lena Dunham and Ry Russo-Young

Directed by Ry Russo-Young

Starring Olivia Thirlby, John Krasinski and Jane Levy

1/4

Lee Jones and Streep in Hope Springs. (Columbia Pictures)

In an age of idiotic garbage overpopulated with alternate realities and toxic avengers in Halloween costumes, I cannot tell you how touching, restorative and vitamin-enriching it is to see a gentle, tender and intelligent film with A-list stars playing real people dealing with real problems in the everyday world. Instead of stupid gags and punchlines, Hope Springs is a character study in elegiac pastels about how people love, then change and eventually drift away from each other—and the daunting energy it takes for them to get their old mojo back while the apple still bites. Separately, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones are national treasures, but together they are simultaneously spectacular and intimately awe-inspiring. I have never loved either one more.

They play Kay and Arnold, a middle-class couple from Omaha, wed for 31 years in a union once ignited with spark plugs, now reduced through the curdled habit of uninspired routine to a stale marriage that needs a new transmission. Their two kids are grown and independent; they sleep in different rooms, Arnold spends so much time on the golf course and watching TV sports replays that Kay sighs, “It’s like being married to ESPN.” Her life makes a two-hour bonus episode of Desperate Housewives look like 10 minutes of aerobics. Hard work in the kitchen produces meals consumed quietly by Arnold with nothing more than a grunt before he retires to the den to watch TV before bed. If she dons a frilly nightgown and slips seductively into his bedroom aroused with high expectations, he looks up from his golf magazine and asks “What?” They haven’t had sex since Dr. Phil was born. The big excitement is a subscription to one of those new digital cable deals with all of those extra channels and still nothing worth watching. After three decades of boredom, Kay is, to put it mildly, underappreciated—like Meryl Streep without a fake nose or a foreign accent.

“You marry who you marry—you are who you are—it doesn’t change,” says her friend (Jean Smart) but Kay is tired of constant rejection and terminal ennui. One day at the mall, she dons her reading glasses, browses the “How To” shelves at Barnes and Noble, and buys a book called You Can Have the Marriage You Want, by a relationship expert named Dr. Bernard Feld, who runs a camp for intensive couples counseling in Hope Springs, Maine. Optimistic, she withdraws money from her personal savings, plunks down $4,000 on the Internet, and signs up for a week of therapy. Arnold is so appalled by the cost that he refuses to go, but when the morning of departure arrives and he watches her heading for the airport with her suitcase packed, he relents and grudgingly follows. The rest of the movie shows, carefully and without contrivance, what happens when two decent people risk humiliation and pain to explore their inner feelings long enough to redeem what they’ve sacrificed through age and tedium. She wants to restore lost intimacy to her marriage. He just wants to get his money back and go home. Charm eludes him. Challenged and annoyed by even the price of tuna in a local homespun country café, Arnold is the kind of curmudgeon who has seen entirely too many Woody Allen movies, but as the memories come out in his counseling sessions, his sweetness emerges. (When they fell in love in college, he hid her engagement ring in a cinnamon bun.) Learning to touch again, his awkwardness is slow and tender-hearted and her joy is fragile but palpable.

The pristine beauty and pastoral ambience of the charming coastal Maine village of Hope Springs (played by the whitewashed colonialism of Stonington, Conn.) is a cure for anything that ails you, and by the time Kay and Arnold reach the next step in their homework assignments—to explore their sexual history—the setting has become a relaxing contrast to the embarrassing facts they uncover about orgasms, fantasies and erectile dysfunction. “I was never comfortable with oral sex,” Kay tells Dr. Feld (Steve Carell, underplaying with moderation and compassion). “With giving or receiving?” he counters. The expression on Meryl Streep’s face when she looks astounded and asks, “Huh?” has got to be seen to be enjoyed to the max. Trying at last to revive the horny days of youth, Arnold orchestrates an evening in an elegant colonial inn with champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries that turns poignant when lovemaking wears thin, like an old quilt. Nothing is hackneyed and everything is unpredictable in the assured direction by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and the intelligent screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, making her feature film debut after writing and producing such above-average TV shows as Game of Thrones and Everwood. The camerawork is clean and captivating without a lot of visual wows, allowing the actors plenty of room to relate in a completely natural style.

They know what they’re doing, but there is no question Hope Springs would not be the revelation it is without two stars of impeccable magnitude. Meryl Streep is her usual reliable self—alert, committed, analytical, making every minute count. But it is really Tommy Lee Jones who surprises and thrills, matching his co-star moment by moment, scene by scene. I’ve never seen him so truly involved. Even in the gruff cactus and sage sagas set in his native Texas, he is never less than mesmerizing. But he seems genuinely inspired partnering an artist with real craft. With exasperated groans, hunched shoulders and graying hair, his Arnold is impatient and irritating, but sensitive and manly, with a total grasp of the nuances of comedy. Amazingly, he looks furtively through the corners of his eyes with a poker face, like a kid caught with his finger in the cherry pie before it reaches the table, and I dare you not to laugh out loud. He hasn’t had a role like this in years, and he is thoroughly flawless.

Without giving anything away, Hope Springs ends with a coda that arrives too abruptly and resolves its loose ends a bit too neatly, but that doesn’t dilute the impact. I think everything about the movie is too subtle and real to appeal to the Batman demographic, but for mature audiences who have forgotten how to smile, it takes up where The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel left off.

rreed@observer.com

HOPE SPRINGS

Running Time 100 minutes

Written by Vanessa Taylor

Directed by David Frankel

Starring Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carell

3.5/4

Kazan and Dano in Ruby Sparks.

If you’re an actor looking for work, it helps to have a girlfriend who is a writer. So Paul Dano, whose dour, limburger face is matched only by a charisma that is the screen equivalent of road kill, is a lucky fellow. His roommate and offscreen squeeze, Zoe Kazan, has provided them both with the screenplay to Ruby Sparks, an engaging if lightweight romcom directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team that hit pay dirt with Little Miss Sunshine. This one passes the time pleasantly enough, but history isn’t likely to repeat itself. The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film—separately or together. I kept wondering, while glancing at my watch, what it would have been like with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, or James Wolk and anybody.

The morose Mr. Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a shy novelist in horn-rimmed glasses who wrote a best-seller at 19 but now suffers painfully from writer’s block. Well, naturally; it’s ten years later, and he doesn’t even own a computer. So emotionally underdeveloped that his shrink (welcome back, Elliot Gould) gives him a fuzzy stuffed toy to cuddle with on the couch while he’s being analyzed, Calvin is awkward, socially inept and unable to get laid. So along comes a girl he calls Ruby Sparks, who falls in love with him faster than he can speed-dial his own cell phone. There’s just one snag. She exists only in his imagination. What happens next comes from the filing cabinet reserved for discarded Twilight Zone episodes. She moves into his house, his bed and his kitchen, invading every space. The only person he can confide in is his sympathetic brother, Harry (handsome Chris Messina, who looks nothing like Paul Dano). “She’s like Harvey, except she’s not a giant rabbit!” Ruby (played by the wide-eyed Ms. Kazan, who neglected to write herself the best part) can eat, sleep, walk, talk, make love and stage domestic arguments, and Calvin adjusts to his first affair with adoring acceptance. But after a corny, contrived falling-in-love montage of zombie movies, penny arcades and video games, Ruby starts materializing. Other people start seeing her, too, including the doubting Harry. But instead of fulfillment, she starts challenging Calvin’s well-ordered male supremacy. On a weekend in Big Sur with his bohemian mother (a criminally wasted Annette Bening) and her younger lover (ditto Antonio Banderas), Ruby wins everyone over and becomes the opinionated, fun-loving life of the party. Back in Los Angeles, she gets bored, begins spending the night at her old apartment, partying with a new group of friends and seeking her own independence. This is not what Calvin had in mind, so he starts re-writing his character. Ruby is transformed, according to the sentence he just typed, and returns, clinging to him more than ever. Her actions, thoughts, opinions and moods are all controlled. When she feels sad, he writes her happy. If Ruby starts to leave, he writes her needy and dependent. All of which gives Ms. Kazan a wide spectrum of moods to play. Who wouldn’t crave a relationship you can modify just by writing a new paragraph? But alas, what happens when your creation develops a mind of its own?

Ms. Kazan, granddaughter of the great Elia Kazan, oddly shows little cinematic technique as an actress, but as a writer she has penned a whimsical view of male self-absorption and obsessive egotism as droll as it is shrewd. It’s still a movie with no payoff (even the epilogue smacks of refried Rod Serling), and the fanciful conceit goes nowhere fast. Ruby is like Ryan Gosling’s inflated sex toy in Lars and the Real Girl. The difference is that she can walk the dog, wax the floor and scramble eggs. But she eventually grows just as tiresome as the puppet who wants to be Pinocchio. The movie is sweet, but it’s a lollipop of whimsy. Lick it and it’s gone.

rreed@observer.com

RUBY SPARKS

Running Time 104 minutes

Written by Zoe Kazan

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Starring Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan and Annette Bening

1/4

Mendez and Klena in Dogfight.

With so much mediocre junk currently polluting both stage and screen, it’s encouraging to visit the modest but robustly entertaining new musical Dogfight at Second Stage. Under the solid direction of Joe Mantello, and based on the honest, compelling, enthusiastically received 1991 movie of the same name directed by Nancy Savoca that starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor, Dogfight is about love and loneliness, coming of age under pressure, and two young misfits struggling for identity despite the cruelty of rejection.

Four years after Vietnam, on a Trailways bus headed for San Francisco, a morose and apprehensive Marine named Eddie Birdlace shows the veteran soldier in the next seat the three bees tattooed on his forearm symbolizing his three inseparable best buddies whose names began with the letter “b”: Birdlace, Boland and Bernstein. A memory play begins, flooding the stage with flashbacks to 1963, a few weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, telling the story of four raucous, naïve boys on the verge of manhood during their last night before being shipped overseas. The title refers to a sadistic contest called a “dogfight” in which the recruits hit the streets seeking a date. In the game, the biggest dog wins $100 for bringing back the ugliest girl for the judges’ assessment and/or amusement. The guys are jerks and jarheads, cruising for “one last ride/on our last night stateside,” singing “Goodbye to chili fries, to apple pies and Dinah Shore ... So long to waffle cones, new Twilight Zones and Lesley Gore ...” Bernstein picks up a fat Indian from Albuquerque at the bus station and Boland secretly breaks the rules by hiring a toothless hooker to win the jackpot. But Birdlace is the one who ends up with a conscience. All swagger, guileless about what’s waiting on the other side of the globe, and pretending he’s not afraid, he scores big with a “dog” named Rose—a plain, sensitive, painfully shy virgin who writes poetry and waits tables in her mom’s diner. Rose is awkward, socially inept and a novice at romance, but falling for Birdlace’s pretense at being an all-American Eagle Scout out of Leave it to Beaver, she takes a chance and goes on the date, clueless about what she’s in for. Rose doesn’t win the dogfight game (there are uglier girls than she at the drunken party) but her humiliation and rage when she learns she’s been the butt of a heartless joke (“Isn’t it funny ... for a minute he convinced me I was pretty ... funny,” she sings tearfully in the privacy of her room) touches a chord in Birdlace that elicits the first apology of his life.

In Act II, Eddie and Rose reunite, and while his other buddies are off getting bee tattoos, he tries to make amends for his boorish behavior earlier in the evening by taking her to dinner in a fancy restaurant he can’t afford, then returns to her frilly room above the diner to listen to her records. Weaned on brainless bubble-gum rock, this crude and inexperienced boy from Buffalo is awakened to more substantial stuff like Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and even a song Rose composed herself, which she sings and plays on her guitar. Overwhelmed by the intimacy, they end up spending the night together with nothing in common but a growing compassion for each other. He’s ignorant and insecure, a volatile and basically unsympathetic person who drinks too much, curses obnoxiously and dreams of heroism in combat. She’s sensitive and confused about boys, self-conscious about her homeliness, and dreams of being another Joan Baez. It turns out she is not the only virgin in the room. After a night in Rose’s bed, fumbling for affection and refuge in each other’s arms, their lives change in ways neither can fully analyze. His swagger is gone—and the story turns tender.

Four years later, Birdlace returns, broken and disillusioned by war. His fellow recruits who thought it would only take a few months to teach the geeks a lesson and return to “The Hometown Hero’s Ticker Tape Parade” (“Cotton candy and lemonade/Can’t get that at the penny arcade”) are dead in the rice paddies and there is no homecoming. Nobody returns triumphant, no brass bands are waiting. Birdlace is the only survivor, and by the time his Trailways bus hits Frisco, he’s the one who needs some tea and sympathy. Rose has taken over her mother’s café, long since abandoning her ambition to be a folk singer. Both are still as vulnerable as they were the night of the dogfight; neither belongs anywhere. When they embrace, the looks on their faces tell a thousand epilogues, any one of which could melt the coldest heart.

Adapted by Peter Duchan from the earlier screenplay by ex-Marine Bob Comfort, and directed by Joe Mantello with simplicity and a refreshing lack of artifice, Dogfight works well as a musical. The pop music and cornball lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are underwhelming (“You—born on a cloud/Angel so far, angel so fine ... You—clear in a crowd/Answer my prayer, say you’ll be mine!”) but strangely, as the play takes shape, so does the score. The cast is uniformly terrific, especially Derek Klena as Birdlace, whose rough exterior and military buzz cut hide the fact that behind an unlikable slug an interesting human being wants to get out, and Lindsay Mendez, who sings beautifully and makes Rose a very special person trapped in a life of excess baggage. The show is really about seeing through the contradictions in people and watching them connect. Poignant, funny and totally endearing, Dogfight could turn out to be one of the surprise sleepers of the year.

rreed@observer.com

Freeman and Madsen in The Magic of Belle Isle.

The Magic of Belle Isle is a warm, human, feel-good experience about bringing out the best in people, one that brings out Morgan Freeman’s best performance in years. He plays a grizzled old drunk named Monte Wildhorn, a once-revered author of epic western novels suffering from writer’s block who has become so miserable and depressed since losing his wife to cancer that he has retired his career to the inside of a bottle of sour mash whiskey. Cynical, reclusive and partially dependant on a motorized wheelchair, he has come to a small lakeside community in upstate New York to escape from the pressures of responsibility, reality and people—by drinking himself into a stupor. Unfortunately, the summer house his nephew has found for him to hide away in comes equipped with a dependant dog named Ringo the owner left behind, an annoyingly friendly community of covered-dish suppers and a compassionate next-door neighbor named Charlotte O’Neil (Virginia Madsen), a single mom with three daughters. Against his best instincts, Monte develops a fondness for them all, especially the 9-year-old infatuated with science fiction who wants to be a writer. Reluctantly, he becomes her mentor, dispensing advice about style, imagination and inspiration (“Most of the time real life doesn’t measure up to what’s in your head”). The smallest and youngest girl loves elephants, so he gets his old typewriter out from under the mothballs and writes a story about a pachyderm named Tony, a story that eventually leads to a series. You already know what’s coming: it turns out that this is the summer when Monte decides to rejoin the human race. After an amalgam of shared experiences—measured gently with brush strokes of sweetness and learning-—at summer’s ends he has not only reactivated his mind and his career, but found his dormant heart as well.

Reunited with Rob Reiner, who directed him in The Bucket List, Mr. Freeman’s unwavering dignity, charm and intelligence are put to good use. Ms. Madsen is wasted, but her no-nonsense honesty is in evidence, too. I admire her unglazed presence and naturalism as well as her deglamorized Hollywood look. In every role, no matter how diverse, she always seems to come from another saner, nicer place than the movies. Mr. Reiner, who has often shown a fondness for earlier, less complex periods in America’s past, is the perfect director to bring out these qualities. The screenplay, which he wrote with Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman, sometimes seems hokey, sentimental and totally predictable, but in a film this affectionate these are welcome qualities. The kids text and talk on cell phones, but the whole movie seems to take place in another time—before the plague of reality TV, when people still knew how to take the time out of a busy day to  communicate through conversation and feelings. (Monte writes bestsellers and doesn’t even know how to use a computer.) The best thing about the film is the gentle way Mr. Reiner allows his characters to develop until their troubles become part of the human coil. You can quarrel with the smiley-face outcome of every ordeal, but the tenderness and optimism are so powerful and ingratiating that only a viewer with the darkest sensibility will go away untouched. When the waning days of summer signal fall’s impending arrival, you feel like these characters are old friends, and the magic of Belle Isle is self-evident.

rreed@observer.com

THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE

Running Time 109 minutes

Written by Guy Thomas, Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman

Directed by Rob Reiner

Starring Morgan Freeman, Virginia Madsen and Madeline Carroll

3/4

The object of affection (brownstoner)

McCarren Pool may be located at the epicenter of hipsterdom on the border between Williamsburg an Greenpoint, but its reopening has brought on a strange, unfamiliar feeling in such environs: an earnest, completely unironic, swooning kind of love.

“The tide of consensus has turned,” Charles Graeber, a 42-year-old freelance writer who attended the pool's opening yesterday told The New York Times. “People are really rather proud. This is a very hopeful, grand, Great Society gesture. Williamsburg is famously hipsterish, sneering and ironic, but there’s nothing ironic about this.”

Could McCarren Pool finally usher in the era of earnestness—heralded by Miranda July and Lena Dunham and all the other painfully genuine, genuinely in pain young artists—that has been burbling below the surface of hipsterdom for so long?

Although some locals bristled at the announcement of the restoration—the empty, WPA-era pool had, after all, become a popular concert venue in the last few years—it seems that no one can resist the feelings of affection for the expanse of sparkling blue, awakening long-dormant emotions among many perpetual naysayers. The strange sensation has caused more than a little discomfort in some.

On Curbed, a commentator who was clearly unaccustomed to saying something nice, managed to twist his joy into a familiar diatribe:

"It's a shame it took so long to re-open MC Carren pool. I left Greenpoint in 1977. Though I went back to visit many times. I always stopped at Mc Carren park to reminisce on my childhood summer days in that pool. I miss the Pool and the old neighborhood. I do not like all the building of huge apartment building and coop's. It's ruining that great neighborhood."

On Brownstoner, the commentators embraced the opening with more ease.

"All 11 WPA pools are back in service. That's astonishing. This project is so symbolic of the improved fortunes of the Borough. Only a great city could build something like this and then refurbish it beautifully seventy years later," wrote one.

"Bloomberg will be recorded as the greatest Mayor this city has ever had," gushed another in what we honestly think was a genuine tone.

In fact, the only really nasty thing anyone could think of to say about the pool was this: "no baby pools here though it seems :("

But people will complain about anything. And guess what? The Parks Department also offers swimming lessons.

kvelsey@observer.com

Michael D'Addario and Banks in People Like Us.

People Like Us is a conveyor belt romcom about a tough tomato with a kid to raise, calloused by life’s shin kicks and cynical with despair, who falls in love at last with the perfect guy she’s waited for her entire life, unaware that he’s really her brother. It sounds awful, but the big surprise is that in spite of its too-obvious directorial flaws, it has an emotional impact (for me, anyway) I can’t resist, reinforced by the guileless chemistry of a perfect cast and the genuine humanity in the script. In a summer overloaded with numbing junk movies masquerading as gum-chewing blockbusters, this is a rare feel-good treat that nudges the heartstrings and makes you feel optimistic about the human race.

Writer-director Alex Kurtzman, whose unoriginal, face-slapping big-budget action programmers (Star Trek, Cowboys and Aliens and the Transformers copycats) leave me colder than refrigerated leftover pizza, makes his first attempt at serious filmmaking with this uneven but basically endearing look at unhappy people who learn through hard knocks and rough mistakes to look at life with new priorities and fresh perspectives. Chris Pine, impossibly handsome, secretly talented, but totally wasted for most of his career in meaningless cookie-cutter action epics, makes a giant leap forward as an actor of both range and subtlety in a new kind of role. He is Sam Harper, a slick New York salesman who is having a bad day. His latest hustle has landed him in job jeopardy, and before he can talk his way out of legal troubles that could lead to a criminal investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, his estranged father, a famous Hollywood record producer, dies in L.A. Urged to attend the funeral by his pragmatic law-school fiancée Hannah (Olivia Wilde), Sam heads for JFK but misses the last plane because he left home without a photo ID, arriving in L.A. so late that he misses the ceremony, too, incurring the wrath of his infuriated mother, Lillian (Michelle Pfeiffer). (Hard to believe, but yes, the still-beautiful superstar has now joined the ranks of aging stars relegated to playing aging parents. This one is a step up from the embarrassing mother of a werewolf she recently played in Dark Shadows.)

All Sam’s father left him in his will is his old LP record collection and a shaving kit containing $150,000 designated to be delivered to a mysterious woman named Frankie (played by Elizabeth Banks with an engaging been-around-and-seen-it-all honesty that grows on you), a single mother with a precocious 11-year-old son named Josh. Following Frankie to an A.A. meeting, Sam discovers she’s a recovering alcoholic and addict, once a hat-check girl at the Troubadour and a Joni Mitchell wannabe, who has spent a lot of troubled years in rehab, with no help from her illegitimate father, and now ekes out a living as a barmaid. Sam also uncovers the astonishing fact that she’s a half-sibling he never knew about. He knows he should do the right thing and turn over the money, but curiosity to find out more leads both mother and son into emotional areas that spiral out of control. Not knowing who Sam really is, Frankie falls for him. Between endless jump cuts, too much fast television-style editing and a bumpy pace that threatens to kill the film’s underlying sensitivity, Mr. Kurtzman also fails to resist the unwise clutter of a dated falling-in-love montage (cracking crab legs in a seafood restaurant at the beach, doing laundry at a Hollywood washateria, posing with a motorcycle gang for laughs, eating tacos, learning to trust). Layer by layer, secrets are revealed, mysteries get solved and hearts are broken in a movie about parents and children, brothers and sisters, immaturity and responsibility, letting go and starting over.

Based on true events in the lives of director Kurtzman, involving meeting an adult half-sister he never knew, and of co-writer Roberto Orci, a college friend whose aunt found out her own father had a secret family he didn’t tell her about, People Like Us is informed by real feelings uncorked like a lost bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon hidden away in a dark corner of a private wine cellar. Mr. Kurtzman is a better writer than director. One minute his movie shows a perceptive compassion for the way people talk and feel, and the next minute it churns its way into conventional TV motion sickness like it is filling spaces between Cheerios commercials.

Still, the actors make up for any and all deficiencies. The natural chemistry between Mr. Pine and Ms. Banks more than smooths out the contrived screenplay away from the artificial—Sam’s refusal to tell Frankie the truth, hand over her inheritance and seal her chances for a better life for her own tortured kid grows annoying—and into the direction of plausibility. Michelle Pfeiffer reveals her own mixed emotions about the secrets she’s been concealing for years, too young to forgive and too old to forget what it feels like to live with pain and betrayal. They work tirelessly, elevating banal characters—concocted for no other purpose than stretching a perfunctory outline to meet the demands of a full-length movie—into real relationships between likeable people who redefine the limits of friends and family.

rreed@observer.com

PEOPLE LIKE US

Running Time 115 minutes

Written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert

Directed by Alex Kurtzman

Starring Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks and Michelle Pfeiffer

3/4

Knightley and Carell in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

Don’t worry about floods, earthquakes or burning to death in an apocalyptic fire. When the end comes, protect yourself with love. This is the message conveyed in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s feature film debut. It’s an intriguing take on the apocalypse as a pragmatic tone poem, with comedian Steve Carell in his first deeply dramatic role (at least, the first one I’ve seen). He is very touching and unexpectedly appealing, and with co-star Keira Knightley he exhibits a romantic chemistry of which I never thought him capable.

An asteroid named Matilda 70-miles wide is hurling toward planet Earth and is expected to collide in 21 days. Cell phones are useless. Water and power are cut off. People trying to escape the cities are trapped in endless gridlock. Life has lost all meaning, and the final flights on commercial airlines have just left the ground, signalling the demise of air travel forever. Mr. Carell plays Dodge, an insurance salesman, who watches the unfolding tragedy on the network news with a mixture of horror and resignation, while his wife simply leaps from the car and leaves him on the spot. He’s introverted and already bruised by life. Now he faces death alone. “This is the Titanic,” says his best friend, “and there’s not a life boat in sight.”

Enter Penny, a flaky downstairs neighbor in his apartment building he’s always carefully avoided—neurotic, extroverted, resistant to reality. Secretly, she’s been withholding Dodge’s mail and now she delivers a letter from his long-lost high-school sweetheart. Distraught and clueless as to where to turn next, the two strangers who have met accidentally join forces and hit the highway to find his old lover in New Jersey, then travel on to locate Penny’s family in Maryland. The movie chronicles their road trip and introduces the characters they meet along the way—a man they hitch a ride with who speeds up his suicide with the help of a hired assassin, the partygoers in a roadside diner where the staff serves an orgy to desperate, oversexed customers, a highway cop determined to uphold the law right up to the final blackout by writing up a speeding ticket. Penny locates an old boyfriend living in a fallout shelter with enough potato chips to last another six months. Dodge gets as far as a reunion with the estranged father he hasn’t seen in years (Martin Sheen). The movie shows how perspectives change—or remain the same—in the face of ultimate tragedy. There is room for tears, mixed with unexpected humor. As the final blackout approaches and the TV stations leave the airwaves with one final test pattern, the announcer reminds everyone watching to set their clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time.

This is an unusual film, resistant to the usual end-of-mankind clichés. The script is full of surprises, even when the parts don’t always come together with the desired impact. The pace sometimes drags, and the focus wavers. Yet the film asks a lot of valid, disturbing questions to which Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay provides no easy answers. What would you do? Take up smoking again? Drink all the vodka in the liquor cabinet? Eat every fattening food the nutrition Nazis warn about? Have sex with anyone you want because “nobody is anybody’s anything anymore?” In the overlapping hours of their search, Dodge and Penny find a new definition of love that is irresistibly moving. If nothing else, see it for the two central performances. Keira Knightley finds a role without a trace of her usual glamour, while Steve Carell finally stretches his talents with more depth and quiet thoughtfulness than he’s ever been invited to previously display.

After so many hellish apocalypse movies, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is intelligent, dignified and emotionally satisfying. The message is simple. If the end is inevitable, then it’s better to face it with your arms around someone you love than alone and forlorn in an empty bed. The choices you make can lead to something oddly akin to optimism.

rreed@observer.com

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Running Time 101 minutes

Written and Directed by Lorene Scafaria

Starring Steve Carell, Keira Knightley and Melanie Lynskey

3/4