Today
I went to see the film, “I Love You, Man,” which cleverly takes the structure
of a romantic comedy and applies it to a friendship.
The setup is that the protagonist (Paul Rudd) is about to get married and realizes that he has no close male friends to call upon to be his best man and groomsmen. He goes on a quest to find a best friend and discovers that, as with romances, the path to a true friendship can be rocky. It’s boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy (as well as getting the girl, of course).
The film is charming, relatively low-key, and amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny most of the time. As well as being enjoyable for its own sake, if you’re a writer you may also find it instructive to see how it takes a predictable formula and gives it a new twist.
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