Susan F I was home one night and planned on watching the immortal classic The Shop Around The Corner for the 20th time on TCM. I decided that the 21st time was even too many times for me. So I decided to give this film a try because I saw Bradley Cooper was in it and I thought he was quite good in The Elephant Man on stage, The Silver Lining Playbook and American Hustle. I could not believe how horrible this film is. I am embarrassed that I live in a world where folks liked this. The script was stupid. The acting, particularly Bradley Cooper, Zooey Deschanel and Jason Bartha were painfully bad. I kept on watching it because Terry Bradshaw and Kathy Bates actually were terrific and the NY Mets had already won their game. The Shop Around the Corner is a great romantic comedy. Failure to Launch is as we say in NYC, shtick dreck. Go to the Urban Dictionary and look up the expression.

Laakbaar At 5.6/10, this rom-com is under-rated on IMDb. It's worth about a 7.5. It's not a bomb."Failure to Launch" is a perfectly enjoyable movie with a nice story line, lots of humour and sexy actors. The acting was good. I don't particularly like chick flicks, but I was easily able to sit through this lighthearted and fun film. The humour is what kept me interested, Zoey Deschanel in particular.The conceit is that older parents are getting annoyed at having their 30-something sons still living at home. How realistic that is, I don't know. Not very. Especially with a character like Tripp, a sophisticated man with lots of money, expensive pastimes and a string of girls in his bed. It's hard to see a guy like that still living at home. It's even harder to imagine parents having to hire an "interventionist" to get him to leave. However, this didn't ruin the movie for me.

secondtake Failure to Launch (2006)Another decent but sometimes strained interference with love film. I can think of two more classic recent ones, "Hitch" and "Heartbreaker," and this doesn't rise to those modest heights.The impressive star of the two leads is the lesser name, charming and gorgeous Matthew McConaughey, who is not just believable but also compelling (which is something different). Across from him is the Sex and the City mega-star, Sarah Jessica Parker, who is good, and who does the job as a would-be pretend girlfriend who really does fall in love. Or not. You'll see.The whole hook is an obvious one--first the woman is hired to make the man fall enough in love with him that he'll finally move out of his parents house. Then she'll collect her fee and boogie. But no, we know from the get-go, as with any screwball comedy, that the two leads are destined to be together. But when one learns the other's secret, what true love there was goes on the rocks. This is exactly what the other two films (above) did, and I'm sure it's a burgeoning new genre.What drags it down a bit are the side plots and side characters. Many of these are good or even terrific one way or another, but it's all patched together and a little lightweight and thin. The best of these is Parker's roommate, played with Oscar-worthy dreariness by Zooey Deschanel (who also appeared in "(500) Days of Summer"). But the sideshows of the mockingbird, the biting dolphin, and even the baroque arrangement with the t.v. monitors in the final scenes are all a little clunky. Good on paper, maybe, but in the end you have to make yourself enjoy the best of it all, which will make you laugh and have fun.

Andrew The story dove head first into introducing the characters and getting the plot rolling which was the only good thing about the film since if it were any longer I would have given it a 1. Once the ball was rolling with it's a-list cast playing severely underdeveloped characters, the formula became too blatantly evident far too early even for a rom-com. The disturbingly futile attempts to add originality and humor came in the form of random animals inexplicably biting the protagonist at various points throughout the film and an equally irrelevant sub-plot of Zooey Deschanel's character (SJP's cliché quirky friend) and an annoying mockingbird. Nothing was genuinely funny despite performances by talented actors and the absurd arbitrary scenes slotted into an otherwise very formula- driven snooze of a film.