Young Adult (2011)

Lovers of cringe, rejoice: here's a good one, about a "psycho prom queen bitch" trying to steal her high school boyfriend from his happy marriage and new baby. Charlize Theron dims her luminosity with good acting and makeup and convinces us that she's a bats**t crazy, mean-spirited loser, with the help of a script by Diablo Cody (a former stripper, she won an Oscar and a pile of other awards for her debut screenplay Juno (2007), then created the masterful series United States of Tara, sadly now cancelled) and direction by Jason Reitman (covered in Up in the Air). One bit of trivia Jack and I noticed as well as imdb: Theron's character Mavis drives a mini-Cooper, just as she did in The Italian Job (2003). We also noticed a continuity error missed on that site: the Cooper bangs something but doesn't appear to be damaged until the next shot.

Theron (I liked her debut performance in the noir 2 Days in the Valley (1996), don't remember her in the excellent That Thing You Do! the same year, loved The Devil's Advocate (1997), Celebrity (1998), The Cider House Rules (1999), The Italian Job, Monster (2003) which won her her Oscar, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) in which she played Britt Eklund, North Country (2006 - nominated), and her hilarious turn in a series arc in Arrested Development in 2005) is great as the deluded writer of Young Adult genre novels. Patrick Wilson (wonderful as the "Prom King" in Little Children (2006) and good, though I wrote little, if anything, about him, in the following: Lakeview Terrace, The Switch, and Morning Glory; he also starred in the Broadway adaptation of The Full Monty, and has a good voice--I have the soundtrack) is fine as ex-boyfriend Buddy, as is Elizabeth Reaser (I wrote about her in The Art of Getting By) as his wife Beth. I really like Patton Oswalt (covered in the excellent Big Fan) and he plays his character Matt, Mavis' fellow barfly, with all dimensions. For fans old enough to remember L.A. Law, Jill Eikenberry plays Mavis' mother; and Mary Beth Hurt (another age test, her biggest hits were Woody Allen's unfunny-but-fabulous Interiors (1978) and The World According to Garp (1982)) plays Buddy's mom.

As to be expected, a Jason Reitman movie has a good soundtrack--you can listen to clips on this page. Set and mostly shot in Minnesota, where Cody lived for a time, this is a fun way to spend just over an hour and a half if you don't require all sweetness and lack of loose ends in your cinema experience. Oh, and if you love Pomeranians, as Vivian does, you must see this for those scenes.