I was an emotional mess by the end of it. From laughing and crying then laughing then crying. I felt completely drained by the end. I saw it in quite a small and busy pre-screening. (probably 30 seater) so maybe this intimate setting brought more of the film alive to me.
Same here. I found a lot of humor in the movie, but the scene right before he goes into surgery hit me on a level I did not see coming. Something about being taken away from your mom and dad to go into a scary place by yourself. There is no level of intellectual detachment that could remove the power of that scene for me. I was also very strangely affected by the sudden death of the Matt Frewer character.
I do think the female characters were a tad on the one-dimensional side: B.D. Howard needed to be the heavy, but they could have made her a little less shrill. They pretty much set her up from the beginning by Kyle to be cold, not fulfilling her so-called womanly duties (his p.o.v., not mine). Anna Kendrick was okay, but when he called her in the middle of the night, she was just sitting on her bed apparently doing nothing, with the lights on. She seemed to live in this world in the service of JGL, not for her own life. Huston was terrific: she started off as seeming kind of one-note, but by the end, the method to her overbearing nature was revealed.
I thought the movie was really well-written, because while it acknowledged the severity of the situation and his difficulty dealing with it, it never put it in a glass case or resorted to bathos. (I thought JGL's scream in the car was fine; it was all his pent-up frustration coming out in one swift motion, since he had been so overwhelmed, but trying to suppress it.)
Juno and
Knocked Up were fun entertainments, but I wouldn't even put them in the same league as
50/50.