'Like Crazy' is, Like, Crazy Good. 'Like Crazy' is a film about the little moments.
The ones we remember when we're saying goodbye, or missing an embrace, or losing something we thought (and maybe wished) we had. It's a film of collected moments; of love, happiness, heartbreak, success and failure. It's a film about how it feels to be in love; how beautiful, intense, addictive and debilitating love can be, but how necessary it is for us to experience as we get older and start sorting out our lives. For his third feature (and second consecutive one in competition at Sundance), writer-director Drake Doremus delivers what will probably go down as one of the best of the fest; an extremely personal, passionate and exceptionally well-crafted story starring Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones as two kids who fall hard for one another, but find their perfect relationship tested when forced apart for long periods at a time.
A real, honest love story. Don't be put off by the lovey-dovey poster: Like Crazy is no vacuous, treacly rom-com.
Rather, it's the rare love story that honestly conveys the giddy joys and sorrows of two people besotted with each other. No other recent film has so deftly captured the act of falling in love or so artfully interwoven the more practical efforts of maintaining that connection. The handheld shooting style, quick edits and improvised dialogue are ideally suited to this enthralling story. Director Drake Doremus employs a host of filmmaking devices — tight close-ups, jump cuts, rapid fades — that work beautifully to communicate the idiosyncratic details that link two people romantically. PHOTOS: This week at the movies Doremus' elegant filmmaking is key to the appeal of the film, but it would never work as superbly without the wonderfully natural, believable performances and powerful chemistry of the lead actors.
Doremus gets every detail right, from the film's pace to his choice of romantic obstacles. Felicity Jones wins hearts in Internet-age love story. November 03, 2011|Michael Phillips | Movie critic Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones in "Like Crazy.
" Love is an endlessly renewable resource, yet the fuel's so seldom used wisely. The new film "Like Crazy" strives to capture that head-swiveling sensation of falling, and then falling out, and then back in again, as it pertains to the sense-defying, metaphysically boggling realm of time and space known as "your 20s. " The reason to see it co-stars with Anton Yelchin, around whom the project got going. Her name is Felicity Jones. She plays Anna, a highly verbal, naturally sociable Londoner attending college in Los Angeles on a student visa. To the degree it follows a conventional story, "Like Crazy" is simplicity itself, hinging on a clear mistake. This is one of the film's strengths. It's entirely possible, maybe even inevitable, that "Like Crazy" will win over a good many moviegoers despite its bouts of semipreciousness. Mjphillips@tribune.com 'Like Crazy' -- 3 stars. Drake Doremus Talks Improvising A Failing Romance.
A film about young lovers inherently lurks along the danger zone of cliche from the start, but "Like Crazy" carries an authenticity that could not be achieved without a deep, real-life understanding of the subject matter.
Co-written and directed by Drake Doremus, the film stars Anton Yelchin ("Star Trek," "Fright Night") as Jacob and Felicity Jones ("Page Eight") as Anna. The two leads play a college couple kept apart post-graduation by circumstance and immigration law when, as a student from England studying abroad in Los Angeles, Anna overstays her visa and is barred from re-entering the United States. The plot is fiction, but the feelings contained are not. "It started inspired by my own life -- a long-distance relationship and another relationship that I was in in my life -- and just sort of working through those emotions and those feelings," Doremus told The Huffington Post in a phone conversation last week. The project is a true collaboration.