Life As We Know It is a tender, heartfelt romantic comedy that hits all the right notes. When Peter (MacArthur) and Alison (Hendricks) Novack die in a car accident, their two best friends are given guardianship of their 1-year-old daughter, Sophie. Holly (Heigl) is a driven, organized entrepreneur and chef; she is taking out construction loans to expand her pastry shop into a full-out restaurant. Messer (Duhamel) is a suave womanizer living the life every guy dreams of: he watches basketball games for a living and gets free dinner and drinks from women who want to sleep with him. Out of their love for their friends and the child, they accept. But fitting into their roles as Sophie's parents is much more difficult than they anticipated.
The acting in this movie is superb. Duhamel was the best part about When In Rome, and he's the best part about Life As We Know It too. He has charm and wit, but lacks the sleaze you'd associate with someone who supposedly sleeps around with every woman he can find. One of the negatives about this movie is that I just didn't find him convincing as Messer. He somehow changed the character into someone likable and sympathetic. I doubt that the person on screen was the same person scripted. Luckily, Heigl is his match, revealing an understated but explosive personality. She is not what you'd expect, given her professional, work-obsessed appearance and relative lack of a personal life. Yes, she wants a family, but she wants it on her terms, not thrust on her like this.
I spent a paragraph describing the characters because characters are what make a movie like this successful, endearing, and memorable. They are imbued with humor and played with honest emotion. Their intricacies and complexities are precisely brought to life on screen. The rest of the technical details like dull cinematography and subpar editing just fall by the wayside when you see this movie. No, I didn't laugh as much in this movie as I did in Going the Distance, but this one did pull at the heartstrings a little bit more. This may not be the movie for everyone, but you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by some of the scenes in this movie.
Note: There is a crucial scene near the climax/finale dealing with a phone call. The phone that rings is an original Sprint Palm Pre with all original webOS UI, and I don't think I have ever been so excited to see anything or anyone in a movie in my life. I literally jumped out of my seat and started hitting my girlfriend's arm to get her attention as I giggled like a little schoolgirl. I have no idea why. I also noticed that my favorite Parker Jotter pen and Oxo mug made cameos, which was pretty cool as well.
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1055292/