Jennifer Connelly: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Janine Gunders - He's Just Not That Into You (2009)

The last few years have seen the rise of two awful trends: films based on self-help books, and poorly-written high concept films with a massive ensemble cast of famous faces. Imagine the self-importance of Eat, Pray, Love, the shambolic storytelling of Valentine's Day and the irritating voice-overs from Sex and the City, and you're pretty close to describing He's Just Not That Into You. Not only is the film irritating and crass, it features Connelly at her most annoyingly uptight. He's Just Not That Into You is based on the self-help book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, which takes its title from a line in Sex and the City. It follows several intertwining stories of people dealing with relationship problems, all centred around Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), who repeatedly misunderstands people's romantic intentions. Connelly's character is struggling to save her marriage to Ben (Bradley Cooper), who begins an affair with a yoga instructor called Anna (Scarlett Johanssen). While not as horrifying as the Sex and the City films in the severely limiting roles it accords to women, He's Just Not That Into You is ultimately just a collection of lazy stereotypes embodied by a bunch of celebrities. While Connelly is working with bad material, she over-eggs the cold nature of her character so that within five minutes of her company we don't carry about her or her marriage. The scene where she destroys her husband's clothes is poorly paced and lazily shot, making her performance all the more artificial. (Interesting piece of trivia before we move on: Ken Kwapis, who directed this film, also directed a TV movie called Noah in the late-1990s. Six degrees and all that...)