About
A Boy
(Universal Pictures) Rated PG-13
Release Date - May 17, 2002
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Starring:
Hugh Grant, Rachel Weisz,
Toni Collette, Nicholas Hoult, Isabel Brook
Directed by: Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz
Produced by: Jane Rosenthal, Eric Fellner,
Tim Bevan, Robert De Niro, Brad Epstein
Written by: Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz, Peter Hedges
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As a critic who does not put a lot of weight in loyalty to
source material – a book is a book and a movie is a movie
– the question I care about is whether the movie works.
The answer is an exuberant, “yes!” The truth is, my
biases about the film going in, before I saw it or read the
book, were all about the previous Brit Flick Comedies that
have done well, but have been fairly fluffy. What floored me about About A Boy was
that it was so much more than any of the previous entries. Hugh Grant is charming, but he’s more
than that. This is
not only his best performance ever.
It’s the best role he’s had to play in his career.
The character has a real arc and is challenged from
all emotional directions. Like the screen adaptation of Hornby’s High
Fidelity, About A
Boy demands that the audience keeps up with the story
and relates to the characters, even when the characters are
quite different than almost any one of us...
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