“Love isn’t a thinking thing, it’s a feeling thing … and this is what it felt like for me.”
SNAPSHOT
In Playing It Cool, formerly A Many Splintered Thing, Chris Evans plays a screenwriter anxious to write an action movie who is told by his agent (Anthony Mackie) that he must first write a rom-com, something Evans’ character, who has a cynical, problematiuc relationship with love, does not embrace with any real enthusiasm. But then he meets a woman, played by Michelle Monaghan, who he falls in love with almost instantly only to discover she has a handsome, successful fiancé (Ioan Gruffudd). No problem! He’ll just be friends with her. But as he soon discovers, and his circle of friends (played by Aubrey Plaza, Luke Wilson and Topher Grace) repeat ad nauseum to him, love is never that easy and it’s never, ever like it is in the movies.
Playing It Cool, which has been sitting on the shelf since 2012 for some strange unfathomable reason – surely the cast alone should merit an instantaneous worldwide release, like, yesterday? – looks for all intents and purposes like your everyday garden variety, thoroughly enjoyable date night rom-com, the sort of movie that tragic romantics like myself eat up for breakfast, lunch and dinner and perhaps the occasional lovestruck snack too.
And if the trailer is anything to go by, it totally is that and more.
But it also looks like it’s also trying to have some fun with the genre of which it is a part, a tricky undertaking that in my estimation has only been successfully attempted by The Princess Bride and Guardians of the Galaxy, largely because it’s a tough ask for a film to be both a homage to its respective genre while gleefully making light of it too.
Chris Evan’s screenwriter character is determined that he will join this rarefied group of movies, that he’ll pen a film that reflects love as it really is, stripped of all its aspirational and romantic elements, a goal not embraced with much fervour by his friends who thinks that his movie sounds like it will be a bit of a “downer”.
It looks like that friend may well be right since the trailer for Playing It Cool seems to be talking the “love is cold and pointless and not for me” talk, and yet walking straight to the boy gets the girl, running through the airport big finish.
It will be fun to see if they can subvert the form while still paying reverence to it, but we may have to wait a little wait to see if it pulls off this thematic balancing act with the film only having limited international release dates so far in Latvia, Estonia and South Korea.