I sat down for a special screening of
Wanderlust this week, and I won’t lie, it would have been nearly impossible for any flick (Judd Apatow or otherwise) to live up to the insane fact that I’ve been talking about this movie for at least 10 months now. Seriously. We’d been circling around
Wanderlust ever since ELLE Canada had the pleasure of shooting one of the movie’s stars, the gorgeous Malin Akerman for our
August 2011 cover. It was supposed to be perfect timing since the film, which centers around her, Jennifer Aniston and
Paul Rudd’s characters kicking it in a hippie commune, was going to be released shortly thereafter… But here’s an industry tidbit, folks: sometimes movies don’t come out when they’re supposed to. Sometimes, like in the case of
Wanderlust, they come out about six months after they’re supposed to. Why? Well, often, the answer is simple: because they suck, and studios get embroiled in elaborate strategies to rescue the stinkers through editing and reshoots. The sad answer? It normally makes them worse. So sitting down to watch the long awaited
Wanderlust, my expectations were sitting about as low as the Titanic (ship, not
blockbuster). But it was funny and charming! And the film (which is unofficially known as that movie that
hooked Justin Theroux up with Ms. Aniston) boasts an uncomfortably long and totally amazing scene in which Paul Rudd talks dirty to himself in a mirror. This kind of squeamish brilliance doesn’t happen every day, people. That two minutes alone is worth the $60 a movie date costs these days (because you can’t go to the theatre and not get a $6 Coke Zero the size of a garbage can). Luckily, the hilarious and annoyingly
leggy Akerman, who plays the commune’s resident free-lover, had as good a time shooting
Wanderlust as I did watching it. As she told me: “We were all shooting two hours north of Atlanta in a little town called Clarksville, we were living in little log cabins. It was as if we were out there camping! We were shooting at was this beautiful old house built in the 1800s. We’d hang out every night, we’d hang out on the weekends. We became a real family.” I’m just glad we’re now finally all able to join the
Wanderlust family.