George Gergenblatt (Paul Rudd) and his wife Linda (Jennifer Aniston are a young New York City couple who have a major setback when George is suddenly unemployed. With nowhere to turn, they move to Atlanta to live with his brother and his wife, only to realize he is really, really annoying. The stumble upon Elysium, a shangri-la community of left over hippies that features a vegan cuisine and free love, and is run by and elderly man named Carvin (Alan Alda) They share everything and “all you need is love”. Fitting into the compound may be a lot more difficult than either of them imagined. The free love aspect seems like a great idea to George, but when Linda tries it out, it’s a lot harder to deal with.

This is a mediocre film, that even with it’s R rating, still has the feel of a TV movie. It’s got some humor and some raunchy moments, mostly is just mediocre. Not a really bad film, but certainly you couldn’t call it good either. Sometimes there is a hidden gem that you missed. This isn’t one of those. It reaches for nostalgia and misses altogether. The kind of humor in this film is repeatedly driving vehicles into the lake. If you ask me, this is not worth your time. If you try to sit through it for the occasional aged bare rear end, you’ll find you wasted a lot of your time. Don’t bother.

==Written by Ed Goettman ==

==From: Ed's Review Dot Com (www.edsreview.com)==

Wanderlust is a movie I would have loved when I was 13. Its sexuality alone is enough to please any blossoming young teen, but its pervasive language (also of the sexual nature) is icing on the cake. It’s stupid, immature and filled to the brim with innuendo and smut, everything required of a movie for teens with such a narrow minded focus. The teenager inside of me is yelling at me to loosen up, but my brain has evolved past laughing at such childish fodder. The dictionary definition of the word “wanderlust” is “a very strong or irresistible impulse to travel.” After watching Wanderlust, you’ll want to travel as far away from any theater playing it as you possibly can.

The film follows George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston), a married couple who are forced to leave New York after George is canned from his job and Linda’s documentary about penguins with testicular cancer (hardy har) is rejected by HBO. At first, they move in with George’s brother, Rick (Ken Marino), but he begins to annoy George and they hop on the road. Eventually, they end up at a bed and breakfast called Elysium, which turns out to be a rural commune whose hippy inhabitants practice “free love” and pacifism. Although hesitant at first, the two decide to give it a shot after a fun night of partying, but the instability of such a life comes at a price and it begins to threaten their marriage.

Wanderlust is about as bad as comedies come and, though early in the year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it reappear on my “Worst of” list in December. It takes everything that is mindless and moronic about comedies these days and wraps it into one painful experience. This is most exemplified in its lazy writing that relies heavily on exaggerated stereotypes to garner laughs. The hippies in this commune, for instance, are unaware of the “futuristic” world we live in—their knowledge only of past generation hardware like VHS players and cassette tapes a running gag—and they sit around delving into all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs, which of course leads to yet another derivative drug trip scene with a character who isn’t used to the effects. The film also throws some nudity into the mix fairly early on. With society’s increasing promiscuity, it should come as no surprise that movies are getting less prude about nudity, but the mere sight of a penis isn’t funny anymore (if it ever was at all). It feels like writers David Wain and Ken Marino, though well into their 40’s, would still be the boys snickering in the back of the classroom during a sexual education class in high school. Convincing evidence like that and the fact that the film follows your typical, predictable movie narrative forces me to believe that creative writing wasn’t their strong suit in school.

If you’re familiar with some of Wain’s past work, however, you should know what you’re getting yourself into. This is the same guy responsible for the atrocious Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten, the former of which may very well be one of the most inept comedies I’ve ever sat through. Aside from Role Models (even the worst filmmakers are bound to accidentally make something good), this guy has pumped out some of the worst, most nonsensical pieces of garbage (on the big and small screen) in recent years. His actors always make passionate and dedicated deliveries of their lines, but it means little when the lines they’re reciting have been written by someone who so rarely strings together something funny to say.

The characters in Wanderlust are annoying, both hippy and otherwise, and their journeys are unconvincing. Upon arriving at Elysium, for instance, Linda protests that there aren’t any doors on the house—a small issue in the big scheme of things—but after having just one song sung to her on guitar by a fast fingered hippy, she’s pooping in the yard and participating in topless protests. The worst part of this movie, however, comes from Paul Rudd in a prolonged sequence where he’s staring in the mirror talking himself up, stating what he’s going to do sexually to Eva (Malin Akerman) after getting permission from his wife. It’s not funny the first ten seconds it goes on, much less the five minutes it continues. It’s one of the most degrading and embarrassing things Rudd has ever done and he was in Over Her Dead Body. Wanderlust has a moment or two of brief enjoyment; perhaps a minute or so in total. Its other 96 minutes are unwatchable. You decide whether that’s worth your time.

Wanderlust receives 0.5/5

==Written by Josh Hylton ==

==From: Josh Hylton Movies (www.joshhylton.com)==

Between the ages of about 8 and 12, MAD Magazine became a significant part of my comedy diet. At the time it seemed to be a heady concoction of absurdity and what I thought was sophisticated “wit.” A favorite feature in those days was by cartoonist Dave Berg: In his long-running “Lighter Side Of...” strips, Berg would skewer some popular trend with a few congenial, borscht-belt one liners. I still remember his one on “The Lighter Side of the ‘ME’ Generation,” which featured a woman extolling the virtues of the 1970's new social freedoms. “I was interested in everyone else and what they were doing! Now, in the '70s, I’ve turned inward!” she says. Her friend asks what prompted such a drastic change in her outlook and the woman replies, “Because everyone else was doing it!” Har har.

I bring all this up because, aside from frequent male nudity and a lot more sex jokes, David Wain’s new comedy “Wanderlust” isn’t too far removed from one of Berg’s comics. Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston star as a seemingly not-very-happy urban couple. He works in the financial sector and she busies herself pitching a documentary about penguins with testicular cancer. After buying a condo they can’t afford, his firm is raided by the FBI and HBO passes on her movie, and so the couple is forced to leave Manhattan and head south to stay with Rudd’s obnoxious but significantly more successful brother, a Port-a-Potty dealer in Atlanta (Ken Marino). But after a night at a dingy Bed & Breakfast that happens to be part of a hippy commune (sorry, “Intentional Community”), our couple decide to throw caution to the wind and take up permanent residence at Elysium, a sitcom-grade caricature of a dope-fueled, drum-circling vegan mud pit populated by morons with no idea of how the so-called outside world works.

Not that this makes the hippies much better than Rudd and Aniston; where they once bickered constantly about jobs and money, now they fight over their mutual difficulties assimilating into this new situation. It just never seems reasonable that they’d want to be there in the first place. The humor is supposed to come from our realization that any given lifestyle is full of secret, implied collective rules and codes of conduct, but it’s ridiculous to think that you’d stay in a place that instantly claims ownership of all of your stuff while telling you what a terrible person you are for having it. When Rudd lends his car to one of the communers, it winds up in a lake. After a brief moment of incredulity, though, the matter is dropped. Honestly, you would leave on the spot and call a small-claims lawyer.

Okay, so we get it. Contrasting these disparate worlds would seem a concept ripe for satirical humor. But Wain’s script (co-written with Michael Showalter) is content to stay in the realm of drug, bathroom and dick jokes. A scene in which Rudd attempts to take a shit while numerous people offer him advice and company is funny for about 30 seconds, yet it continues for a full three minutes. A major plotline involves Justin Theroux, as one of the commune’s most respected members, as he attempts to seduce Aniston (who, being a fickle woman, is of course completely oblivious to his sex-guru douchebaggery).

“Wanderlust” goes exactly where you know it will: It arbitrarily suggests a middle ground between the chaos of urban existence and the implied “tranquility” of “living in the moment” or some such nonsense. But the commune seems positively hellish; nobody who might appreciate this film would be the type to live there. They’re also not the sort of people that would cough up an exorbitant sum for the mortgage on a Manhattan “microloft.” I realize that satire is often engaged in the business of exaggeration, but you can’t score irreverent points with jokes that were considered hacky kids’ fare 30 years ago.

==Written by Matt Lynch==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

From Walt Whitman to Thelma and Louise, the open road has long been a fixture of the American imagination and of all mediums, none are more reverent or enduring than the classic road movie.

In this brilliant new documentary, the most important writers, actors, and directors in the genre discuss these movies, from Grapes of Wrath and Sullivan s Travels to Bonnie and Clyde and Rain Man. WANDERLUST features clips from hundreds of iconic films, as well as fascinating insights on classic road movies from film stars including Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Sam Shepard, Wim Wenders, and many others. In a reverent counterpoint, WANDERLUST includes vignettes from a fictional road trip starring Paul Rudd and Tom McCarthy.

Whether it s Dennis Hopper describing the reception of Easy Rider in New Orleans or Peter Bogdaniovich discussing why all the roads but one in Paper Moon were straight, this film is full of the movie magic and the glory of the open road.

DVD Features: Featurette: Journeys: A Road Story