Now IHTSBIH has been made into a movie, which I managed to see last weekend and which opens nation wide at the end of the month. Here’s my review:

I was extremely excited for this movie, mainly because I knew it would be doing something 90% of Hollywood comedies don’t do: tell jokes about something other than the main characters’ extra chromosomes. All my life, the big Hollywood comedies have been cast from the Dumb and Dumber mold: they’re about making the audience members with characters that they can feel smarter than. Since they’re also designed for mass-market appeal, the characters have to be significantly stupider than the average American, and, well, have you seen the average American? Painful viewing for anyone with a brain. Tucker Max’s stories, in contrast, are about a smart guy who does dumb stuff only because he doesn’t care, and who frequently has fun at the expense of dimmer lights. No idiot ball required. That’s a huge deal.

So how did the movie turn out? The script follows the stories closely enough that if you liked the stories, you’re guaranteed to like 90% of the script, and probably will like the entire thing. The only thing that I was worried about going in was the acting, and I had reason to be: the picture of the male lead, Matt Czuchry, that went up on all the movie posters sucked. It’s an imitation of the picture of the real Tucker from the original book, but it’s a piss poor imitation: Czuchry looks way to excited at the mere fact of having a woman on his arm. Thankfully, Czuchry’s actual performance was spot on, though, and so were those of the other actors.

The script did have a couple of pleasant surprises, though. The ending of the original edition of the book was dark and nihilistic, giving the book its title. (The current edition doesn’t change this per se, it just tacks on some bonus material at the end.) The movie does a Tom Sawyer-esque “lovable rogue grows up, but doesn’t” ending, something without analog in Tucker’s nonfiction. It’s not that I didn’t like the original ending, but the new angle was definitely interesting.

Even better, though, was the romantic subplot that got added. You’ll know it when you see it–it involves proper ambush planning. And if you have any taste, you will find it more deeply moving than any romantic comedy that’s come out in the last five years. This is kinda faint praise: most romantic comedies amount to providing a funny situation and then resolving the plot with “and then they fall in love.” But just by not doing that, IHTSBIH The Movie does something importantly right: there’s some substance to the couple’s interactions beyond them falling under the magical mysterious spell of love. I suspect this–along with the effectiveness of the movie ending, actually–is the result of Tucker and his co-writer for the script, Nils Parker, having lived life enough to understand how real human beings work. Hollywood seems filled with writers who don’t get this.

The movie comes out September 25th, a Friday. Mark your calendars.