Slow Learners (2015)

Finding love is hard. Being lucky in love is even harder. Especially if you are slow to realize who is right and who is wrong for you, even when they are standing right in front of you. Written by Matt Serword, Peter C. Swords and Heather Maidat, Slow Learners is a movie about love, friendship, losing your dignity and putting it all back together again.

The Premise

Jeff and Anne are best friends and co-workers who have a lot in common, including still being single in their thirties. They decide to take their summer break to look for love. By experimenting with different styles and lots of sex and alcohol, these friends find themselves (and love) after nearly losing each other.

My Take

Slow Learners is a love story in which the formula is near perfect. Boy and girl already know each other, lose each other and then have to find each other again. But of course, we are talking about slow learners so there are quite a few mistakes made along the way, much to the audience's delight.

Starring Adam Pally as Jeff and Sarah Burns as Anne, the movie starts off on a comedic note with a really bad date. Jeff and Anne decide to change themselves for the summer and see if what has been wrong with their love lives all this time has actually been them.

Over the course of the summer, high school guidance counselor, Jeff, gets in a bar fight, changes his style, gets drunk, has lots of sex and alienates himself from friends, Dan and Lenny (Gil Ozeri and Bobby Moynihan, respectively). Anne, who is either a librarian or an English teacher, gets a complete makeover, has numerous one-night-stands, many drunken nights and pushes away her best friend, Julia (Catherine Reitman).

In short, they both become the assholes they were idolizing.

So, what's a body to do when your friends hate you, you're hung over and you no longer know who you are? You go back to the beginning.

The Verdict

Slow Learners was an excellent film directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce. I think that it was the casting that made it so good, however. The principal players, Pally and Burns, were impeccable. They each had small nuances that made their characters totally believable. The supporting was amazing as well. From their cast of friends, Ozeri, Moynihan and Reitman, to their love interests for the summer, Reid Scott and Mary Grill, the casting was superb. I would tell you how many stars or whatever I give this film, but being slow learners, you probably wouldn't get it anyway.