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"  Ever since Judd Apatow mined box \u00ADoffice gold five years ago with Knocked Up, romantic comedies replete with dollops of gross-out yuks have \u00ADbecome so plentiful they&amp;#039;re starting to feel like a dime a dozen, and yucky to boot. You can tell Nicholas Stoller&amp;#039;s The Five-Year Engagement is worth more than that simply by the director&amp;#039;s choice of leads, Jason\u00AD \u00ADSegel and Emily Blunt\u2014two excellent actors whose careers are blossoming big time. Segel, an Apatow regular, wrote and starred in Stoller&amp;#039;s first outing, the enjoy\u00ADable Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and he \u00ADcowrote the new film with the director. Here, as in all his roles, Segel is a big, soft presence, but his smarts shine through. So it was inspired of Stoller to pair him not with one of the usual rom-com ladies, charming as most of them are, but with the crisp, thoughtful Blunt, an eccentric \u00ADEnglish beauty with brains to spare. Their characters, Tom and Violet, are living comfortably together in San Francisco when we meet them. He&amp;#039;s a sous chef on the way up; she&amp;#039;s a would-be \u00ADacademic, hoping to get into a PhD program in psychology. But then comes the first of several flashbacks to the New Year&amp;#039;s Eve party where they met two years \u00ADearlier and immed\u00ADiately sparked. Their party \u00ADcostumes hint at the charmingly odd \u00ADcouple they might become: She&amp;#039;s a jaw-dropping double of the young Princess Diana, right down to the puffy sleeves and rhinestone tiara, while he&amp;#039;s standing around in a large pink bunny suit. For romantic comedy to work, the \u00ADlovers must have convincing chemistry together, and these two do. Segel has lushly handsome features, but he doesn&amp;#039;t work them. His Tom is a big teddy bear, while Violet is your basic urban sylph. This feels like a typical setup for her to be the more anxious, high-strung one and he the warm consoler; instead, that ball passes back and forth between them, as it does in any good relationship. Still, contemporary rom-coms differ from their predecessors in their distrust of the long haul. As Stoller&amp;#039;s title suggests, the looming \u00ADprospect of Happily Ever After makes this couple skittish. So instead of a wedding, they invite family and friends to their engagement party, which has the great comic virtue of introducing a goofier potential pair, Tom&amp;#039;s younger, frat-boy colleague, Alex (a very funny Chris Pratt), and Violet&amp;#039;s \u00ADvociferously independent sister, Suzie \u00AD(ditto \u00ADAlison Brie). Alex treats the guests to a slide show of Tom&amp;#039;s many previous girlfriends, rattling them off like an auction\u00ADeer, followed by Suzie&amp;#039;s celebration of singlehood even as inconvenient tears keep springing from her eyes. And you Animal Kingdom fans, look for the marvelous Jacki Weaver as Violet&amp;#039;s mom. Engagement has a fair amount of meat on its bones compared with most flicks of its ilk\u2014largely due to career pressures on Tom and Violet that threaten to tear them apart. This dark turn could have sucked the joy out of the movie itself, but Stoller strikes a canny balance between the couple&amp;#039;s growing misery and some of the broadest comedy the script has to offer. It turns out those charming flashbacks have a purpose: They&amp;#039;re poignant reminders of what&amp;#039;s about to be lost. The leavening \u00ADhumor at this point in the story includes a hilariously horrible sex scene and a dimly lit view of Segel&amp;#039;s rather vulnerable \u00ADbottom. But the funniest scene of all\u2014the one that reduced an early preview audience to squealing like children and that makes you want to see the movie all over again\u2014\u00ADinvolves the use of a couple of well-known puppets who aren&amp;#039;t even on-screen. Rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll drives another love story by fearless Scottish art-house film director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Asylum, Mister Foe). Tonight You&amp;#039;re Mine features hotties Luke Treadaway and \u00ADNatalia Tena as fictional indie-rock stars Adam and \u00ADMorello, who front different bands and detest each other on sight. Seeing them squabble, a peacenik prankster claps their wrists together with a pair of handcuffs and runs off with the key, forcing them to spend the next 24 hours in close company, onstage and off. Adam&amp;#039;s fashion-model girlfriend is not amused, nor is riot grrrl Morello&amp;#039;s shy banker beau. Amazingly, the movie was almost entirely shot on the fly smack in the middle of Scotland&amp;#039;s annual version of Woodstock\u2014the very real, very large T in the Park\u2014complete with shirtless lads diving into the mud against a backdrop of sex and drugs and one fierce band after another. Mix that with the rockers&amp;#039; fractious, budding romance, including Treadaway and \u00ADTena&amp;#039;s blasting onstage duets, and Mackenzie has served up a double treat. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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