While I expected I Love You, Man to be yet another mediocre entry in the increasingly popular bromance comedy movie genre, two things in particular lift this entry ahead of the pack: Paul Rudd and Jason Segal. 
(There’s a pretty stellar supporting cast, as well.) Rudd plays the part of the damaged male lead, Peter Klaven. Peter isn’t a 40 year old virgin, or a 40 year old living at home, or a guy who’s obsessed with baseball. Instead, when Peter decides to get married, he discovers that he doesn’t really have any male friends. Eventually Segal’s self-assured man-child Sydney Fife comes along, and the two discover that they are best friends forever cruelly kept apart by the universe until now, the moment that the crushing tide of societal expectations of responsibility and conformity is threatening to ruin the little bubble Sydney has nurtured and Peter admires.
There isn’t anything transformative about this picture, by any means, but Rudd inhabits Peter extremely well, taking a character type (one that is effectively laughable) and creating a remarkably believable person. Segal reprises a version of his Forgetting Sarah Marshall character, and that works quite well. The two actors complement each other (there’s bromantic chemistry, I guess), creating the best laughs from the sheer discomfort that exudes from Peter’s trying way to hard to be cool. The story doesn’t go anywhere unexpected, but the journey brought with it many more laughs than I was prepared to have.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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