"This is the way the world ends," poet T.S. Eliot wrote. "Not with a bang but a whimper."
For reasons that are so obvious that storytellers have stopped mentioning them, the apocalypse is all the rage. Survivalists are counting the days until the rapture or the Mayan meltdown, and last year we had two separate movies about astronomical annihilation ("Another Earth" and "Melancholia").
An asteroid is the off-screen bad guy in "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World," but the problem with this nice-try comedy is the nice-guy protagonist. Steve Carell, as a whimpering white suburbanite who hunts for a lost love while the clock runs down, is a black hole that sucks the satirical juice from the movie.
Carell is Dodge, an East Coast insurance agent whose wife leaves him on the eve of destruction. While his yuppie friends fornicate and snort heroin (a wickedly funny touch), Dodge wonders what ever happened to his first love, Olivia.
As the faceless masses finally make a cameo appearance in his neighborhood, Dodge stages a hasty getaway with Penny (Keira Knightley), the free spirit from the apartment downstairs, who has a car and an armload of vintage vinyl to wile away the hours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7FKVAuDv8M&feature=player_embedded
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/keira-knightley-steals-apocalyptic-comedy-from-steve-carell/article_c4919d70-b9c7-11e1-b8ad-0019bb30f31a.html#ixzz1yefoGrRM
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