Peter Sollet’s romantic comedy reviewed in 140 characters or less.

Ok, maybe that’s not entirely true but the last year certainly feels like a blur.

 Try as I might to not fully realize it, it’s been a year since I packed my life into a yellow truck and drove from Destin to Beaufort, a place I’ve called home since April 2008. Kind of hard to believe that at this time last year, I was packing up my CDs, DVDs, kitchen stuff into boxes for a move to a place I’d seen only once. I remember sitting in my then-empty bedroom, only one more box to load up before spending the night in the Residence Inn at Sandestin, thinking about how fast time can fly when you’re not paying attention. Time is funny that way. It seems like when you’re younger all you ever want to be is older, and once you get there, all you want is to go back to when you were younger. A time that seemed, by comparison, a lot less complicated, frustrating and downright scary. 

I still miss Destin and don’t know that any part of me will ever look back on that experience, at working at The Log and the relationships and friendships forged in that unbelievable place with anything but the fondest of memories. Truthfully, it’s where I cut my teeth and as I look around at people scrambling to justify the extra money they spent on more education after college, I become increasingly appreciative that Jim Wagner took a chance on a kid from Indiana University with only a few clips to his name and hired me to work at The Destin Log. That year and a half in Destin changed my life and I will be forever grateful for that opportunity and my experience – both professionally and otherwise – there.

Despite how fast the last year has gone, it is the past month that has provided the great amount of change.  Changes, both for what I hope to the better and what – for now least  - feels somewhat the like worse. To cut to the chase, after more than two and a half years, my girlfriend and I broke up. It feels weird saying that outloud because some part of me feels like it didn’t actually happen and when I look at my life it’s hard to see the physical changes. Inside though, the familiarity and comfort lost in not having someone there who was, at one point, such a central focus of your energies, effort and attention is pretty clear.  Though I’ve always been a man of the details, a guy who notices the small things, it’s amazing all of the intracies, idosyncracies and mannerisms about someone that kind of crystallize in your mind when you miss them. Truthfully, it’s been all I can do to try to not think about it. 

Sometimes that’s easy. Sometimes it’s not.

Every reporter or photographer who covers these kinds of stories (as I do) has had the conversation with themselves that Halevi had on that bluff. Thankfully, many of them never have to make that split-second decision and decide whether to help or stay behind and do your job. Many criticize Halevi, and later Halevi seems to question his own decision that day, for “letting a woman drown” just to get a good picture, just to sell some papers.

As journalists we often see things we wish we hadn’t and ask questions that many people, including our readers, viewers and ourselves, would rather not know the answers to. I don’t second guess Halevi’s decision not to help. As a journalist, my first job was working in Destin, Florida, walking stretches of sugar-white sand of a coastline fraught with rip tides. Having fairly close relationships with a number of beach umbrellas attendants, lifeguards and firefighters, I learned that often times those who go in after someone who is drowning are often killed themselves and then someone must go in after that person and so on and so forth. Whether that was Halevi’s reasoning that stormy day, no one can say for sure. But I find the idea that because someone is a journalist or someone is a photographer that they were complicit in the death of an innocent person just to get a good photographer insulting beyond reproach. There are those in this business who relish the sorrow, pain and misfortune of others for their own professional gain but that is, in my experience, most certainly the exception rather than the rule. As someone who has gotten into my car after an assignment and fought back tears or just weeped openly, I can tell you that this job gets to you and stays with you.

You never forget the stories you cover, the things people say to you and the things you witness with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. Halevi certainly did not.

In the interest of brevity, as we sit on the eve of Selection Sunday, I’ve thrown in my review of this film posted a few minutes ago on Twitter.

Not much more to say about it than that. The film is really carried by Rudd and a surprisingly-decent performance by McLovin’  Christopher Mintz-Plasse. 13-year-old Bobbe J. Thompson steals every scene he’s in and is hilarious throughout (as he did during his guest stint on Human Giant where he played himself as the head of Child Casting Agency, Shutterbugs). Sean William Scott players Stiffler again. Elizabeth Bank is underutilized and forgettable and the best performances of the film are turned in by Rudd, Thompson and Jane Lynch. 

Grade: B-