Word: besting
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...enough about them. We know they're going to get together, despite the heat between them topping out at about 56° (Fahrenheit, sadly), but we never get vested in the romance. Eckhart's best moments are the ones in which we see Burke psyching himself up to glad-hand his fans. But problematically, even after we've seen the "real" Burke, the snake-oil salesman with the sharky grin is more convincing. So it's far more satisfying to focus on the supporting actors, the people who try their hardest to make this cutely maudlin movie bearable...
...woefully underappreciated actor John Carroll Lynch. You might remember him from Fargo, in which he played Marge Gunderson's husband Norm, or Things We Lost in the Fire, in which he gave a compellingly tender and pleasingly peculiar performance as Halle Berry's neighbor. Love Happens is not his best work - that would probably be his chilling performance in Zodiac as the prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen - but it's still pretty fine. Lynch has been working steadily since 1993, which was right about the time of Eckhart's first screen credit, but he, unlike Eckhart, never become a star...
...coping with grief would be complete without some comic relief, or at least that's what the studio presumably told the screenwriters, Mike Thompson and Brandon Camp, who also directed. To that end, we have Judy Greer and Dan Fogler. Greer has made a career of playing the wry best friend (27 Dresses, 13 Going on 30, The Wedding Planner). She plays Marty, a poetess, flower arranger and dispenser of advice to Eloise, and as usual, she's cute, funny and charming enough to be able to recite a poem featuring a phallus without making you hate her. Fogler plays...
...says Richard Wilkinson, professor of medical epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, whose work has shown that wealth equality is far more important to population well-being than overall wealth. "We have reached the point, after millennia, in which raising material living standards is no longer the best way of improving quality of life. In wealthy countries, we now need to turn our attention to other factors, such as the quality of our social interactions...
...Included in the panel were Princeton University's Daniel Kahneman, one of the first psychologists to apply happiness studies to economics; the British economist Nicolas Stern, whose influential "Stern Report" advocated green technologies to stimulate economic growth; and Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist and best-selling author of Bowling Alone, which traces the decline of the U.S.'s "social capital" through the decline of 10-pin bowling leagues...