What we have learnt from 'He's Just Not That Into You'

*If you force someone to marry you, they will have an affair and hide their smoking from you, but if you don't force someone to marry you, you will split up, get back together after a few months of ritual humiliation on your part and living on a boat on his part, and he will compromise all his values and marry you anyway.

*Baltimore is nothing like the Wire. There are still corners, but they are clean and empty. Front steps are street kid free and lead to frosted glass doors, not crack dens. Everyone has exposed brickwork and distressed leather furniture and every house overlooks the Domino Sugar factory. It's also a yuppie's dream, as it appears you can afford a massive warehouse loft to yourself simply by managing a bar, or doing some vague office job where you actually spend all day squealing and jumping up and down or running out at a moment's notice to catch your hubby cheating.

*Jennifer Aniston has a head like a sweet potato**.

*If you a sexually liberated feisty young woman who knows what she wants (read: slut) you will end up sad and alone (even if you are Scarlett Johanssen) but if you are a kooky fuckup with no social skills who acts like a twelve year old, you will meet the man of your dreams because 'at least you try'

*If you are Jennifer Connolly you must be asking yourself why on earth you are in this film.

*If you are gay, you will flock around Drew Barrymore like squawking seagulls ready at any moment to drop a dead fish of sassy relationship advice into her lap. You will also be well schooled in rolling your eyes, clicking your fingers and generally binding the different storylines together in various tenuous ways. You will dress like the last ten years never happened (see right)

*The best place to tell your wife you cheated on her is the flooring aisle of Homebase. This section was also good ammunition for the argument I had with my brother that you really can't tell the difference between laminate and real wood flooring.

*The mirror in your house is not for checking your hair, it is for Seeing Into Your Soul. Every so often you will look in it with a faraway gaze, then either sigh wistfully or smash it into lots of pieces. If the latter, you will then get a new mirror, symbolically put it on the wall of your new batchelorette pad and repeat.

*Scarlett Johnanssen truly has a fantastic figure. Dodgy hair extensions not so much.

*You will leave the cinema uneasy at a film that on one hand shows some quite obvious truths about relationships (if he doesn't call... if she doesn't sleep with you... if he doesn't want to marry you etc etc) but on the other hand ties up all the ends nicely and 'happily ever after' under the weak justification that these women are 'the exceptions to the rule'. Unless you are the slut. (see above)

*Wood Green is the BEST place to see any film of even slight comedic merit. Honestly, the cinema was half full but it was still like sitting in a Ricki Lake audience when some fat woman just stripped down to her red polyester neglegee- the whooping! The laughing! The genuine gasps of shock at coming-a-mile-off revelations! I swear I even heard a 'go girl!' at one point. There was also one man with a really distinctive loud laugh, which is just great, because you end up laughing at their laugh rather than the lame pratfall that happened onscreen.

Update: Rather good article in the Guardian about this twatfest of a film and why romcoms in general are vile

**I know, I know it's all anti-woman to say so, but she is getting to the age where you can't get away with superlong romcom facial closeups when you are projected sixty foot high onto a screen. It's harsh, but it's just not that nice to look at. See Sarah Jessica Parker in SATC. That said, it's not everyone, the rest of the SATC 'girls' and Drew Barrymore did not offend the eyeballs so. Maybe 'a face for television' is the kindest way to say it.