I SO wanted to like this movie. No, really! Don't let my age fool you. I have seen enough Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic comedies to know what they're like and how incredibly improbable and fun they are. The previews and ads billed this movie as an homage to those type of fun and playful comedies laced with sexual innuendo that you don't understand until you hit college. Yeah. Not so much with this one.
Renee Zellweger plays a career girl, Barbara Novak, who writes a novel called "Down With Love", inciting the women of the world to stand up for their womanly rights and to put their careers first and sex (not love, mind you) second. She postulates that this is the only way for women to be successful in this "man's world".
Ewan McGregor plays magazine writer Catcher Block who represents the root of all evil by allowing his libido to run rampant and, to quote another movie, "use women like ATM machines". His mission: to expose Renee Zellweger's character as a stereotypical woman who wants love and marriage and babies. David Hyde Pierce plays his antithesis of an editor who reminds me of the dorky guy in every Dawson's Creek-like show that you just want to hug for the duration of the episode. These two and the storyline between David Hyde Pierce's Peter MacMannus and Sarah Paulson's Vicki Hiller (Barbara's editor) are what make this movie relatively tolerable.
They try. Lord knows, they try. The costumes, the sets, the music...hell, even the split-screen shots. EVERYTHING is right out of the sixties sex comedies. I was even buying into it all. I wanted her to get the guy and I wanted him to get the girl. I even turned to my father in the middle of giggles and said that I had to get this movie when it came out.
Then it came. Not from outer space...from Renee's mouth. Her character delivers a doozy of a plot twist in an endless expository monologue. If I had been Ewan's character, I would have dozed off in the middle of it, but that's just me. I'm all for plot twists, but not at the expense of my stake in the characters. Everything that was in that monologue should have been in the first scene of the movie. THEN, the people watching it could root for the heroine in her quest to beat the Romeo at his own game. I seriously think that I felt more betrayed by her revelation than Catch did.
After the bombshell, I spent the rest of the movie wondering why it hadn't ended yet. I didn't care if Barbara got Catch or Catch caught her. I didn't know who the heroine was anymore and I hadn't been rooting for the guy to begin with. It was a little late to change the home team, so there was no one to be happy for when the end finally came around.
If you don't bolt for the door at the final fade, there's a hilarious scene with David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson, then there's the video. Evidently, Ewan pushed to get this video done for a song that he and Renee recorded for the movie. It's a great idea and it was cute, but he pulls off the singing and dancing WAY better than she does. Yes, yes, she was in "Chicago" and got an Oscar nod and is supposed to be so wonderful as a singer/dancer, yada yada, but I still think she needs to stick to acting. She's like me in that she can carry a tune in a bucket, but that's about it. She reminds me of those girls in the junior high talent show that do the stilted dance routine because they've taken dance for two years and think they're Janet Jackson. Ewan glides around the set where Renee attempts to walk (okay, granted she's in mile-high heel and those things are a bi*** to move around in when you're NOT doing it in rhythm). Where he sounds like Bobby Darin, she sounds like the girls in my sister's swing choir. It just doesn't work.
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