Brittney
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13
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02-12-2003 01:25 PM ET (US)
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Seems my little review will appear in next week's edition of the Nashville Scene. :)
I just got off the phone with the lead critic who called it clean, funny and "far ahead of most first-time submissions," just after jokingly opening with "Brittney, this is going to need a major re-write."
Here is the rough draft for anyone interested. If you want to skip it I'll be posting the final version to my blog next week, rest assured.
“How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” is so underwhelming that it may function more successfully as a tutorial on how to lose a viewer in under ten minutes. Director Donald Petrie (whose resume includes such lackluster flicks as “Miss Congeniality” and the faint recollection that is the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle “The Associate”) dares not stray from formula in his newest, feeble effort--a romantic comedy that botches both the romantic and the comedic aspects of the over-saturated genre. His two leads, the luminous Kate Hudson and the hopelessly down-home Matthew McConaughey, valiantly try to act their way out of the mediocrity, but they fail, and instead become marooned in it.
The film’s paramount flaw is its preposterous premise. Andie (Kate Hudson) is the “How-To girl” at Composure magazine, the fastest-rising women’s fashion rag in the country. A Columbia-educated journalist, Andie longs to write about politics, religion, foreign policy—things she really cares about— but is instead assigned a column in which she reveals 10 ways to a hot bod and other such banalities. She pitches the story idea responsible for the movie’s title to her Helen Gurley Brown-esque (but younger) editor, Lana (an under-used Bebe Neuwirth), who encourages her to find a man, then become as clingy, desperate and stereotypically psychotic as possible to illustrate how to do it all wrong.
That man is Ben (Matthew McConaughey), an advertising executive who attempts to nab a diamond account from his smolderingly sexy (and pencil-thin) female competitors by convincing his boss that his ability to make any woman fall in love with him in just ten days means he understands what women want, and therefore, how to sell diamonds. This is the kind of unsound, perhaps sexist, shallow logic that permeates the entire piece, and when, implausibly, Andie and Ben choose one another for their ridiculous ruses, the viewer is made aware they are going to have to actively exercise their suspension of disbelief.
The deceitful pair spend the entire ten days swindling, manipulating and misrepresenting themselves, yet, inexplicably, there is a bubbling attraction between them. The viewer may ponder what Ben sees in the dreadful Andie, but her Boticelli face, which the director frames with a soft focus lens so smoky it calls attention to itself. Ben, likewise, is flat and uninteresting save for his finely toned physique. The dialogue between the two isn’t just stale it is lazy. Their initial conversation is an unimaginative volley of single word sentences that could have been clever and charming if they weren’t so uninspired. The characters say and do what is expected of them, from start to the very end, but, hey, at least they look good doing it. “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” isn’t so terrible that it is unbearable to watch; it is just so maddeningly average that it is devoid of any joy.
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