MOVIE REVIEW
Must Love Dogs (2 stars out of 5)
Must love retro, not to mention sweet and cute
By Roger Moore
Sentinel Movie Critic
July 29, 2005
Family Ties creator Gary David Goldberg discovers Internet dating in
Must Love Dogs, a deja viewed romantic comedy that is somewhat less
than the sum of its thefts.
Diane Lane, lately our favorite dumped fortysomething, is Sarah, a
woman “of a certain age” back in the dating scene. Her overlarge,
sit-commie family, including Elizabeth Perkins doing that sassy
sister/best friend thing she has done since About Last Night and
Christopher Plummer as her Irish, Keats-quoting dad, want her to date
again. They have an “intervention.”
That Goldberg, right on the comic cutting edge . . . of
1994. Remember, Family Ties premiered on TV in 1982. Goldberg has lost
a bit, OK, a lot, off his comic fastball. At least, he included dogs.
John Cusack, everywoman’s Sensitive Man, sleepwalks through the High
Fidelity/Serendipity sweet-guy-who-may-get-away, a role he has been
playing since Say Anything.
Heck, Dermot Mulroney is “the other man,” wishing this was My Best
Friend’s Wedding II.
Not that this doesn’t include a heaping helping of that film. And
Serendipity. And Under the Tuscan Sun and oh-so-many others. When the
sisters all start singing the theme to The Partridge Family, you
expect Rupert Everett, Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz to chime in.
Goldberg still has a way with a sensitive one-liner. Sarah’s latest
date was a dud.
“Let’s go watch Beaches,” her sister blurts.
Why don’t we all?
Distraught over the heartbreak of a failed marriage?
“I think your heart grows back bigger,” swoons Cusack’s Jake, a
wooden-boat builder who refuses to date luscious 24-year-olds because
they’re “too young,” who watches Doctor Zhivago over and over again to
show how sensitive he is.
No, there are no men like that. No straight ones, anyway.
Cusack supposedly rewrote his own lines, and the parameters of his
character are so Message in a Bottle-idealized that you wonder if he
didn’t come up with those too. He tries to snap off his zingers to
second-choice sidekick Glenn Howerton as if his normal sidekick,
Jeremy Piven, wasn’t busy with ahit TV show (Entourage).
Sarah and Jake meet cute, fail to click, meet cute and meet cute
again. They practically trip over each other trying to keep
Serendipity from kicking in.
There’s even an adorable “Every drugstore in town is out of condoms”
dash through suburban L.A. in Jake’s Prius.
Of course, he drives a Prius. Really, you can’t make this stuff up. Or
shouldn’t.
The whole Internet dating thing, which is where the title comes from,
that always fictional “profile” you post on “Per fectdate.com” or
“Americahooks up.org,” is so 20th century. The novel twist is having
older folks like Dad Plummer and Stockard Channing (as a trailer-town
tart) try it out. But themovie Goldberg cooked up could have been
plotted, scripted and cast by computer, one operating on Windows 1.0.
Small cities no longer have revival movie houses that show Doctor
Zhivago.
People don’t name their Newfoundland hounds “Mother Theresa.”
Nobody does Armenian for dinner on the first date.
And the cute-but-hurt preschool teacher is almost as worn out as the
cute-but-hurt-preschool teacher with the gay best friend.
It’s OK to be retro with your screen romance, but retro shouldn’t feel
this inept.
Copyright © 2005, _Orlando Sentinel_
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress