A serviceable romantic comedy

Rating: 7/10 (3 October 2006)

One of my friends really likes this movie. So I decided to give it a try. Well, it was a pleasant, simple and mostly implausible romantic comedy about a famous fictional actress and the man that loves her.
In terms of romantic comedy, this film basically gets the touchstones right. There are quirky, but fleshed out supporting characters. Silly scenarios and the like. It's cute enough to be smile-making funny, albeit nothing laugh-out-loud. But that's fine.
It's likable. But it still has a few faults, some of which I'll describe here. The film takes a shortcut in developing the characters' relationship by use of montage. I generally dislike this practice, except if you need to get across a lot of information quickly. In this case, it was to skip past the hard work of showing these people get to like each other. And so it comes across to me as cheap and I have a hard time believing that they've come to like each other. Of course, I just bought it for the sake of not hating the film--but it would be nice it the story featured more of that and cut a little bit more of the not-as-funny comedy bits.
The other thing is that the main characters are pretty flat. That is, both protagonists aren't very well developed (albiet the male protagonist is a little more developed than the actress) and so sometimes wasn't really caring about their trials and tribulations. But otherwise, they seem to be lifted from templates rather than having been thought through carefully. The supporting characters, on the other hand, have more depth than I expected. Unfortunately, it's not their story.
Still, it does its got as a serviceable romantic comedy just fine so I can say that you might enjoy it. I enjoyed it at least, even if at times I was throwing crumpled paper at the screen. 7/10.
Another note: I really didn't like the overuse of pop music in the film, especially the overblown music used to bookend the film. It felt a little tacked on or inorganic to the soul of the film and almost seems to try to "sell" the scene as emotionally related to the piece of selected music. Perhaps with more carefully selected tunes, it wouldn't have been so bad, but the choices were either overly melodramatic or just too well-known.