not romantic, not comic, not good

Rating: 1/10 (5 December 2007)

I had no preconceptions before watching this-- i just wanted a bit of fun diversion for the evening. Instead, what i ended up with was a nearly-unwatchable steaming pile of scenes that failed to achieve the basic requirements of story or characterisation.
It occurred to me early on that perhaps the goal of the film was to take the highest-paid, biggest-name actors the producers could find & make the worst movie possible out of their contributions.
What made the subject/story/believability of characters even harder to choke down were two additional crimes: 1) the underlying theme of "ooh celebrities have it so rough here's a feature-length PSA examining their plight"; 2) the under-use of at least 2 truly brilliant comedic actors (the picaresque Dylan Moran & the luminous Julian Rhind-Tutt), who put art before ego & therefore do the job of acting better.
I still could not figure out, at the end of the film, what drew the 2 main characters together. If their feelings were so compelling, the audience should at least have the remotest inkling as to _why_, surely.
The constant fawning over the fictional starlet was nauseating and demeaning-- surely, a single celebrity can not be held in the same degree of spluttering fascination by all who encounter her-- not every "famous" person resonates in the same way by all those little people who behold their greatness... and, amazingly enough, some people even don't even care about celebrities!
There was a great deal of discontinuity between threads which started & then disappeared with no resolution, the uncomfortable clash of comic with tragic (even in the same scene), and the mix of UK & US slang.
The soundtrack was also way off base... not sure whether there was a single UK cover/artist in the lineup. Considering the whole film was set in the UK, the usage of so many United Statesian artists felt confused & displacing.
With plot twists you can spot a mile away, unconvincing "romance", an ill-fitting jumble of predictably kooky characters, and an intolerable repetition of self-effacing British stereotype "sorry's" & other self-deprecations, this movie is entirely missable.