Surprisingly entertaining -- even for a guy

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2010)

Brought the chick flick DVD home for my ailing wife and was happily surprised it was good enough to sit through and enjoy. I thought I'd prefer to miss an Ellen Page movie, she's a been a bit unnerving in the past, but in this case she was quite central to the movie's success. The whole movie's mostly a presentation of Ellen's performance, which would be no problem at all except that I would have enjoyed seeing more of Drew Barrymore and Juliette Lewis; their nicely turned performances seem oddly curtailed. But Ellen has a very low key presence and I'm not sure she could have managed to retain the film's focus without everyone else toning down theirs. We thankfully do get a bigger slice of Kristen Wiig's performance and also both Jimmy Fallon and Andrew Wilson add substantial substance to the film and are memorable. All in all hardly a waste of time and I can't help thinking the IMDb rating is unreasonably harsh. This movie has a lot of heart and I'm guessing Drew has a future as a director far beyond what the rating here indicates.