Inc. All rights reserved. By Gregory Weinkauf Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants , so, naturally, he begins unzipping his trousers en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning over her motley scrapbook of home furnishings and decor, composing her dreams of material comfort. While this production from Michael Douglas is being touted as a sexy romantic comedy, it's more precise to think of it as big loud fun for when you're feelin' dumb.
Laughter is inevitable, so long as one checks one's humanity at the door.
Taking its cues from the notion that a girl with great assets will turn men into asses, McCool's focuses upon Liv Tyler, who plays Jewel, an incarnation of erotic electricity who also happens to be a selfish, manipulative monster. She'll have none of that, however, and quickly integrates herself into his ratty old fixer-upper, left to him by his dear mother. Employing the lusty knave and his house as stepping stones toward realizing her dream of domestic bliss, Jewel ruthlessly exploits her gifts to get what she wants. In a bad Midwestern shirt and Cro-Magnon hairpiece copied from the one Steve Van Zandt wears on The Sopranos , Douglas gives himself the vanity role in his vanity project, playing unctuous and crudely cool. John Goodman, on the other hand, plays a cop who stakes out Jewel in Randy's house, collecting clues to the crimes she's catalyzing but also projecting all manner of virgin purity and feminine glory onto the undeserving shrew.