After work yesterday I decided to use up some of those goddamn Cineplex Odeon passes and saw Picture Perfect and My Best Friend's Wedding.

It's funny, but I liked Picture Perfect better. I judge a good romantic comedy by how depressed and hopeless I feel about my life at the end of it, and I was wet faced and suicidal at the end of that film, while My Best Friend's Wedding left me a bit cold. I loved bits of it, but not the whole.

To fall in line with every reviewer, I will say that the screen lit up like a Roman candle whenever Rupert Everett was on and lay there like a mackerel when he wasn't. And the male lead was perfectly fine and all, but certainly not worth all that fuss--he didn't have that spark that a leading man in a romantic screwball comedy must have or there is no point. I did like the way that everyone kept bursting into song, and I thought that the kareoke scene was one of the bravest bits of acting that I've ever seen, and I liked ol' Julia very much, but as a whole it just didn't gel for me.

Picture Perfect, on the other hand, is right up there with Green Card and While You Were Sleeping and Crossing Delancy and Moonstruck for me. And Jay Mohr, though not as good looking as Dermot Mulroney or Dylan McDermott (whichever the hell one is in My Best Friend's Wedding) is remarkably charismatic. He was on Saturday Night Live for years and never manifested a smitch of charisma, so I don't know where it suddenly came from, but he had it in spades in this film.

When Mom saw it the other day, she commented on Jennifer Aniston's hair, which made me weep with laughter. I said "Mom, she has had the single most famous hairstyle in America for the past three years!" and she said "Well, I've never seen it!"

Two small observations in My Best Friend's Wedding:

1. "Eric Isaakson-Senior Editor Sporting Magazine" is not, has never been, and will never be an e-mail address, and:

2. In that scene with Julia and Rupert where they're in her hotel room and she's smoking a cigarette and then lays back on the bed and Rupert lays back too, and then you see both of her hands...no cigarette!
Did she stick it in her belly button?

The thing about romantic comedies is that they are about two lonely and isolated people, so lonely their bones ache, who find each other and don't have to be lonely anymore. And I love these films with all my heart, but they do tend to make me sad because I am that lonely, too.

One year ago today:
I sound like Jack Klugman

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