MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL - not to my taste, but I can imagine Dane Cook fans having a great time

From, improbably, the director of PRETTY IN PINK, comes a gross-out romantic comedy. Jason Biggs (AMERICAN PIE) is typecast as the desperate loser whose girlfriend (Kate Hudson) dumps him. In a characteristically contrived set-up, he hires his best-friend - a sort of anti-HITCH - who takes girls on piss-poor dates so that they realise how nice they guys they just dumped were and ask to get back with them. Problem is, the anti-Hitch and the girl actually hit it off. What follows is a bi-polar movie. The first two-thirds are firmly in gross-out territory with lots of non-politically correct dating humour. In the final third, the movie loses its balls and flips into a typically schmaltzy rom-com. I don't particularly find Dane Cook's brand of whacky humour funny, and I certainly don't dig formulaic rom-com's so I pretty much hated this film. BUT I can perfectly envisage fans of Dane Cook really having a great time with this film. So it's basically an alpha-gamma review. This movie does what it does. It's not to all tastes, so think carefully before you go, and hopefully you'll have a good time either way!

MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL is on release in Greece, Hungary, Russia, Thailand, the US, the Philippines, Israel, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Belgium, Brazil, Iceland, Turkey, Spain, New Zealand, South Korea, Estonia, Finland, Poland and the UK. It opens in Portugal on November 27th and in Sweden on December 5th.

Kevin Smith retrospective - JERSEY GIRL (2004) - in which Kevin Smith proves he can direct a movie as banal as any mainstream rom-com offering

JERSEY GIRL is a travesty - a movie in which hard-edged indie film-maker Kevin Smith jumps the shark with a movie as schmaltzy, formulaic and manipulative as the worst of the romantic-comedy genre. And no, the fact that his hero and heroine meet-cute over video-porn does not mitigate the BOMF trite denouement in which the hero has to choose between a big-shot job in New York and attending his daughter's school play. Liv Tyler's soft-spoken dead-pan certainly suits the merciful, porn-researching new girlfriend but Ben Affleck is typically wooden as the newly widowed single dad. Raquel Castro is fine as the kid, and George Carlin is heavily sanitised as her grandfather in this mainstream release. The only good thing about this movie, and I doubt I'm the first to say it, is that Jennifer Lopez' character dies in the first fifteen minutes.

JERSEY GIRL was released in and is available on DVD.

WEDDING DAZE - stealth comedy

There's something about WEDDING DAZE that defies the ludicrous premise. The idea is that a grieving fiance, prompted by his best friend's pleas to start dating again, asks the next girl he meets to marry him. Ridiculously, she says yes. And so they set off for a wedding chapel in Atlantic City with some kooky best friends, a jailbird dad and some cops in tow. Jason Biggs and Isla Fisher are just so darned likeable as the goofy lovers that you can't help rooting for them. Michael Weston and Ebon Moss-Bachrach are so quietly funny as their respective best friends that you can't help chuckling. In fairness, the whole Jewish toy gag and Joe Pantoliano/jailbird storyline left me cold. But what's not to like about Edward Herrmann and Margot Martindale playing Biggs' sexually voracious parents?

I'm not pretending that I laughed myself silly, but anything that makes you smile at the end and chuckle more than a couple of times has its merits.

WEDDING DAZE aka THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY played Toronto 2006. It opens in the UK on June 1st, in the US on September 17th, in Belgium on September 19th and in the Netherlands on September 20th.

GUY X - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

There are lots of great films about the absurdity of war that combine black comedy with insightful social comment. GUY X is not one of them. GUY X is what happens when you take all that is wickedly funny, noble and true in M*A*S*H and CATCH-22 and then invert it. The film tells the story of a young soldier in 1979 who is posted to Greenland by mistake. Unable to resolve this clerical error he sets about writing the Base newspaper for the autocractic Colonel Woolrap while romancing Woolrap's chick. The movie fails to create the claustrophic, Kafka-esque atmosphere necessary and has NOT ONE SINGLE funny line or moment. The romance between Jason Biggs and Natasha McElhone is insipid. Worse still, McElhone and Jeremy Northam - two fine British actors - cannot do American accents. The final nail in the coffin is when the director lazily sticks "War (What is it good for?)" by Edwin Starr on the soundtrack. This is a brave move because as every funk fan knows, the response to the question is "absolutely nothing". Cue the inevitable title for my review....

GUY X played a bunch of minor Film Festivals including the oh-so-wittily named RAINDANCE festival in London in autumn 2005. It is currently on limited release in Canada and is available on Region 2 DVD.