She Did Not See My “A” Game

During yesterday’s post, I slipped in that Jerry Maguire was one of the few chick flicks that guys can actually enjoy because it had football for us to focus on. As for chick flicks, that’s pretty much the list except for one caveat; oddly enough John Cusack who has somehow make a career out of making watchable romantic comedies from hoisting up the jukebox in Say Anything all the way up to one of the best movies of the past ten years, High Fidelity.

Cusack’s latest entry into the genre is Must Love Dogs, a movie centered on what seems to be a booming business, internet dating. Both Cusack and his female counterpart, Diane Lane, are recently divorced yet not ready to get back into the game. But thanks to some nosey family members and an over-sex lawyer, both inadvertently make into the world of on-line dating. Sadly that’s where the hilarity stops.

The start of the movie starts off with a few chucklers and looks to be focused on the two main characters as they are forced to get back on the horse. But once the internet profile is set up, it quickly turns into Lane’s movie and Cusack wrongly takes a back seat. At this point the movie is rarely romantic or comedic, which is never good for a film that is supposed to be in the genre. Speaking of underused, Stockard Channing is grossly underused as one of Lane’s father’s girlfriends. Much like the Cusack character, Channing’s looked as if they had a bigger part for it, but never got around to fleshing it out.

Plenty of romantic comedy cliché about most notably the obligatory spontaneous break out into song scene. Ironically enough Dermot Mulroney, who may have started this cliché in My Best Friend’s Wedding, is involved in the scene and adds to the insainity of the premise by rushing to the piano to accompany the singing. And what mobile home doesn’t have a piano? The biggest fraud of this movie hough is that not only did neither main character actually own a dog; Snoop Doggy Dogg didn’t even appear in the movie. What a shame.

Must Love Dogs gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.