My Best Friend’s Girl: Not That Awful

I imagine the studio pitch went something like this:

Hey, thanks for meeting with me.  I got this great idea for a film—it’s fresh and definitely original.  See, this guy meets his best friend/brother’s girlfriend/love interest, they start dating, then the friend finds out, there’s a riff between everyone, and in the end the guy and the girl get together and he makes up with his friend.  What?  Yeah, I’ve seen Dan in Real Life, what’s it to yooo—oohh yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.   No, this is going to be different . . . um, wait . . . ok, see the guy is a real jerk but once he starts dating this girl, he decides to change for her and he becomes a better person in the end.  Crap!  You’ve done that too?  Um, no, don’t call security!  I got it!  Other guys who’ve been dumped hire this guy to go on dates with their ex-girlfriends.  On these dates, the guy is a major a-hole and the girls, realizing they had it better with their ex-boyfriends, get back together with their ex-boyfriends.  Oh, you want to talk cast?  Who’s hot now?  Um…Dane Cook!  Yeah, he’s due for another movie.  No, no. this role is totally different from what he did in Dan In Real Life—Cook was the brother dating the original girl and his brother was interested in the girl.  See?  Different.  No I don’t remember the K-9/Turner & Hooch controversy of 1989; I was just starting at Harvard.  Anyway, I was thinking Jessica Alba as the female lead.  Wait, they’ve worked together already.  Who’s an It-girl type only with talent?  Like a young Goldie Hawn.  Got it, Kate Hudson!  Yeah, I heard she wants to work with someone besides Matthew McConaughey.  The friend?  I don’t know, how about a nerdy nice guy to balance out the jerky character?  Michael Cena?  Too young.  Jason Biggs?  Yeah, that could work.  So what do you think?

And a few weeks later…green light!  What’s the saying?  A classic never dies?

Let’s talk about the cast.  This was my first Kate Hudson movie and I’d consider watching something else with her again (provided there’s no Matthew McConaughey nearby).  I hear that Biggs is a good actor but I feel like I’ve only seen him play the same part, but he does it well.  This was also my first Cook film; he’s tolerable but I don’t get the big deal.  As a surprise treat, Alec Baldwin had a brief appearance as Cook’s sexist father who’s also a Women’s Studies professor.  His scenes alone make this something you could rent for a mindless evening of drinking alone on the couch.

Perhaps it was the awfulness of the last two movies I saw or perhaps it was the funny comments my fellow late afternoon moviegoers shouted at the screen, but this film wasn’t that bad even with an overdone story.  Language and some visuals aside, the humor was a step above the gutter—or at least a nice gutter in an upper-middle class neighborhood.  I didn’t want to walk out and I only checked my watch three times, and frankly, with the dogs I’ve seen this summer, that’s a vast improvement.