27 Dresses

Ah, the date movie. What better way to spend a Saturday night with your sweetie than by taking part in a bright and cheery group lobotomy? Yay monogamous heterosexual marital bliss for the vacuous and the toothsome! Yay retrograde conservative dogma! Churlish? Moi? It's not that I want my romantic comedies to be dazzlingly original or to even have the most fleeting acknowledgement of reality; I just don't want them to be this hideously, unforgivably dull. To say that 27 Dresses is clichéd really doesn't quite grasp the dizzyingly vast collection of rom-com mainstays that director Anne Fletcher trots out for our collective lack of amusement. Wigglesome, apple-cheeked Heigl is thirty-something Jane, always a bridesmaid never a…yup. Marsden, packing his usual 27,000-kilowatt grin, is Kevin, a cynical Wedding Journalist (no, really) who spends most of the film being deceitful and stalkerish. Will these two crazy kids ever get it together? Unfortunately Jane is mooning after her boss George (Ed Burns, sitting back and letting his stubble do the acting for him), while George only has eyes for her sister Tess (Malin Akerman: like dental floss with botox). Wackiness ensues. And yes, there is the inevitable dresses montage, and if olive-satin mini-dresses and taffeta petticoats make you just giddy with the ironic cuteness of it all, then boy howdy, is this the film for you. [Laura Smith]