The mating dance of a trailblazing, best-selling feminist author and a men's-magazine hedonist revives the Rock Hudson and Doris Day series of bedroom comedies, right down to the re-creation of the original period (1962) and the presence on screen of Tony Randall (although David Hyde Pierce takes the role that would have gone to Randall in the old days). "Revives" might be the wrong term. Struggles futilely to resuscitate; transplants an artificial heart into; hooks up to a lightning rod in a Dr. Frankenstein thunderstorm. Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger, quite apart from their inferior charms, camp up their roles as though performing on a catwalk, a pair of herky-jerky wind-up dolls. (But while Zellweger's taut, ropy physique is no more at home here in the Sixties than in Chicago in the Twenties, McGregor's trim but unsculpted torso can easily pass inspection.) Beyond the cartoony characterizations, the overall broadness of touch of director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) conveys a contempt for the entire genre. Comparison, albeit inadvertently, is thus invited to the recent revivalism of Todd Haynes in Far from Heaven. Haynes may have felt a superiority to the depicted era, but not to its imitated films. Question for Reed: why, then, bother? Question for moviegoers: same. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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