Writer and director Nancy Meyers arranges an Internet home exchange, for two weeks at Christmastime, between two wounded women desperate to get away: a London newspaper columnist (Kate Winslet) with a cozy cottage in Surrey, and a Hollywood trailer-cutter (Cameron Diaz) with a modernist mansion in Beverly Hills. The agreed-upon date of "tomorrow" initiates a pattern of time-compression that effectively removes the action from the realm of the real world. But then, Meyers does not seek to inhabit the real world. Underneath her superficial smooth talk, she's really just a seductive dope peddler, chumming up to her susceptible sisters on the subject of romantic disillusionment, and then hooking them on the same old delusions — the grooved path, greased wheels, and phantom obstacles en route to Mr. Right. The film, at best, is a testament to the dearness of the dream. The sample of the trailer-cutter's work — an imaginary action thriller starring Lindsay Lohan and James Franco — is dead funny: the two stars running straight at the camera and away from a mushrooming fireball, the male star diving sideways in slo-mo with two guns blazing. But the fantasies wherein she sees her own life in terms of a movie trailer never really take flight. Meyers's affection for Golden Age Hollywood — chiefly funnelled through the character of Eli Wallach as a widowed Oscar-winning screenwriter grumpily resisting a lifetime-achievement award from the WGA — is doubtless genuine, but our agreement with her must stop short of her persistent hints that she herself should be painted golden. With Jude Law, Jack Black, Rufus Sewell, Edward Burns. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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