Recommendable to anyone desirous of an old-fashioned bubblegum comedy, bright and sweet and airy and chewy, about a Piggly Wiggly checker in Frazier's Bottom, W.Va., who gets selected out of the legion of Internet applicants for a night on the town with a Hollywood heartthrob anxious to reclaim his image from tabloid cover boy to Boy Next Door. Big-screen newcomer Josh Duhamel (ex-Leo on the daytime soap, All My Children) harnesses all the required confidence, entitlement, jadedness, and, upon command, charm, in the role of the heartthrob. All he lacks is the stature to set himself apart, as a bigger star would automatically have done (a Leonardo DiCaprio, a Brad Pitt), from the Little People: Topher Grace, of Fox-TV's That '70s Show, who is no less confident, in an overpracticed sitcommy way, as the actual Boy Next Door, or Kate (Blue Crush) Bosworth, who as the winning contestant shows every capability of becoming the next Sandra Dee, a position vacant for thirty-five years. Kathryn Hahn as a tattooed but tender-hearted bartender makes a good impression as well. The kidding of Tinsel Town could hardly be more kid-glove (the Big Star speaking broken Spanish to his Albanian housemaid), and if the extolling of the simple life and small-town values seems a tad two-faced, there is plenty of truth in that duality -- plenty of honestly torn emotion -- and plenty of tradition, too. The humor throughout remains solidly rooted in character and situation, never straining the bounds of probability or taste. Ginnifer Goodwin, Nathan Lane, Sean Hayes, Gary Cole; directed by Robert Luketic. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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