I went to a sneak preview of this one, and before the movie even started my friend hooked me up with two stacks of tickets: one for Barenaked Ladies, one for Sugar Ray and Uncle Kracker. Good night already. The only problem is the BNL concert conflicts with a sneak preview for Planet of the Apes, and I am so geeked about that movie it's not even funny. Tim Burton and Apes. What more could you ask for? I'll figure it out.
Anyway, America's Sweethearts. The setup is this: a famous Hollywood couple, played by John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones, has split up. The studio has their last film together and needs to sell it, so they drag everyone out to a remote press junket in the desert and try to make the public think everything is fine. Julia Roberts plays Zeta-Jones's sister, who has been the couple's assistant and handler for years and is quietly in love with Cusack. Billy Crystal plays the publicist running damage control on the whole mess. The director, played by Christopher Walken, is somewhere in the hills with the finished film and nobody knows what's in it.
It's a satire of Hollywood and celebrity culture and the machine that packages all of it for public consumption. It doesn't go very deep with any of that. The movie is more interested in being a breezy comedy than in actually saying something sharp about the industry. That's fine. Not every satire needs to draw blood.
What it does have is a good cast that clearly enjoyed making it. Crystal gets most of the best lines and delivers them well. Roberts is warm and easy to root for. Cusack is doing his usual slightly-wounded-decent-guy thing, which works here. Zeta-Jones is playing a monster and commits to it completely. Hank Azaria shows up as her new boyfriend and gets a few good moments. The movie moves fast and doesn't overstay its welcome.
It's not a great movie. The plot is thin, the satire is soft, and it wraps up exactly the way you expect it to. But I laughed, and I laughed more than once, and sometimes that's the whole job. Worth a look if you want something light and you like any of the people in it.
