Starring: Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Alec Baldwin, Lizzy Caplan

Directed by: Howard Deutch

Lionsgate Films

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My Best Friend’s Girl has everything you could possibly want out of a sweet, romantic comedy not so subtlety disguising itself as a crude R-rated, sexy romp. Cussing, vulgarity, beautiful women, inappropriate priest molestation jokes, Dane Cook – Not so fast…

Yeah - Dane’s back. Trying yet again to win us over as the bad boy with a heart of gold. This time he plays Tank, a male chauvinist jackass for hire. If you’ve chased away your girlfriend by being to mean, too dumb, or too inconsiderate, Tank swoops in, romances her and then shows her how good she had it with you by treating her to the worst first date of her life.

As unenthusiastic as I was to see Cook going through the motions of a character he’s tried and failed at twice already, the bad date Dr. is actually kind of a cool idea and, believe it or not, it’s handled pretty well. After Tank’s best friend Dustin (Jason Biggs) hires him to chase his would-be girlfriend Alexis (Kate Hudson) back into his clingy arms, things take an unexpected turn. Tank never counted on falling in love.

We’ve all heard the Cars song that the movie is named after though, or saw the trailer where they made it obvious, or are not complete morons, so the audience saw this coming a mile away. And even though My Best Friend’s Girl could have used a few more laughs along the way and some better chemistry between any two of the three stars on screen, the story is pretty solid. Predictable but, what good Cars song isn’t predictable?

So, It’s a nice enough idea but not clever enough to distract you from the persistent itch that Dane Cook’s time is up! His 15-minutes of fame have come and gone and he insists on puttering along making average to below-average raunchy comedies with super hot female costars. But it’s up!

You could argue that time is ticking away for the other two as well. Remember when Kate Hudson was a fresh new Oscar nominee with the world in her hand and Jason Biggs won us over by dry humping a pie? What happened to those two? What happened over the last 10 years that has made them take a back seat to Dane Cook – the flavor of the month three years ago?

Alec Baldwin is definitely the odd duck in the bunch, and when he turns up (a draining 50 minutes into the movie) you’ll be surprised to see him. After that amount of time of watching pure mediocrity, his mere presence raises the bar enough to remind you that you actually paid for this “entertainment�.

Yowza. That was a rough way of saying, “it’s nice to see Alec�. He’s good here though, as Tank’s father, a life-long womanizer who represents the sad horny future that awaits Tank if he doesn’t change his ways. Baldwin comes in just in time to steer the movie in the right direction and to give it some much-needed credibility. I would say that this is proof he should be in every single movie, but not every movie deserves him.

My Best Friend’s Girl is the kind of movie I have trouble getting too mad at. It’s an inoffensive story that never pushes hard enough for that perfect laugh, perfect performance or perfect anything. It’s a great date movie just not one worth paying 20 bucks to see. This bunch of actors that are on the way out might just have a few minutes left on their fading celebrity after all. Times not up, but they didn’t exactly earn any good faith minutes either.

Rating: 5 out of 10 - Is Dane’s time really up? Not necessarily. I think he’s had some good and bad choices on the big screen (I find him most impressive in supporting parts when he sneaks in to steal the scene and is gone before he can muck things up - Dan in Real Life,Mr. Brooks) but I still recognize that his home, on the comedy stage, is a place where he’s still very relevant. He may not be respected by his peers for “selling out� but watching his shows you can’t help but laugh. The guy knows how to work a crowd and he’s genuinely funny. It would be great if that kind of skill translated to screen with ease. So far… not so much. I’m looking forward to his next stand-up special a lot more than his next predictable on screen, sex-crazed adventure.

There was a time when I worked hard in the summers, didn’t have to pay rent, had disposable income and was first beginning my love affair with home video. Back then I probably would have bought My Best Friend’s Girl on VHS, used from Blockbuster. In a weird way I could even envision myself coming to appreciate it.

I look back on those times fondly. I found the most odd movies to love that I would never give a chance to now. EdTV… I would never buy that on DVD but it spun around my VCR at least 50 times in the early 2000s. It makes me wonder what kinds of movies I’m missing out on now in a time when I only buy what I REALLY want. At the same time I don’t have a bunch of crap I’ll never watch again in my DVD collection, and there are at least a dozen VHS cassettes under my bed that will never see a TV screen again.

Anyway, I feel like My Best Friend’s Girl could have been one of these movies. A movie I could watch over and over again and fall into “comfort love� or “like� with. If only it had been released 5 years earlier.

I spent a lot of time debating if I should or shouldn’t spell “Pole� correctly in the first panel. If I had I can only assume most people would have been distracted by it. “ Here we go again with the bad spelling…� I was careful not to have the word “Pole� mentioned in the second panel just so I wouldn’t have to have it spelled “wrong� then “right� and only add to the confusion. Looking back I feel like I spent too much time worrying about that and not enough worry that the text on the poles would be legible. It’s kind of important that it is.

Fear(s) of the Dark - I just went to TrailerAdidct.com to remind myself of the trailers that were in front of My Best Friend’s Girl and I saw this link to something called Fear(s) of the Dark. It had a really sharp poster so, even though it was not one of the trailers I saw with this film, I decided to give it a look.

Where the hell did this wonderfully dark and inventive little movie come from!? (A: IFC Films) From 6 different graphic artists comes a collection of animated shorts with a fresh sense of visuals perfectly suites the creepy, disturbing tone of the season. This is going to be a brilliant way to spend Halloween.

Check Fear(s) of the Dark on October 24th at the IFC center and On Demand.

Well, Eagle Eye finally comes out this weekend. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding the trailers even though, from what I can tell, it’s not like they’re giving too much away. We still don’t know who’s making the calls (even though the celebrity voice is a painfully familiar one), why they’re calling or why these characters were chosen to be included in this “game�, and that’s great. They’ll make their money back on curiosity alone, even though spoilers should be plentiful on the interwebs in, oh say, 3 hours. Even if they couldn’t keep the secret, names like Shia, Spielberg and D.J. Caruso are such a sure thing at the box office these days that they might as well be Spider-man, Batman and Iron Man.

I’ll be out of town this weekend at Baltimore Comic Con but I’m hoping that my fellow pimps are willing to sneak away to the theater to see this with me. It seems like a great guy’s action movie that we should be high-fiving all the way through.

That is that. See you soon!.