accessAtlanta

Grade: B

Verdict: A sweet albeit lightweight romantic comedy with a sparkling leading lady.

Details: Starring Famke Janssen and Jon Favreau. Directed by Valerie Breiman. Not rated but it includes sexual situations and adult language. One hour, 22 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Remember when love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage? The premise of "Love & Sex," a charming trifle with a star-making performance by Famke Janssen, is that love and sex go together like, well, oil and water. That, all too often, they don't go together at all.

Kate (Janssen) is a single modern woman in her early 30s. Translation: She's had plenty of sex, but true love is still elusive. She works at a glossy woman's magazine where her most recent article - a somewhat autobiographical how-to on oral sex - has sent her editor (Ann Magnuson) ballistic. Now she has 24 hours to turn in 2,500 "happy perky words" on how to find that perfect man.

The new assignment starts Kate thinking about all the imperfect men she's known. Especially an artist named Adam (Jon Favreau). A sort of thicker Woody Allen (his head alone is roughly the size of Woody in his entirety), Adam may not be male model material, but he's funny, smart, sweet, supportive, intuitive and too strong-minded to be a "sensitive guy" doormat. Just as they're getting settled, fate intervenes and they split. He starts dating people with names like Peaches while she falls for a hunky but vacant actor given to atrocious De Niro impersonations.

Like its protagonist, "Love & Sex" doesn't always have its act together. But, in a way, that's part of the good news. This movie doesn't have an act. It dares to be a romantic comedy that's not twisted around some contrivance to create an obstacle for its lovers (as in the dead wife's heart transplant in "Return to Me" or the he-fathered-my-child-
but-he's-gay plot of "The Next Best Thing").

Rather, this romantic comedy says what every single knows: It's hell in the dating zone and finding someone you want to love, let alone have sex with, is hard work in the best of circumstances. As Kate says, "Love is a mine field, but I guess it hurts so much to be alone we'd all rather be blown up than be single."

Where filmmaker Valerie Breiman goes somewhat wrong is in casting Favreau. Likable as he was in "Swingers," he's just not a good match for Janssen. We're asked to believe that they're made for each other, but it's a stretch. Janssen, however, is a treat. And something of a revelation. As self-deprecatingly funny as she is gorgeous, she suggests a more exotic Sandra Bullock. Cast mostly for her looks in movies like "X-Men" and "GoldenEye," she clearly relishes the chance to deliver comic dialogue and generally act like a three-dimensional person.

"Love & Sex" can be annoyingly predictable, and it skims when it should take the plunge. But at least it tries to scale itself to the pitfalls of real-life romance. And besides, how can you resist a flick in which the lovelorn heroine's favorite movie is "Nosferatu"? The orginal silent version.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service