America's Sweethearts

It's funny that America's Sweethearts should be the first movie I post on, since it's not really representative of what I usually watch. Before I get to it, I should mention one more thing about my Netflix queue, which is that I very rarely rearrange it. The films are usually on the queue in the order in which I added them. Very occasionally I'll put something on and shoot it to the top; and when I add a multi-part tv series, I will do some rearranging so that I have some "real movies" in between episodes. But otherwise the chips fall where they may.  If Netflix had a "shuffle" feature I might make use of that, but with such a long queue it's just too tedious to move things one at a time. So, anyway, sometimes films come along and I don't even remember why I added them.

America's Sweethearts (2001) is a romantic comedy featuring Billy Crystal as a studio PR man, John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a former star couple who have broken up, thus endangering their careers as "America's Sweethearts," and Julia Roberts as Zeta-Jones's sister and personal assistant. Hank Azaria plays the Spanish actor who has supplanted Cusack in Zeta-Jones's affections. I like John Cusack, who has the same kind of goofy charm as Nicolas Cage, and Hank Azaria's performance was very funny.  I tend to enjoy Billy Crystal too, as his fast-talking, one-liner-full persona reminds me of lots of New Jersey and Long Island guys I went to college with. Julia Roberts, I think, maybe really is America's sweetheart with that big grin. In this film, they had to have flashbacks of her in a fat suit and glasses to explain why John Cusack wasn't with her from the beginning, since her character was both more beautiful and a better human being than her "sister," Zeta-Jones.

I gave this movie three stars out of five. It was an enjoyable way to spend a little less than two hours, and besides the performances mentioned above, the subplot of the eccentric director and his film was a nice send-up of Hollywood pretension. But, it's also the kind of movie I created this blog for, in that a year from now I may not otherwise remember that I've already seen it.