A short post on "No Reservations"

The romantic comedy "No Reservations" starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart is so inept that I wasn't even planning to write about it (mostly I plan to write about everything I see or read, and I never end up writing most of it) but a few reviews I've read so far have made me wonder whether, in fact, the critics and I were watching the same movie.

Robert Wilonsky, from the Voice, loved it ("the thing's so charming and frothy and delightful and sentimental and beautifully shot and well-acted and sincere that it takes a good couple of hours before you start craving real nourishment", he says), Matt Zoeller Seitz finds in it "emotional details" that are " surprising, honest and life-size" while Dana Stevens likes Abigail Breslin and thinks that she acted the pants off Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Me? I almost got my hopes up during the credits when I saw that in addition to Zeta-Jones and Eckhart, it has Patricia Clarkson and Brian F. O’Byrne. But the movie sucked. Big-time. Zeta Jones character is a chef, who loves her work, and therefore, in Hollywood, cut off from her emotional life; she's, in other words, frigid. All she needs now is a child and a man. The child she gets when her sister gets bumped off, and the man -- well, the man walks in to her kitchen and listens to arias. I don't mean to be hard on the plot -- good romantic comedies are like delicious ice-cream: they slide past the throat smoothly and leave you feeling all nice and good. "No Reservations", on the other hand, is tepid, meandering along, as if on auto-pilot. The movie is indeed, as Seitz points out, "factory-sealed" but in the worst possible way. It seems to have been written an directed by an autistic machine.