And so are my feelings about Nancy Meyer's predictable and overlong boomer-bait rom-com. I'd watch Meryl Streep read the Senate health-care bill. And she deserves her Golden Globe nod for this one: she takes Meyer's slight script and turns in a glowing performance that's bold, sexy, and ebulliently eye-catching.
By sheer force of personality, Alec Baldwin — as the remarried ex-husband with whom she has an affair — is also good for laughs, spending half the movie with his substantial torso unshirted. Those two have, what I believe they call in the biz, "chemistry." But Steve Martin, as another trepidatious beau, plays a weirdly muted sad sack. (Whatever happened to the wild and crazy guy of yore?)
It's clear I'm out of the demo for this one, which fetishizes interior design and home furnishings almost as much as the sex. But a substantive plot larded with more laughs would have made my thoughts much less conflicted.
