Down with Love, Up with Bad Dates

As a proud member of the John Hughes generation, I was certainly spoiled when it came to the teen films upon which my youthful sensibilities were raised. Though teenagers in the late '80s were probably every bit as awkward and maladjusted as those living today, many of the films that era produced argue otherwise. The best of them managed to communicate the confusion of blooming adolescence with such delightful sensitivity and intelligence, one could be excused for thinking that young adults are people too, thank you. Recall Lucas (1986), Pretty in Pink (1986) and Say Anything (1989), to name just three.

Now, if you were to take the recent DreamWorks production Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! as indicative of where the genre currently stands, you might also be excused for having once believed that today's MTV generation would ever mature. If I sound precociously nostalgic for the good ol' days of a few years back, it is perhaps because I viewed this film in a theater full of 13 and 14-year-old girls. The experience was revelatory, to say the least. Though we all watched the same inane story unfold, the young audience laughed, shrieked, gasped, and even cried a little. I daresay they actually identified with the characters onscreen, while I, dear reader, wondered how this dull, silly film could possibly work for anyone old enough to cut their own food.

Kate Bosworth and Topher Grace star as Rosalee and Pete, a pair of rural West Virginian supermarket employees trapped in a coup of bad casting. Both actors evoke a kind of blueblood urbanity, and the film has been set in a blue-collar rest stop where the local sheriff nervously addresses young lovers by name as they not-so-innocently sit in parked cars.

If I understand the premise correctly, Pete has been in love with Rosalee since before he could walk, whereas she has remained cheerfully oblivious to this astounding feat of masochistic pining. Perhaps the Guinness Book of World Records keeps track of such things. If so, at least her side is understandable: Pete looks at her with all the interest of a man who's perennially exasperated by someone else.

When Rosalee enters a charity benefit and wins the grand prize--a date with Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel), her favorite film star--she flies to Los Angeles, has dinner with Tad, then resists his post-cocktail advances. "Good for you," he says, charmed by his own rejection. Meanwhile, Pete can breathe easier as he hunches over his bourbon back home, worrying about the sanctity of Rosalee's "carnal treasure." (At the airport, he obsesses over how Tad, a notorious playboy, has slept with "15, maybe 20, women" and though we should be rooting for Pete, we instead jeer at his lines--one of director Robert Luketic's many miscalculations.)

When Rosalee returns to her regular life and job, Tad unexpectedly follows. Though the film begins as a satire of Hollywood romances and shows some desire to be a comedy about the struggle we all face between our ideals about love and the realities we meet, it settles into a situation perfected over years of television sitcom: both x and y like z, z likes y more than x, so x despises y. If x is the small town guy, y his rich and famous rival, and z their beloved Rosalee, I bet you already know who will end up with whom.

As the characters play catch up, coming to learn what we have known all along, they begin to become boring with their seriously fatheaded blather. Favorite subjects include Pringles, orthodontics, and how many different types of smile they use. Though the characters in P.J. Hogan's wonderful Peter Pan are a good decade younger, it's truly remarkable how much more meaningful and grand their romance appears to be.