This is pretty dopey, though not any more dopey than it seemed from the preview I’d seen. Eva Longoria Parker, of Desperate Housewives, plays a ghost desperately trying to break up her former fiancé’s (Paul Rudd) new relationship. He’s gotten involved with the “psychic” (Lake Bell, of Boston Legal) he went to after her death. Yeah, it’s dopey. That would be all right if it was clever too. Instead, the ghostly gal resorts to, for example, making fart noises that only the psychic can hear. All of these people live in brittle world, where softly lobbing keys can hit a vase and cause it to shatter.
Meanwhile, though, the comedy is also trying to be a romantic, not just a series of sight gags. It’s not terrible or anything, but the wacky stuff detracts from the semi-serious side of the story. Parker’s character is so shrewish you wonder that Rudd’s kindly veterinarian was actually going to marry her. A silly subplot involving the psychic’s catering partner/gay best friend (an engaging Jason Biggs) is resolved in predictably phony fashion, and everyone lives happily ever after. In shallow romantic comedies, no one ever has to feel bad for long, even dead people.
IMDB link
viewed 2/2/08
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