No Reservations

No Reservations is a romantic comedy... I could almost stop talking about it right there.

Everyone should pretty much know what to expect by now. This one really doesn't break the time honored mold.

Our heroine, who is some kind of chef, suffers a crisis, in this case her sister dies and leaves her with a kid to look after. She struggles on for a bit, making a few mistakes and then, just as she thinks she can no longer cope, a guy shows up. He saves the day,by teaching her to relate to the kid and is generally considered the second coming of sliced bread.

Obviously that would be too easy so the love birds have a tiff and break the whole things off. One threatens to move away, they realise their differences, get back together and it's happily every after. Apparently, the movies never really go on long enough for us to know.

No Reservations makes a vague attempt to break the mold by having the Heroine (Kate) piss of the kid as well near the end but its not much of an effort. I did like the slightly more sober tone adopted by this movie. The death of the mother/sister is constantly referred to and it helps to keep the tone a bit more level than the usual giddy-happy-fest of the genre.

Despite its lack of originality it is a quite good movie. There really isn't anything done badly to complain about. The acting is pretty good, the cinematography is pretty good, it goes for long enough that you don't feel cheated but isn't Peter Jackson long and the story keeps up at a decent clip. The whole thing is pretty good. If I had one major complaint its that they could have picked a hotter lead guy. Aaron Eckhart is really dredging the barrel.

If you go to see this then you already know what you are going to see and you won't be disappointed. A true triumph of consumer cinema.

Cheers

DTN.