The Perfect Man opens today… to responses like these:
“The Perfect Man takes its idiotic plot and uses it as the excuse for scenes of awesome stupidity.” – Roger Ebert
“…sticky, straight-to-video caliber.” – Lou Lumenick
“…nondescript piffle.” – Jami Bernard
“If you are planning on seeing the new Hilary Duff comedy over Father’s Day weekend, show Dad how much you care. Leave him home.” – Jan Stuart
“Maudlin love story about awful people.” – Angela Baldassarre
“You’ll most likely want to throw up and call it a night after swallowing this big ball of cotton candy.” – Kit Bowen
“Who would’ve thought…that the certifiably awful/unaccountably popular Hilary Duff was daring enough to make a movie about having a lesbian relationship with her mother?” – Peter Canavese
“Probably the only reason the Department of Children’s Services hasn’t come after her is because they can’t find her.” – Sarah Chauncey
“The faux lover angle isn’t exactly new but when a daughter is more or less trying to woo her mother, it’s not original, just weirdly creepy if not a tad incestual.” -Jeffrey Lyles
“Duff comes across as so self-absorbed that her trademark perkiness bleeds into selfishness.” – Donald Munro
“This is a monumentally bad film, the kind that only comes along once in, oh, I don’t know… Three years? Five?” – Eugene Novikov
“The movie doesn’t even seem to know how disturbing, at its heart, its subject matter is, so that it can at least have fun with it.” – Michael O’Sullivan
“Seriously, the perfect man would call social services.” – Carina Chocano, LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Dear Hilary… I can’t see you or your movies anymore.” – Sean O’Connell
So help me, I actually saw this film two nights ago, mainly because I have to review the new Lindsay Lohan film next week and I figured I was obliged to keep tabs on both sides of the Duff-Lohan divide.
Yep, it’s awful. Perhaps not quite as awful as these hyperbolic criticisms suggest, but definitely creepy, though I never saw it as Duff trying to woo her own mother; rather, I was a little unnerved by the scenes in which Duff’s would-be boyfriend begins expressing his love to (not for, but to) Duff’s mother, due to some identity mix-ups over the phone and via e-mail. Yes, there are actually two of these exchanges in this film — eek!
Perverse suggestion of the day: I wonder what sort of double-bill this film would make with Dear Frankie.
Bottom line: Duff is a 17-year-old playing yet another 16-year-old, whereas Lohan is an 18-year-old who, I hear, plays a 21-year-old in Herbie: Fully Loaded. I won’t give Lohan points for making yet another Disney remake, but I’ll at least give her points for trying to grow up!
from ebert’s review, i got the sense that the disturbing part (well, for me it would be engrossingly disturbing and endlessly selfish) of this movie – besides the fact that it was made, et al – is the fact that they leave town/state/region every flippin’ time she breaks up with her boyfriend. including, this time, just before duff’s prom.
and the second thing that disturbed me is that horrendous romantic notion of the perfect man/woman. hopefully, viewers will see through the veneer of this horrendous movie and it will balance out much-better made romantic tripes like ‘sleepless in seattle.’ hopefully, for the sake of us singles, single women will not try to be like locklear, single men like the love interest guy and his ‘what woman want’ carp, and young ladies will no longer follow duff’s crappy advice. lift every voice, my a**.
Yes, the constant moving makes no sense. It made me wonder why these characters ever bother unpacking — or, more to the point, why they don’t just “travel light” (or “live light”).
BTW, the National Post review makes an interesting comparison:
If the director of Mermaids had replaced Cher with Heather Locklear, Winona Ryder with Hilary Duff, Bob Hoskins with Chris Noth and Christina Ricci with some female version of the Jerry Maguire kid, it would have totally sucked.
But wait! That’s exactly what Mark Rosman has done with The Perfect Man. Right down to the plot — a single mom with her two daughters who all move to a different city every time she gets dumped — this is pretty much a straight rip-off of the 1990 dark-comedy hit, except here, in place of Rachel Flax’s bizarre finger foods, there’s Jean Hamilton’s cutesy cakes, made with extra-white, super-refined, intensely sweet sugar.
Jean (Locklear) is apparently a baker, albeit one who looks like she surely doesn’t make her cake and eat it, and when she finds out her latest in a string of boyfriends has been unfaithful, she and the girls move from Wichita to a Hollywood studio back lot — oh, sorry, Brooklyn. A really, really clean and sterile Brooklyn, where everyone dips in and out of fake accents and has stick-on lower-back tattoos.
Holly, being Hilary Duff and all, effortlessly makes a new best friend on her first day of school by bragging about her kicks, which she claims she pulled out of a Dumpster. A Chanel Dumpster? She also flirts with Adam Brody from The O.C., or at least a guy (Ben Feldman) who looks just like him and, like his character, Seth, is an aspiring cartoonist.
Because diaries are practically a dead medium, Holly narrates the film via her blog, Girl on the Move. While she’s no morose Charlotte, at least she’s occasionally sarcastic, making quips about her gypsy status and dropping words like “self-preservation” into the mix.
So far, so Mermaids — there’s even the mother-daughters poppy dance number (too bad it’s not to the tune of Jimmy Soul’s If You Wanna Be Happy). And cue the cruel twist: Rather than bother with one daughter’s near-drowning and the other’s simultaneous deflowering in a bell tower, Rosman opts for creepy, manipulative head games. . . .
You mean this movie is a remake? It follows a lead? There’s a prototype? Dang, now I’ll NEVER want to see Mermaids!