征婚广告 Must Love Dogs review by Stephanie Zacharek

Nothing kills a romantic comedy faster than romanticism. When characters start making moony remarks about how each person can have only one true love in a lifetime, or launch into overheated speeches about how they long for "a love so real that even after you're dead, it hurts," it's time to head for the hills. That's not romance, it's pathology.

Maybe filmmakers think that moviegoers trolling for a fun date movie or an evening out with the girls are actually looking for this kind of poot. That's the only plausible explanation for why damp, droopy pictures like "Must Love Dogs" get made: This is a comedy about recently divorced people in their late 30s looking for love and companionship (a reasonable, realistic desire if there ever was one) that feels as if it was made by a teenage girl with a penchant for writing "Bobby Sherman 4-Ever" on her notebook covers. It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.

Diane Lane plays Sarah, a preschool teacher who has been divorced for eight whole months. Her large, nosy family -- which includes her happily married sisters, Elizabeth Perkins and Ali Hillis, and her widowed, ladies' man of a dad, Christopher Plummer -- can't bear to see her dying on the vine. (Eight months is 4-ever!) So, in a feat of product placement far more obvious even than the ubiquitous Coke can, these wily meddlers attempt to fix Sarah up with a suitable mate via Perfectmatch.com. (The characters say it just like that -- "Perfectmatch-dot-com!" -- as if they'd been expertly coached in radio-ad voice-over technique.)

In the movie's first 10 minutes, we're made to understand how badly Sarah needs a boyfriend: She has begun to spend way too much time at home in her comfy pajamas, and she snaps at her cheerful local butcher when he suggests she can get a whole chicken for just 75 cents more than the single breast she's requested. (In her newly single state, she's apparently forgotten how to use the freezer.) Cut to John Cusack's Jake, a builder of meticulously finished wooden sculls that nobody wants to buy -- and director Gary David Goldberg literally does cut to a shot of the sensitive, idealistic craftsman-artiste lovingly planing the surface of one of his boats. This is a guy with calluses on his hands and poetry in his soul, and he's recently been dumped by a wife he really loved. So he sits around watching "Dr. Zhivago" obsessively, boring his friends with his brooding, supposedly profound observations about the nature of true love.

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