America's sweethearts - 2001

It wasn’t bad and the first time I saw it years ago I rather enjoyed it, but now it mostly annoyed me. The best part was Christopher Walken’s scene towards the end :-) He played Al, the eccentric director with the crazy hair :-p  Billy Crystal was also funny, although I didn’t like the silly scenes with the dog, so cheap. He was Lee the press agent, the one who tried to convince the actors to do what basically was their job, to promote the movie, while secretly setting them up for pictures that he wanted to appear in the papers, again a publicity stunt. I liked him and his role.
Catherine Zeta-Jones played the actress Gwen, a beautiful spoiled arrogant self-centered woman, indeed an actor, what do you know. She played it well, I liked her.
Now, for the “romantic” part of the movie, the ‘good couple’, aka the annoying part. 
Julia Roberts played Kiki, Gwen’s sister/slave, the ‘normal girl’, the ‘good girl’ who does whatever her sisters asks her to do and who is secretly in love with Gwen’s husband, actor Eddie. John Cusack played Eddie, a character so over-the-line it was absurd and unbelievable; a famous actor who fell in love with his co-star Gwen and who had a nervous breakdown when he saw her with another actor and who rode his motorbike into the restaurant and onto their table: I don’t really know if he really wanted to kill her or what he wanted to do, but that wasn’t a normal thing to do :-/ Despite that, since Gwen is the one who left the other, he moves through the film like a victim, obsessively thinking of her and unsure in his fantasies if he wants her back or if he wants her dead...
Kiki also has ‘victim’ written all over her face every time she has to prepare Gwen’s food, Gwen’s clothes, every time she has to convince her sister to do what she has to do, everytime she agrees to do whatever Gwen asks her to do... but we learn from one scene that their relationship has always been the same since they were girls, Kiki says that she was despised at school because Gwen always sent her to break up with her boyfriends, and Kiki blames her sister for the fact that everybody hated her back then. Why did she do it then? Because she loved her sister is not an acceptable answer, because loving somebody and blindly doing whatever they ask are not inevitable cause and effect. If you love your children you must not say yes to whatever they ask for, that’s not the way to go. She chose the easier path, to blindly obey her sister and live in her shadow.
Her love for Eddie is also annoying, the way she adores him is humiliating. 
Eddie is such a wreck that he inspires exasperation more than sympathy, still playing victim after one and a half year simply because his wife left him; he says himself that he fell in love with her image on the screen but doesn’t like the real Gwen, so basically he was nothing more than a teenage fan who can’t separate the actor from the character, and believes the actors to be the perfect image they want to give of themselves. At the end he was all ‘on the screen you are sexy and sweet and that’s the woman I fell for’ ... :-/ meanwhile he never noticed her overweight sister. Or rather, like Gwen he noticed her when it was convenient for him, oh what a good person she was and what a good friend she was, but now that she’s lost 30 pounds he suddenly falls for her... :-/ he replaced the sister who only thought about herself with the sister who only thought about him :-/  Kiki went from following Gwen around to following Eddie around :-/
At the end they spend a night together and she thinks she got him but then he goes to talk to Gwen and Kiki very wisely tells him that it can’t work because he’ll always think about Gwen and she’ll always wonder if he’s thinking about Gwen, but then as soon as she leaves he’s all ‘I love her I can’t lose her’, just like that, and when he tells her she forgets all her reservations and goes with him.
I didn’t like these two characters at all.
The whole movie was like a mockery of fans' obsessions and credulity: the belief that an actor is the image given to the public, the belief that two actors playing two characters in love must certainly be in love for real (guess what, people, acting is pretending!), the belief in everything one reads about celebrities on the papers... in this movie we see Lee carefully planning for a photographer to be present whenever he wants him, and Gwen makes a mother-scene in which declares that the only important thing for her is the happiness of her sister only because she was in a room full of people and journalists...
Other actors in this movie: Seth Green played Danny who works with Lee or for Lee, but the character is quite plain. Eric Balfour played one of the two security guards who wanted to arrest Eddie thinking that he was masturbating outside Gwen’s cottage when actually he was taking away cactus spines after he had fallen on one. 
Stanley Tucci played the producer who only thought about scheming and money. I liked him, he was funny, he’s always good :-) 
I liked the bit when he talked about Senor Wences, although I didn’t understand the line and had to look it up on the internet. I didn’t understand it probably because I had never heard of the guy, so it was interesting to learn about him. He’s described in the movie as the only real genius in the entertainment industry because he only used lipstick and his hand and had a long career, and after reading about him I now understand what it means: he was a ventriloquist and one of his act consisted in using his hand with lipstick on as a puppet. Wow. 
Hank Azaria played Hector, Gwen’s new boyfriend, and he was funny.
Rainn Wilson played Dave, a journalist I think. This actor is the one that I always recognize but can never remember his name, I usually think of him as the one who reminds me of Alan Carr..

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