[smg-fans] BBC Online - Movies - What's On

Simon Burford Tue, 26 Oct 1999 14:33:03 -0700

Title: BBC Online - Movies - What's On

SUNDAY
24th October 1999

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Simply Irresistible

Buffy the Vampire slayer gets sloppy in a romantic comedy that leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is the struggling owner of her family's 70-year-old community restaurant. She's pleasant, Bohemian, squeaky and cute and her regulars love her, but there isn't enough of them to help her keep her diner open.

Desperate to emulate the culinary talents of her late mother and keen to find the love she puts into her creations, she bumps into local department store boss Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery) and hey presto, a couple of magical coincidences and a rather spooky crab (stay with me here!) later the pair are falling for each other and her passions are being fired up in the food she cooks.

Simply Irresistible

When she's unhappy, people cry as they eat, when she feels sexy, so do her diners.

All is well until her uptown beau accuses her of witchcraft and suddenly her magical little world becomes a living hell.

This is almost a charming little film, but it's a little too close to Alfonso Arau's brilliant Mexican foodie film 'Like Water For Chocolate' to really pass as an original idea.

With some work Gellar and Flanery could become the next Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks - the perfect romantic comedy double act - but in this film they're just two American TV stars making a non- descript movie. It's a pity because they do look good together.

And, despite the end product's rather bitter taste there's enough in the film which is watchable - director Mark Tarlov cooks up some delightful fairy-tale scenes, and the script is littered with wonderful throw away lines about food, fantasy, the sexes and love ("this dish is like the poem I never wrote," and "a man's character is his destiny.")

'Simply Irresistible' serves as a complicated appetiser but it leaves you keen to get to the main course - and that never arrives.