Simply Irresistible

It's a little like _Troll 2_ if it were a magical romantic comedy. And yes, I watched this because of SMG; and yes, she's fully dialed in for it, and is unrepentantly adorable. It's absolutely ludicrous, and I found it charming, despite how bad it is.

Beyond its charm, I found it hilarious, and mostly at the wrong times. But even the intentionally silly bits were so ridiculous that I was practically wheezing. That's a win in my book. While I found the 'quirky' characters on _Gilmore Girls_ insufferable more often than not, this was so wholesomely saccharine, with bits of "too hot for the Disney channel" teen girl romance novel sex jokes, I was laughing pretty regularly, and Sarah does meek and discouraged underdog just as well as she does the full spate of typical romantic dramedy emotions, and you can really tell she enjoys the bits where she get to give a little naughty line and tweak her eyebrows.

There are several instances of "women writing men" that are an additional source of unintentional humor and there are a couple of things that age it in a way that makes watching it like doing a cultural retrospective: The over-the-top douchy French stereotypes; the best friend sous chef who is a clearly gay-coded character, and yet the script goes out of its way on several occasions to explicitly make him say things to assure us of how much he likes women; and the soundtrack pretty much entirely comprises songs that were like someone put together a playlist of songs because the CD that you could get with Virginia Slims points (thanks, Mom) was just "a little too alternative" (Jennifer Page, Semisonic, and a terrible cover of "Everything She Does Is Magic" by Sean Colvin, and some song apparently picked or commissioned for the film that plays at the top of the credits called "Bewitched" by an artist called Katalina, and it's not even on Spotify. I actually liked that one. If this had been made ~8 years earlier they would have tried to get Sarah to sing it.)

Fun times. Did not regret.

If only to be a fly on the wall when this movie was pitched. A romcom about food and a magical crab? This movie has is entirely of its time, and its not necessarily a good thing, visually its 90s af, but its also forgettable. Not a bad film, its still watchable, if only for the crab.

Such a cheesy movie. I watched all of it hoping that somehow it would become funny and have some meaning, but sadly, no. I've seen kids magic love stories better than this. It would have been interesting to see if the magic carried on with the sous chef and the crab. LOL

A romantic quasi fiction whose insanity you can enjoy, if you're ok with plot dumps that go nowhere and characters with random logical patterns.

Man, this movie is terrible. I watched it for HDTGM, which was a great ep by the way.

Anyway, I thought we were in for a real treat when a crab made SMG's food magical and Amanda Peet started flipping out...but nope. That was Peet's last scene and the crab action basically sums up the rest of the movie. She serves people magical food and they get emotional. One of those emotional people is Sean Patrick Flannery. He gets emotional and they end up together. Did SMG know the crab made her food magic? Does she react when she finds out? Does she do anything about this magical crab, like try and find out why or how it's doing it? No no and no. It's kind of shocking how little this movie tries to do with a decent magical realism set up. But worth the view for HDTGM.

Simply horrible movie. Don’t recommend