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This week's reviews: 'How to Lose a Guy,' 'Music Man,' 'Failer'
(PEOPLE) -- This week PEOPLE.com looks at the film "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," Kathleen Edwards' new album "Failer," and "The Music Man" on ABC. Movie review: 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days'
This woefully misguided romantic comedy breaks the single most basic rule of the genre: The jousting lovebirds must be likable, no matter how badly they misbehave while pursuing amour. Instead, "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" gives us a screeching shrew of a heroine and a jelly-spined pushover of a hero. Not wishing them well is beside the point; you will quickly find yourself wishing they would vamoose, the sooner the better. "How to Lose" never recovers from its unlikely (and beyond dumb) set-up: Columnist Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) is assigned to write a story for Composure, a glossy women's monthly, on getting a man to dump her in 10 days. The same day, hotshot advertising executive Benjamin Barry (Matthew McConaughey) bets colleagues that he can make a woman fall in love with him in a week and a half. These two Manhattanites meet that night and, though they have chemistry to spare, immediately start scamming each other. Andie is soon acting like a psycho witch in hopes that Benjamin will throw her over; he grovels, begging for more because he needs her as his trophy honey on deadline day. Will true love prevail? The movie barely gives us a reason to care. For anyone old enough to have grown up watching her mother, seeing Hudson struggle with the sort of I'm-so-cute-you'll-forgive-me-anything part that Goldie Hawn used to own is disorienting. Hudson looks and sounds eerily like Mom; what's missing, at least here, is the charm and the giggle, which would have gone a long way toward rescuing her. While personable, McConaughey is big, blond and bland, making him the perfect "B"-picture leading man, a role he now seems destined to fill. Bottom line: How to lose us in less than 2 hours Music review: 'Failer'Kathleen Edwards (Zoë/Rounder) Many a female singer-songwriter has gotten lost in her own wispy voice and wimpy emoting, but this 24-year-old Canadian isn't interested in being a shiny new Jewel. Don't be fooled by the gentle strumming of acoustic guitars (which occasionally segue into a harder rock sound). Edwards rambles through her first full-length album singing about drinking, cussing, stealing and otherwise having a fine time. With her seen-it-all voice, she could be Liz Phair's rootsy cousin on "12 Bellevue": "I don't want to be your friend/ Just take off your clothes and get into my bed." In "Westby," a sleazy motelroom affair ends, "You passed out so I flicked through cable/ And I stole your gold watch off the bedside table." Edwards is often compared to Lucinda Williams; the newcomer has more grit and less poetry, but here's to one act that threatens to live up to the hype. Bottom line: Woman to watch TV review: 'The Music Man'
ABC (Sunday, February 16, 7 p.m. ET) The soft sell is not what's needed in this high-spirited musical about a con man who blows into a small Iowa town in 1912, promising to organize a boys' band if the citizens will kindly cough up the cash for uniforms, instruments and instruction (which he's totally unqualified to give). On Broadway and in the 1962 movie version, Robert Preston portrayed self-styled Professor Harold Hill with brass, brio and the strut of a born virtuoso at tooting his own horn. Matthew Broderick is a comparatively low-key Hill in this three-hour remake on "The Wonderful World of Disney." Though likable as usual, Broderick seems constrained and tentative, as if the salesman lacked faith in the strength of his pitch. I'd like to say he's disarmingly different in the part, but I'm afraid he's just miscast. The same goes for Victor Garber ("Alias"), who isn't nearly funny enough as malaprop-prone Mayor Shinn. The spotlight here falls on Marian (Kristin Chenoweth), the librarian who stirs Hill's conscience and succumbs to his charm. Atoning for Kristin, her ill-conceived NBC sitcom of 2001, Chenoweth sings beautifully on "Goodnight My Someone" and "Till There Was You" and looks radiant when Marian opens her heart to the huckster. Her work and Meredith Willson's irresistible songs ("Seventy-Six Trombones," "Ya Got Trouble") make "The Music Man" worth playing again. Bottom line: Lend an ear despite some off notes -- Terry Kelleher
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