"The hotness of one girl
is directly proportional to the ugliness of her best friend," opines an actor
named The Greg Wilson in The Hottie And The Nottie. From that less-than-universally
acknowledged truth, a waste of 90 minutes has been spun. (Yes, he really goes
by "The Greg Wilson," although "The Extremely Poor Man's Horatio Sanz" might
have been a better choice for a stage name.) Continuing the parade of
almost-familiar faces, Matthew Lillard-resembling Joel David Moore serves as
the recipient of that wisdom. Moore plays a man so beaten up by life, he
doesn't even bother having the word "Loser" removed from the side of his
vandalized car. That's what the scriptwriting guides call "characterization."
But he isn't completely
hopeless. Seizing on a 20-year-old memory, Moore decides to track down the love
of his life, circa first grade. That not-at-all-creepy idée fixe finds him face-to-face
with Paris Hilton, a Los Angeles yoga-enthusiast who's inexplicably attracted
to him, but unable to act on her urges because she's promised to remain
celibate until she finds a boyfriend for her best friend, Christine Lakin.
That's a big problem, because Lakin is less a person than a beastly assemblage
of body hair, unsightly moles, blackened teeth, sores, infected toenails, and
simian facial tics.
Laughing yet? If so, good:
You'll enjoy the one joke The Hottie And The Nottie repeats endlessly. You
might not even guess that Lakin is actually a beauty destined to emerge from
beneath the film's cheap-looking makeup effects, and that, shocker, she's a
better match for Moore than the sweetly shallow Hilton. Now, on to the question
everyone is wondering about: Is the dialogue recorded clearly? In most scenes,
yes, but some sequences reveal that director Tom Putnam clearly had to overcome
a low budget, and didn't have a lot of time for ADR work.
Oh, the other question:
How is Paris Hilton in her first starring role to receive a national release?
Pretty bad, actually. She's limited to a single, all-too-familiar expression of
smug self-satisfaction, and she delivers her lines in a tone somewhere between "seductive"
and "dish-soap commercial." It suggests that maybe, just maybe, the best movie
stars are not those first made famous for penetration scenes.