Alyson Hannigan

New releases by Anita Gates, NYT

Date Movie

IT was an education to see Date Movie with two dozen or so adolescent New York students and their teachers. Here are some things that members of Hollywood’s favorite demographic find hysterically funny: fat women, old people, enormous buttocks, homosexuality, amorous cats having a go at dead bodies and flatulent cats with diarrhea. The source of the laughter appears to be a delighted revulsion.

Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, who wrote the screenplay, have crammed dozens of movie parodies into this deliberately juvenile spoof of romantic comedies. Seltzer, who directed, has made very few of them funny. The fake orgasm scene, for instance, borrowed from When Harry Met Sally and given to the male lead in this case, is just peculiar.

The likable Alyson Hannigan, who surely has better things to do, plays an obese young woman working in her multicultural family’s Greek diner. She undergoes an extreme beauty makeover at an auto body shop, meets the young blonde Englishman of her dreams, Grant Funkyerdoder (Adam Campbell), and then must deal with competition and both sets of parents.

The film has a nascent sense of the absurd but doesn’t know what to do with it. And some of the references are to films (Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle) made when the target audience was in diapers. Or in utero.