America's Sweethearts

Turns the kleig lights around to produce a wry and dead-on commentary on the film industry and the journalists who cover it.

Though an uneven, often confused, mixed bag -- the movie gradually comes together to be a fairly hilarious inside-Hollywood farce.

For the farce it so desperately wants to be, the film often feels slack and too reliant on so-so punch lines for laughs.

America's Sweethearts recycles "Singin' in the Rain" but lacks the sassy genius of that 1952 musical, which is still the best comedy ever made about Hollywood.

Begins as a smartly promising, gently farcical comedy of manners and ends as sourly and haphazardly as the lives it is poking fun at.

Chockablock with things we're not supposed to notice: that Roberts is wasted; that she and Cusack have no characters to play, so it's virtually impossible to understand why she loves him or vice versa; that the script provides comedy without bite and romance without resonance.

The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.