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.