"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.
