BEAUTY AND THE BRIEFCASE (2010) is the non-time travel rom-com I used as a talking lamp while I was finishing taxes up this week. Hilary Duff plays an aspiring writer and frustrated single who thinks she can solve both problems by pitching Cosmopolitan (which gets a lot of tongue-bathing in this film as the Greatest Magazine Ever) on a story about landing a job to find the guy who perfectly fits your checklist of must-have qualities. Only of course, to discover the solution to finding love is to dump the checklist. Very poor, and I find this almost as implausible as I Was a Mail-Order Bride.
IF ONLY (2004) is the kind of tear-jerker that makes me appreciate Quest for Love‘s quality—Jennifer Love Hewitt is way, way too cutesy/supposedly adorable as a music student whose tragic death leaves her boyfriend shell-shocked. Then a mysterious cabbie (Tom Wilkerson) gives the guy a chance to relive his last day with her, while warning him it will still be their final day together. Another flaw in the film is that a lot of the plot depends on Hewitt being a gifted singer/songwriter but from what we see, her songs are pure syrup. “Because of you every choice I made was different and my life has completely changed.”
BEWITCHED (2005) stars Nicole Kidman as a witch yearning for a mortal life and love, and making the dubious pick of jerk actor Will Ferrell as her soulmate. This big-screen remake of the TV show is bizarrely meta as Ferrell is actually starring in a big-screen remake of the TV show, but I found that more cumbersome than clever (and while I like the original show, it didn’t deserve the amount of OMG It Was Awesome! it gets here). This does make the appendix for one scene; forgettable otherwise, despite Michael Caine as Kidman’s father, Steve Carrell as Uncle Arthur from the original show and Shirley Maclaine as the actress playing Kidman’s mother in Ferrell’s movie.“It’s Darren—everybody hates Darren!”
PLAYING BEATIE BOW (1986) is an Aussie movie adapting a popular Aussie kids’ book about a modern-day Sydney team 
transported back to the 1870s where she gets involved in the affairs of a working class immigrant family, falls madly in love and of course gains valuable life-lessons. Not actually bad, but I’ve seen better kid time-travel films. “The sight was only given you for a little while.”
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