Down With Love (Peyton Reed, 2003)

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Sarah Paulson, David Hyde Pierce, Rachel Dratch, Jack Plotnick, Tony Randall, John Aylward, John Munson, Matt Ross, Michael Ensign, Timothy Omundson, Jeri Ryan. Screenplay: Eve Ahlert, Dennis Drake. Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth. Production design: Andrew Laws. Film editing: Larry Bock. Music: Marc Shaiman.

From its retro opening credits to its boy/girl gets girl/boy finale, Down With Love is a spot-on parody of 1960s rom-coms, specifically the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies epitomized by Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959). Its aim is to spotlight modern attitudes toward sex, romance, and marriage by showing us the way we were only 40 years earlier -- which means, too, that the parody itself looks a little dated 20-some years after its release. Critics liked Down With Love, audiences not so much, perhaps because you had to be steeped in those '60s movies to fully appreciate some of its gags. Like the original films, it's full of double entendres, including the split-screen effect that in Pillow Talk had Doris and Rock on screen in their separate apartment bathtubs, so that at one point it looked like the two of them were playing footsie. Down With Love's verbal and visual double entendres are, naturally, much raunchier than Pillow Talk's, which now seem quaintly innocent. The parody goes on for too long,  so that some fatigue has set in by the time the film reaches its cleverest point, a denouement that consists of an extended speech delivered by Renée Zellweger's character that both recaps and upends everything we've seen. Zellweger and Ewan McGregor don't have the chemistry that Day and Hudson have, but it doesn't matter, because we're not supposed to take their attraction seriously. David Hyde Pierce gets the Tony Randall role in the film, the neurotic sidekick to McGregor's character, but an appearance by Randall himself in a cameo role unfortunately reveals how much better in the part he was. 

Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995)

Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger in Empire Records

Cast: Anthony LaPaglia, Maxwell Caulfield, Debi Mazar, Rory Cochrane, Johnny Whitworth, Robin Tunney, Renée Zellweger, Ethan Embry, Coyote Shivers, Brendan Sexton III, Liv Tyler. Screenplay: Carol Heikkinen. Cinematography: Walt Lloyd. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Michael Chandler. 

It's not much of a compliment to call a movie "harmless," but that's the only word I can think of to describe Empire Records, which was a flop when released but has an enthusiastic following today among Gen-Xers. The best I can say, as a member of a generation not even contiguous with Generation X, except that my daughter was a member, is that it provided a nice diversion from pre-election anxiety. And that it has some performers -- Rory Cochrane and Renée Zellweger in particular -- that it's fun to watch. The story is negligible and predictable: a small record store is threatened with being taken over r by a large corporation, and the madcap young employees, who never seem to do any work, manage to save it. That's just enough to hang a lot of songs from the '90s on. There is a place for movies that disarm criticism like this one, so I respect it for being just that.