I rented this movie one dateless night along with 'Big Fish.' I had been waiting for 'Big Fish' on DVD ever since I learned Billy Redden was in it. He was the banjo boy in 'Deliverance.' 'Big Fish' and 'Win a Date' make a great combo because each represents a different kind of Hollywood 'flyover country' mythmaking. 'Big Fish,' a sort of 'anti-Forrest Gump,' gives you 1950s Alabama as a velvia-toned 'Pleasantville' where black and white kids play together and go to the same churches. No lynchings, no George Wallace.
This deception is part of a sly joke, part of the mythical life story of the lead character exposed as myth. Grownup Billy Redden was in the movie, for about fifteen seconds, sitting on the porch of a picket-fenced little house facing the village green in an immaculately whitewashed New England looking Brigadoon of a town lost in the Alabama swamps. He was, of course again playing dueling banjos, placed there just to remind you that what you otherwise see is all just a big fish tale.
'Win a Date's' deception is not sly understatement, but glaring overcompensation. The movie is set in Frazier's Bottom, a real town in West Virginia, but don't get out a map and plan a trip. Country roads won't ever take you back to this movie's West Virginia, no matter how many 'wrong turns' you make driving them in vain looking for it.
Not all West Virginians are inbred pot growing cannibals, but these folks are too clean, too sober, too blandly prosperous, and completely devoid of the diphthongally challenged. Not the slightest hint of nasal twang by the actors, not one sodomy joke, everyone wears shoes, no one wears overalls, and nary a 4x4 anywhere. In the local bar hangout, men don't wear cowboy hats, or John Deere caps. There is a dart board like in 'Cheers,' but no pool table. And the music, well it ain't ever country. The biker chick 'bartendress' (the lone local with a semi-authentic, but discreet Appalachian accent) might gladly serve you a latte or a bottle of Samuel Adams, if you ask. This is not moonshine, or meth lab America.
The story, of course, is total cliché. A checker at the overly modern Piggly Wiggly named Rosalee (don't expect total cultural correctness) surfs across an internet contest to 'win a date' with a second-rate bubble gum 'bad boy' matinée idol named Tad Hamilton. After being egged on by fellow checker and gal pal Cathy, she enters, wins, flies to LA, has the date, refuses to compromise her Heartland chastity, and flies back nonetheless satisfied to Red State America. Tad follows her home because he is smitten with her virtue, and of course he wants to seduce her eventually. Standing in his way, if reluctantly, is Pete, Rosalee's not so down home childhood friend and her dorky, precocious boss at the Piggly Wiggly. He of course is also smitten with her interminable chastity, but stereotypically too shy and unsure of himself to make any moves that might threaten it, or their friendship should she (likely) reject him as a lover. In the end, you know who gets the girl, with her 'carnal treasure' still buried for him to dig up off camera when 'X' marks the right time. The dialogue is hopelessly sappy, featuring groaners like the difference between 'big love' and 'great love,' and how to win the heart of your true love by telling her she has six different types of smiles.
Midwesterner Josh Duhamel surprising plays Tad as lonely and confused in his fame and wealth, rather than as a simple predatory Lothario. LA born Kate Bosworth is out of place as a Piggly Wiggly checker, but Tennessean Gennifer Goodwin seems convincing as Cathy, right down to her Pringles enhanced figure, good ole girl hairdos, and bubbly, slightly trashy personae.
The real star is New Yorker Topher Grace, a blend of young James Stewart and Alan Alda: vulnerable, sympathetic, yet obnoxious. He plays insecure Pete as a sort of straight 'gay' guy constantly engaged in witless Wildean banter when around Rosalee. His entire social life, when not sitting home alone reading Flannery O'Connor, is spent as a 'third girl friend' to Rosalee and Cathy, tagging along to see all the new Tad Hamilton movies at the local theater, etc. The classic scene in this movie is when Pete, thoroughly frustrated at his looming loss of Rosalee as gal pal and fantasy lover, confronts Tad in, of all places, the men's restroom at the local bar. "You win," the skinny Pete tells Tad, "but if you break her heart, I'll tear you to pieces with my bare hands, or (with eyes rolling while reconsidering) with VICIOUS RHETORIC!" Do West Virginians act and live like the people in 'Win A Date' any more than they do in a movie like 'Wrong Turn?' Certainly not, but seeing Hollywood get it wrong to the other extreme is good. The original ending in the deleted scenes on the DVD, however, hint that the original concept was more condescending.
One of the reasons 'Win A Date' probably didn't end up a 'Sweet Home Alabama' type putdown (something like 'Jessica Lynch, after the nude photos, Wins a Date With Colin Farrell, playing himself') can likely be traced directly to the outcry over CBS's stupid idea to do a 'Real Beverly Hillbillies.' reality show. This idea certainly would have become reality but for Robert Byrd, a certain Senator from .West Virginia, who railed loudly against it right on the Senate floor. His reasoning was that if Hollywood would rightfully shudder at the idea of doing a modern minstrel show (by anyone other than Spike Lee), or a new pidgin English version of Charlie Chan, why were hillbillies still ripe for vicious ridicule? Maybe they aren't so much anymore, given what you see in this movie. As far as this hillbilly is concerned, that's a good thing.
This deception is part of a sly joke, part of the mythical life story of the lead character exposed as myth. Grownup Billy Redden was in the movie, for about fifteen seconds, sitting on the porch of a picket-fenced little house facing the village green in an immaculately whitewashed New England looking Brigadoon of a town lost in the Alabama swamps. He was, of course again playing dueling banjos, placed there just to remind you that what you otherwise see is all just a big fish tale.
'Win a Date's' deception is not sly understatement, but glaring overcompensation. The movie is set in Frazier's Bottom, a real town in West Virginia, but don't get out a map and plan a trip. Country roads won't ever take you back to this movie's West Virginia, no matter how many 'wrong turns' you make driving them in vain looking for it.
Not all West Virginians are inbred pot growing cannibals, but these folks are too clean, too sober, too blandly prosperous, and completely devoid of the diphthongally challenged. Not the slightest hint of nasal twang by the actors, not one sodomy joke, everyone wears shoes, no one wears overalls, and nary a 4x4 anywhere. In the local bar hangout, men don't wear cowboy hats, or John Deere caps. There is a dart board like in 'Cheers,' but no pool table. And the music, well it ain't ever country. The biker chick 'bartendress' (the lone local with a semi-authentic, but discreet Appalachian accent) might gladly serve you a latte or a bottle of Samuel Adams, if you ask. This is not moonshine, or meth lab America.
The story, of course, is total cliché. A checker at the overly modern Piggly Wiggly named Rosalee (don't expect total cultural correctness) surfs across an internet contest to 'win a date' with a second-rate bubble gum 'bad boy' matinée idol named Tad Hamilton. After being egged on by fellow checker and gal pal Cathy, she enters, wins, flies to LA, has the date, refuses to compromise her Heartland chastity, and flies back nonetheless satisfied to Red State America. Tad follows her home because he is smitten with her virtue, and of course he wants to seduce her eventually. Standing in his way, if reluctantly, is Pete, Rosalee's not so down home childhood friend and her dorky, precocious boss at the Piggly Wiggly. He of course is also smitten with her interminable chastity, but stereotypically too shy and unsure of himself to make any moves that might threaten it, or their friendship should she (likely) reject him as a lover. In the end, you know who gets the girl, with her 'carnal treasure' still buried for him to dig up off camera when 'X' marks the right time. The dialogue is hopelessly sappy, featuring groaners like the difference between 'big love' and 'great love,' and how to win the heart of your true love by telling her she has six different types of smiles.
Midwesterner Josh Duhamel surprising plays Tad as lonely and confused in his fame and wealth, rather than as a simple predatory Lothario. LA born Kate Bosworth is out of place as a Piggly Wiggly checker, but Tennessean Gennifer Goodwin seems convincing as Cathy, right down to her Pringles enhanced figure, good ole girl hairdos, and bubbly, slightly trashy personae.
The real star is New Yorker Topher Grace, a blend of young James Stewart and Alan Alda: vulnerable, sympathetic, yet obnoxious. He plays insecure Pete as a sort of straight 'gay' guy constantly engaged in witless Wildean banter when around Rosalee. His entire social life, when not sitting home alone reading Flannery O'Connor, is spent as a 'third girl friend' to Rosalee and Cathy, tagging along to see all the new Tad Hamilton movies at the local theater, etc. The classic scene in this movie is when Pete, thoroughly frustrated at his looming loss of Rosalee as gal pal and fantasy lover, confronts Tad in, of all places, the men's restroom at the local bar. "You win," the skinny Pete tells Tad, "but if you break her heart, I'll tear you to pieces with my bare hands, or (with eyes rolling while reconsidering) with VICIOUS RHETORIC!" Do West Virginians act and live like the people in 'Win A Date' any more than they do in a movie like 'Wrong Turn?' Certainly not, but seeing Hollywood get it wrong to the other extreme is good. The original ending in the deleted scenes on the DVD, however, hint that the original concept was more condescending.
One of the reasons 'Win A Date' probably didn't end up a 'Sweet Home Alabama' type putdown (something like 'Jessica Lynch, after the nude photos, Wins a Date With Colin Farrell, playing himself') can likely be traced directly to the outcry over CBS's stupid idea to do a 'Real Beverly Hillbillies.' reality show. This idea certainly would have become reality but for Robert Byrd, a certain Senator from .West Virginia, who railed loudly against it right on the Senate floor. His reasoning was that if Hollywood would rightfully shudder at the idea of doing a modern minstrel show (by anyone other than Spike Lee), or a new pidgin English version of Charlie Chan, why were hillbillies still ripe for vicious ridicule? Maybe they aren't so much anymore, given what you see in this movie. As far as this hillbilly is concerned, that's a good thing.