I associate Steve Guttenberg with B-movies. However, I thought he actually did a very credible job in "Don't Tell Her It's Me." I especially liked his portrayal of the bald and bloated Gus.
"Don't Tell Her It's Me" is also on TV and DVD as "The Boyfriend School," which is also the title of the very funny book by Sarah Bird on which the movie is based. Sarah Bird also is credited with the screenplay for the film, which appears to have been her first attempt to write for the film industry. I am guessing that she accepted too many suggestions from people with more film experience than she had, because the movie is so below the quality of the book. Someone even convinced her to change the title, although later it was changed back to the book's title.
The film begins with a clever, if not original, device of restarting the movie when the narrator, Lizzie Potts (Shelley Long), a best-selling romance novel author, changes her mind about what she is composing in her mind. Her mind drifts to her younger brother, Gus (Steve Guttenberg), who we learn is a cartoonist. Gus is recovering after finishing 2-years of treatments, for Hodgkin's Disease, that caused him temporarily to be bloated and hairless. We see some of Gus' cartoons about his medical exams in animated form. This part of the movie I liked. The film went downhill from there.
Lizzie is concerned that Gus never had much of a social life and his medical problems aggravated his poor interaction with people his age, so she fixes him up with Emily (Jami Gertz), an intelligent and attractive but nerdy reporter she meets at a book signing. Emily tells Lizzie she would love to meet a man who is sensitive and cares about her. She claims that physicality doesn't matter. However, after Lizzie, her husband, Emily and Gus meet for a disastrous dinner, Emily rejects Gus because he is not physically attractive.
Lizzie decides she needs to shape Gus into every girl's dream date using her considerable knowledge of what her young female readers seek in a man. The rest of the movie is a predictable story of Gus changing, assuming a more exotic identity, and Emily becoming in love with his assumed persona. Of course the crisis is that eventually he has to reveal who he really is.
My problem with the film is several stale and sophomoric bits of humor that have little to do with advancing the plot. This includes a scene where Emily fills her mouth with some bad-tasting strange-looking exotic food at the dinner party. It is missing whatever humor made the original book such a success. In addition, someone decided to tack on incidental music that sounds like Muzak and doesn't even fit the tempo of the on-screen action. I also found myself dreading the few times Mitchell, Lizzy's husband, appeared. He was supposed to be a funny character. I found him irritating, not funny.
"Don't Tell Her It's Me" is also on TV and DVD as "The Boyfriend School," which is also the title of the very funny book by Sarah Bird on which the movie is based. Sarah Bird also is credited with the screenplay for the film, which appears to have been her first attempt to write for the film industry. I am guessing that she accepted too many suggestions from people with more film experience than she had, because the movie is so below the quality of the book. Someone even convinced her to change the title, although later it was changed back to the book's title.
The film begins with a clever, if not original, device of restarting the movie when the narrator, Lizzie Potts (Shelley Long), a best-selling romance novel author, changes her mind about what she is composing in her mind. Her mind drifts to her younger brother, Gus (Steve Guttenberg), who we learn is a cartoonist. Gus is recovering after finishing 2-years of treatments, for Hodgkin's Disease, that caused him temporarily to be bloated and hairless. We see some of Gus' cartoons about his medical exams in animated form. This part of the movie I liked. The film went downhill from there.
Lizzie is concerned that Gus never had much of a social life and his medical problems aggravated his poor interaction with people his age, so she fixes him up with Emily (Jami Gertz), an intelligent and attractive but nerdy reporter she meets at a book signing. Emily tells Lizzie she would love to meet a man who is sensitive and cares about her. She claims that physicality doesn't matter. However, after Lizzie, her husband, Emily and Gus meet for a disastrous dinner, Emily rejects Gus because he is not physically attractive.
Lizzie decides she needs to shape Gus into every girl's dream date using her considerable knowledge of what her young female readers seek in a man. The rest of the movie is a predictable story of Gus changing, assuming a more exotic identity, and Emily becoming in love with his assumed persona. Of course the crisis is that eventually he has to reveal who he really is.
My problem with the film is several stale and sophomoric bits of humor that have little to do with advancing the plot. This includes a scene where Emily fills her mouth with some bad-tasting strange-looking exotic food at the dinner party. It is missing whatever humor made the original book such a success. In addition, someone decided to tack on incidental music that sounds like Muzak and doesn't even fit the tempo of the on-screen action. I also found myself dreading the few times Mitchell, Lizzy's husband, appeared. He was supposed to be a funny character. I found him irritating, not funny.