Of Mice and Movies

First off, they found two dead mice in this guy's office. The janitors came up to inspect the smell and instead of finding one they found two. It's kind of like when you are pregnant and then you find out you are having twins, except you're not pregnant and you have a mouse problem. It's just like that.

So second, I saw this really crappy movie last night. It's called The Perfect Man and it stars Hilary Duff and Heather Locklear. I learned three things: Heather Locklear is actually a really good actress, Hilary Duff is still the Anti-Christ and when introducing a younger-sibling character into the plot, it's okay to put coke-bottle thick Jerry Maguire Kid glasses on the child as long as it's a boy. This poor seven year old girl had to spend the whole movie looking like an androgynous toad. Or maybe the kid really is legally blind, I don't know.

Anyway, the "plot", loosely based on the excellent film Mermaids, centers around this girl whose mom always moves whenever she gets her heart broken which is apparently quite often. She's a baker so there's job openings everywhere. This is how the movie starts:

Hilary Duff (in an ugly prom dress): "Gosh I can't believe I'm going to my first dance next week. I've never stayed at a place long enough to go to a dance. My mom moves around a lot."

Disposable Rent-A-Friend: "Yeah. I'm happy we became such close friends."

If you have seen even one movie in your life you know she never makes it to that dance. So the mom packs up and they move to Park Slope for the exterior shots, but live in Brooklyn Heights and the girls go to school on a sound stage in New Jersey. Hilary Duff meets her new best friend, an ambiguously Puerto Rican white girl with a Long Island accent, and together they try to find her mom a man so Duff can stay in Brooklyn with her new best friend. Brooklyn girl's hot uncle who owns a restaurant but does not have a coke habit gives them advice about men and together they create the "Perfect Man" as a secret admirer for her mom. If Anthony Michael Hall were in this you can bet he'd actually make a man out of his science kit, but we're not in the 80's, people.

So the girls make all this up, take a picture of the Uncle and send it to her mom along with love letters and emails. Things get really creepy when Duff's teenage love interest helps by calling her mom in his "older guy voice" and professing his love when really he is falling in love with Duff. The plot takes a turn for the criminal when Heather Locklear and said teenage boy actually start IMing each other and turns downright Southern when Duff and Locklear have a creepy sexual IM conversation. All under the guise that she is the guy who owns the restaurant.

Hey, I have an idea. Couldn't this have been avoided if the ambiguously Puerto Rican white girl would have just mentioned that her uncle actually is single? Whoops. Hilary Duff crashes a wedding that he's catered, thinking he is the groom. That just came out of nowhere.

I won't tell you how this movie ends. If you ask, I'll have to relocate.