10. Dermot Mulroney does a fine job in the least flashy of the lead roles. As sportswriter Michael O’Neal, he is pivotal to the proceedings, as he must wrestle with the agonizing dilemma: to choose Cameron Diaz or Julia Roberts?
9. Cameron Diaz is carbonation personified, playing O’Neal’s fiancée Kimmy Wallace with the right balance of pluck and intelligence. Kimmy is much more clever than her perky college sophomore exterior suggests. She knows enough to keep her enemy close, making Julia Robert’s character (Julianne Potter) her maid of honour.
8. Julia Roberts is as charming and beautiful as ever, but this is a darker role than we would normally associate with her. Julianne Potter chooses to try to win her old love (O’Neal) back by a variety of means, some devious (her Iago-like advisor role to Kimmy) others nefarious (she plots to make Michael choose between his job and fiancée). Somehow Roberts remains sympathetic throughout.
7. Family members are real, instead of stereotypes, which is usually the fate of supporting characters in inferior comedies. Only Kimmy’s trashy Texan cousins suffer the caricature’s fate.
6. Sappy Sixties Songs are sprinkled throughout the soundtrack to varying degrees of comic effectiveness (though we don’t need any more restaurant sing-a-long scenes, do we?)
5. The karaoke scene.
4. Rupert Everett, as Julianne’s gay editor, steals every scene without resorting to clichéd, effeminate La Cage Au Folles-type parody.
3. Preconceptual manipulation. The filmmakers set up Julianne as the heroine, then spend the rest of the film creating doubts, so that by the end we are not sure who Michael should pick.
2. The denouement has just the right bittersweet feeling.
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