The Boyfriend School Reviews

By now everyone has heard of New Age music. Many record stores even have special sections set aside for it; tapes and CDs with titles like "Sun Song" offer noodling acoustic instrumentals that go on forever and sound like the musicians are making it up as they go along. A whole side of one of the these tapes might be taken up with something called "Manifesto" that you've never gotten to the end of because you always fall asleep halfway through it. If you've had this experience, it's a good bet that you'll start yawning during the opening credits of DON'T TELL HER IT'S ME, a sort of New Age romantic comedy complete with noodling performances and a script that plays like the actors are making it up as they go along. Even the music, credited to Michael Gore, sounds like someone left the radio tuned to the local soft-jazz station. Under the wavering direction of Malcolm Mowbray (guiding his first film since the well-received A PRIVATE FUNCTION), DON'T TELL HER IT'S ME starts out with satirical promise but quickly turns into drivel distinguished only by its cynicism and insensitivity. Steve Guttenberg stars as cartoonist Gus Kubicek, whose body is hairless and swollen after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin's Disease. Too eager to get him back into the swing of things, his romance-novelist sister, Lizzie (Shelley Long), sets Gus up with Emily Pear (Jami Gertz), a pretty reporter who's writing a story on Lizzie. Emily's romance with her handsome editor, Trout (Kyle MacLachlan), is on the rocks, and she tells Lizzie that looks aren't important to her anymore; what she wants is a man with integrity. For her part, Lizzie desperately wants to believe that women don't really go for the musclebound hunks she writes about in her novels. She is, of course, mistaken. A quiet dinner, to be cooked by Lizzie's ditzy husband, Mitchell (Kevin Scannell), is arranged. However, the affair is a disaster. The food is unpalatable, and Emily is neither fooled by Gus' lounge-lizard toupee nor moved by his cuddly chemistry with dogs and Lizzie's cute daughter, Annabelle (played by twins Caroline and Sally Lund). Determined to help her brother win Emily's favor, Lizzie decides to make over Gus in the image of the most virile, irresistible romantic hero her fertile imagination can conjure up. Not only does a strict workout regimen bring tone to Gus' body, but hair begins growing on his head again (leaving him looking more and more like the Steve Guttenberg of yore). But Lizzie isn't content with these changes; she wants to redesign her brother, right down to his undershorts. Soon, Gus is tooling around town on a Harley, looking and talking like an extra from a "Mad Max" film. "Mad Gus" first encounters Emily at a gas station-convenience store where, very conveniently, an armed robbery is taking place, giving Gus an opportunity for some off-the-cuff heroics with a coffee pot (a la FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH). Emily, of course, is smitten, and Gus is faced with the movie's non-dilemma: Will Emily still love him once the masquerade is over. Displaying little of the integrity Emily claims to desire, Gus withholds his true identity until after they spend a night together, leading to some 11th-hour fireworks that don't delay the predictable ending by more than a couple of minutes. Fairly cynical at heart (with its implication that only the young, healthy, and attractive are eligible for romance), DON'T TELL HER IT'S ME nonetheless tries to come across as a full-frontal attack of cute kittens and fuzzy bunny rabbits, which, in the end, makes it seem even more cynical than it really is. Guttenberg is less whiny than usual, but how likable can a character be who deceives a woman to get her into bed? Though Gertz is warmer than usual, her character's stupidity seems bottomless. How did she ever get to be a reporter? At a romance writers' convention, she doesn't even recognize Lizzie when the author is standing next to a life-size cardboard cutout of herself. As Lizzie, Long is less grating than usual, but that might only be because she's not at the center of the action most of the time. Neither is MacLachlan, who, along with costar Madchen Amick, must have been splitting his time between this film and "Twin Peaks." Either you'll wish you could follow them back to the mad, mad world of David Lynch, or, if you're lucky, you'll drift off into calm, untroubled slumber to the strains of the inanely noodling actors. (Adult situations.)