2.6.99 00:07:13
Simply resistible

Simply Irresistible
** (out of five)
Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean Patrick Flanery, Patricia Clarkson, Dylan Baker, Christopher Durang, Larry Gilliard Jr., Betty Buckley. A 20th Century Fox picture written by Judith Roberts, directed by Mark Tarlov. Rated PG-13, contains profanity, adult themes. Running time: 95 minutes.

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

I never walk out of movies before they're over. But I made an exception with Simply Irresistible, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (TV's Buffy the vampire slayer) as a restaurateur whose cooking gets a boost from a magic crab.

It's not because I hated Simply Irresistible, either, although my editor had warned me that it had gotten some of the worst reviews of any movie ever from critics around the country. (A local preview screening had been scheduled, then canceled.)

Instead, I left because, after the film broke for the second time during the first show yesterday afternoon at a local theater (the first unexpected "intermission'' lasted 17 minutes; after five minutes into the second break the manager turned up to say that it would be another 10 minutes or so), it seemed pointless to wait around.

It was easy at that point, a little over an hour into the film, to see that Simply Irresistible was headed for exactly the ending that you could guess it was going to have from the start when Amanda Shelton (Gellar) was awed by department store executive Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery).

Once that magic crab comes into her life and she discovers that her previously awful food is getting rave reviews from customers and acts as an aphrodisiac on Tom, what more could be said?

Unfortunately, there aren't many sparks between the nasal-voiced Gellar and Flanery. There's no depth to her character and their romance never comes alive in the lightweight plot. At one point they engage in crude chatter for far too long about the number of times a day that men think about sex.

Buffy, stick to vampires.

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