BEFORE: The romance chain is like winter weather - it's sometimes hard to get through, and some days it's particularly nasty, but in a few weeks things should clear up considerably. Hugh Grant carries over from "Notting Hill".
THE PLOT: A lawyer decides that she's used too much like a nanny by her boss, so she walks out on him.
AFTER: You might expect me to harp on proper grammar, and point out that the title of this film should be "Two Weeks' Notice", with proper apostrophe placement, but I'm not sure about that. When you quit a job, you give two weeks OF notice, and possibly the OF is just silent when you shorten the phrase. Pure grammarians would add the apostrophe, because of phrases like "one year's time" - but I have to live in the real world and make some allowances.
My wife and I went to Coney Island last Memorial Day, and I noticed a building that was apart from the others with scaffolding around it. It looked ornate, like an old-timey theater or meeting hall, and I wondered what it was. Well, that building is front and center in this film, playing the part of a Coney Island Community Center. Here is how the building looked in May 2014:
The proper name of the building is the Childs Restaurant Building, and it was built in 1923. It was a restaurant with nautical decorations of Poseidon and sailing ships until 1952, when it became a candy factory - candies like Peeps were made there for 50 years until the building was abandoned in 2002, right about the time they made this film. It was designated as a landmark in 2003, but it wasn't until 2013 that plans were announced to turn the building into the Seaside Community Center, which sounds a lot like the use suggested by this film a decade before. So I guess life ultimately imitates art.
As for the film itself, it's also badly in need of some renovations. I get that a romantic comedy needs to have a few reversals - "Notting Hill" and "Hope Floats" are two recent examples of sort of on-again, off-again developing relationships - but there are so many reversals in "Two Weeks Notice" that the plot ended up making very little sense. For 90% of the film I wondered if I'd bungled things, and programmed a film that wasn't even a romance at all. Really, the love angle comes in at the end, seemingly out of nowhere.
Let's start with a LegalAid lawyer doing pro bono work for the community, who then decides she can do more good by working for the same developer she's been fighting for years. Huh? This would be like joining the army to promote peace, or fighting against billboard sprawl by going to work for an advertising firm. I mean, I could see it if she took the job as some kind of mole to destroy the company from within, but no, she wants to work for the evil developer to do good things - that makes no sense.
Secondly, we've got the issue of her trying to quit said job - but she's locked in place by an ironclad contract that she HERSELF wrote. Again, WTF? If she wrote the contract, why is she unfamiliar with its terms? She would know that it's ironclad, if in fact it is, or if it isn't, she would know how to get out of it. Or she could file some kind of injunction that could nullify her contract - but no, her decision is to act like a terrible employee in the hopes of getting fired. I can kind of see this, because you retain benefits if you're fired, but not if you quit - but this point isn't even mentioned, so it's just another reversal in a long string of ill-intentioned contradictory plot contrivances.
Now we come to the character herself - she's a great lawyer, but a clumsy person? So she's competent, but also bumbling? Smart at corporate law but terrible at romance? She gorges on Chinese food under stress, but never seems to gain an ounce? Things just aren't adding up here. It seems that women haven't really made much progress if strong female characters also have to have all these flaws built in to their personalities. God forbid that a film portrays a woman who's good at her job and can also balance a positive relationship at the same time.
Finally, we've got the romance between the developer and his attorney - which doesn't seem like a great idea, considering the potential conflicts. Maybe this is why it doesn't even seem like a romance for the first 99% of the film - it's more of a co-dependency. She needs him to keep her employed, and to get this community work done (again, this is a real stretch, but let's assume...) and he needs her, well, for pretty much everything. Most notably, he calls her out of a friend's wedding because he can't decide what suit to wear.
This leads to a major NITPICK POINT: why did she leave that wedding? If she knows his personality, that he's likely to call her for non-emergencies, why did she treat this call like an emergency? Why did she even have her phone ON in the middle of a wedding? And most glaringly, why couldn't she use THAT VERY PHONE to ask him what the emergency was, before ruining a ceremony as well as her relationship with said bride and groom? Ridiculous.
This whole film had no structural support - should have been torn down and rebuilt from the ground up so it would make at least a little sense. Plus I hate hate HATE that Joni Mitchell song, "Big Yellow Taxi" - points off for using it. "They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot..." Well, you know what? The world needs parking lots, too, so get down off your high horse and shut up.
Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Hope Floats"), Alicia Witt (last seen in "88 Minutes"), Robert Klein (last seen in "Reign Over Me"), Dana Ivey (last seen in "The Kid"), Heather Burns, David Haig, with cameos from Mike Piazza, Donald Trump, Norah Jones.
RATING: 3 out of 10 wrecking balls
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