An homage to the films made by Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notably Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, it tells the story of Barbara Novak, a farm girl from Maine who finds fame and fortune as the author of Down with Love, a book that urges women to become liberated from male domination by giving up on love and substituting chocolate for physical pleasure. Ace reporter Catcher Block (McGregor), a playboy in the classic sense, sets out to expose her as a fraud, and invents an alter ego, astronaut Zip Martin, to seduce her. In a sub-plot, Novak's garrulous editor and publicist, Vikki Hiller, and Catcher's naïve, insecure best friend and boss Peter MacMannus, provide comic relief as they struggle to engage in a romantic fling of their own.
The sets, costumes, cinematography, editing, score, opening credits, and special effects, including split-screen shots during phone calls heavily laced with double entendres between the two leads, are carefully designed to give the impression that the movie was actually shot in 1962, even to the extent of digitally recreating the New York City skyline and developing a greenscreen technique simulating cheesy 1960s rear projection. While the plot reflects the attitudes and behavior of the early, pre-sexual revolution Sixties, the film has an anachronisticsubtext driven by more modern, post-feminist ideas and attitudes. The script mixes early 21st Century ideas with the type of light-hearted banter that dominated films of the early 1960s.
Trivia
The musical number seen during the closing credits (and in its entirety on the DVD release) was a last-minute addition to the film. Songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman appear in the number as the bartender and the pianist.
The script includes a reference to CinemaScope, a now defunct widescreen process introduced in the 1950s, developed and owned by 20th Century Fox, the studio that released the film.
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