How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) poster

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is my favorite rom-com, bar none.  The setup is classic screwball—Andie (Kate Hudson) is a journalist for a Cosmopolitan-style magazine and is writing an article about all the things women do to drive men away.  She’s going into the field for research, picking a man who she’s going to hook and then push away.

Too bad she chooses Benjamin (Matthew McConaughey), who’s just accepted a bet that he can make any woman fall in love with him.

In other words—whatever she dishes out, he has to take. 

Andie starts small—she pretends to be a vegetarian after Benjamin has gone to a lot of trouble to cook her a lamb dinner, and asks him to buy her a drink during the most critical moment of a basketball game.  She slowly escalates to the absurd, eventually making photoshopped images of what their future kids will look like.

But when he takes her to visit his family, they both let their masks slip off for the afternoon and realize they truly care for one another.

One of the best things about reviewing films on the internet is that you meet movie buffs from all over the world.  I “met” The Film Authority when he roasted How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, calling it “absolutely awful cinema” and wishing all the characters had been gunned down in the final scene.

I made my case for it in his comments section.  It was great fun, very polite, and a friendship was born.  Politicians could learn a lot from us about reaching across the [movie] aisle.

These days I don’t watch anything without first checking what The Film Authority has to say about it.

He’s so, so wrong about How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, but he’s right about (almost) everything else.

This is part of my Movies I’m Grateful For series, running daily through the month of November. 

Other films include: Splash | New Moon | The Lucky One | Thelma and Louise | Katy Perry:  Part of Me | Crazy Rich Asians | Under the Tuscan Sun | Terminator 2 | Moulin Rouge! |