Rating: 
Summary: Romantic comedy?
Review: An odd catagory for a movie that seems intent on doing without romance or comedy.
With this cast it's fair to say that expectations might have been set too high, but geez what were they thinking? I mean they all have basically decent track records and none of them notices that the movie is bombing? Annoying characters, less than entrancing chemistry, and a diligent focus on the dreadful nature behind a Hollywood "star" who is so annoying that I began hoping that a plot twist would kill her off. Seth Green has some good moments, but if you want to see an all around brillant "inside Hollywood" movie I'd recommend "The Player" from 1992 - which also happens to feature Julia Roberts and John Cusack.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Julia's best work..
Review: Being a huge Julia Roberts fan, I was excited when I heard she was doing this movie. The previews looked good, the plot seemed cute, but a bit of a surprise that Julia was kind of taking a back seat to Catherine Zeta Jones. After the first round of my friends saw it and panned it, I held off seeing it in the theater and got it on DVD. My intuition was right. It's not that this is a bad movie, it's just not up to par with other JR movies. Maybe because her character was given second billing.. I don't particularly care for Catherine Zeta Jones, and the part she played in this movie didn't help. Thankfully, though the makers alluded to Julia Roberts' character having lost a lot of weight, they didn't subject us to her in a fat suit a la Gwyneth Paltrow.. like anyone would ever believe, even in a movie, that Julia would ever be less than beautiful. Given that the movie had a lot of star power in it (JR, CZ-J, Billy Crystal, John Cusack) it was just a bit of a bad use of the typical Julia Roberts romantic comedy. Go with "My Best Friend's Wedding" or one of her better movies if you're looking for a funny, entertaining Julia Roberts film.
Rating:
Summary: blah mediocrity
Review: It's surprising that a film with so many talented actors (Cusack, Roberts, Crystal, Walken, Zeta-Jones) --- acting about what they know, no less --- is so blah. Roberts plays Kiki, the formerly fat sister and personal assistant to mega-movie star Gwen, played by Zeta-Jones. Zeta-Jones is great as the whiny self-centered diva. Cusack is Eddie, actor and the husband from whom Gwen has split, and he is like the world's saddest puppy that his wife has left him for some other guy. But the two have one more film they made together, and he hopes to win her back at the press junket. Meantime, Kiki has a crush on Eddie, her brother-in-law not even divorced from her own sister. (Who does she think would pay for the wedding if it works out anyway?) Even though the film tries to depict Eddie and Kiki as star-crossed and meant for each other, it just screams that Kiki is being vindictive to Gwen and that she needs therapy instead. (Zeta-Jones is possibly the only actress who can make Roberts look plain, but, as sisters, they look absolutely nothing alike. Zeta-Jones looks like she swam in the same gene pool as Cusack instead.) But it is still an amusing little flick, and Seth Green is a stand-out as Crystal's 'mole' as he spies on the actors to orchestrate a charade of marital bliss for the audience at the press junket.
Rating:
Summary: Hollywood stars fail in impersonations of Hollywood stars
Review: You'd think Hollywood would have no problem making a movie about Hollywood. Think again. True, there have been some great pictures in which Hollywood looks at itself. The oldest one I can think of is 1937's A Star is Born, which was remade as an even better movie in 1954. 1950's Sunset Boulevard is one of the greatest movies ever made, and a few years later came Singin' in the Rain, a classic musical. Yet, over the years, the industry has produced more bad movies about itself than good ones. America's Sweethearts falls somewhere in-between. Its beginning is quite promising, but it falters and goes downhill after that. Lee [Billy Crystal] is a Hollywood press agent with big problems. His boss, Dave [Stanley Tucci], needs him to promote the newest move starring Gwen Harrison and Eddie Thomas [Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack]. The pair used to be the hottest, most popular married couple in America, and the public flocked to see their movies. Now that they are on the verge of divorce and can't stand the sight of each other, they are boxoffice poison. Lee must figure out a way to convince the press that Gwen and Eddie are getting back together without letting the two stars know what he is up to. He enlists the aid of Gwen's sister, Kiki [Julia Roberts], who not only resents the way Gwen orders her around but is also secretly in love with Eddie. Then there is the problem of the movie itself. All the studio has seen of it is the opening credits. The director [Christopher Walken] doesn't want to show it until he's made some changes. These modifications will result in a movie quite unlike the one the studio paid 86 million dollars to make. Reading the above synopsis makes me see how funny and insightful America's Sweethearts might have been. The plot leaves ample room for both farce and satire, but the writers didn't take advantage of the opportunity. Instead of being bright, brittle and insightful, the story is instead cute, cloying and tame. Most of the chances for Hollywood to laugh at itself are wasted. So is Julia Roberts. As much as I have finally come to respect her, I just don't think she's right in a plain-Jane role. Also, she has done the ugly duckling into a swan routine too many times before. The movie is primarily a vanity project for Billy Crystal, who also produced it, and for director Joe Roth, who used it to launch his new company, Revolution Studios. They probably were afraid to upset the Hollywood establishment, of which they are a part, too much. If your mind wanders while watching a movie, it usually means it isn't grabbing you. There are several scenes in America's Sweethearts where a character says something and everyone in the room gasps. I started thinking about this. In my entire life, I have never known anyone ever to say anything that made all the listeners gasp, and I've known some pretty racy people. This is something that happens only in the movies. Then, I started to list in my head of other things you see only on celluloid. Before I knew it, the movie was over.
Rating:
Summary: It was just OK!
Review: Nothing spectacular. The movie got a few laughs out of me.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of John Cussack
Review: This movie was such a disappointment. Although the female actors had an opportunity to capitalize on their relationship with one another (despite the ridiculous plot-which is so forgettable, thank God), Julia Roberts plays like she's taking a break from her busy acting career and Catherine Zeta Jones makes no effort to add MUCH-needed charisma or sympathy to her character. As for John Cussack...well, he just seems to be caught in the middle. The token male. American Sweethearts could have passed for believable, or funny, or not so stupid. There were no redeemable qualities. The director wasn't able to get anything out of his actors and to be honest I don't think the actors even tried, or cared. The one star is for Billy Crystal's line: "That's a whole Backstreet Boy".
Rating:
Summary: How embarrassing
Review: American Sweathearts is a testament to the acting abilities of Cusack, Jones and Roberts in that they manage to hide what must surely be complete embarrassment and discomfort in acting out each scene. This movie is lousy, unfunny, and totally devoid of charm. The acting is so cutsey and the plot so inane it would surely be a smash hit with the pre-teen crowd--not what the movie is marketed at. The only reason it deserves 1 star is the slap in the face of Walken, who's character and acting was actually enjoyable. A total waste of money.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing New, Nothing Original, Except for Very Crazy Walken
Review: Audience's instinct always tells that whenever bankable stars share the screen, it means money. And this movie's title is audaciously straightforward "America's Sweethearts." I thought the honor belongs exclusively to Mary Pickford. To be fair, "America's Sweethearts" is not a total mess; it gives some funny moments here and there, thanks to writers Billy Crystal and Peter Tolan (the latter also co-wrote the script of "Analyse This".) You can easily find Billy Crystaliam, just like in "When Harry Met Sally...", and incredibly unpredictable Christopher Walken, whose wacky performance gets wackier every year, appears the wackiest film director, Hal Weidmann. He is simply great ... sort of. But the romance part of the film is so weak, and it lacks power to convince us that Julia's character really 1) falls in love with a star John Cusack plays; 2) can endure her impossible sister for years. After all, we see standard Julia again, and charming as she is, she is doing the same thing after all. Her portrayal of Anna Scott in "Notting Hill" was more credible and memorable for her spontaneous and natural charms. (How come they decided to put her into a special make-up to make her look fat? This is not "Shallow Hal," isn't this?) As to Cathrine Zeta Jones, she plays an egoistic, selfish superstar pretty well, but it's still one-note performance and that's all. After all, haven't we all seen or heard those behaviors of Hollywood stars anyway? This is the product from Revolution Studios established by the director Joe Roth, whose career as producer is far more outstanding than as director. (His last job as director was more than 10 years ago. One interesting fact is that Mr. Roth, married to Donna Arkoff Ross, is son-in-law of Samuel Z Arkoff, legendary producer of famous movie company AIP, which made many exploitation films during the 50-70s.) This fact may suggest one aspect of the "America's Sweethearts"; "name" stars dominate the film, not the skill of director. But if you like Julia, you won't complain from the beginning. Not exactly effective as a romantic comedy, "American Sweethearts" still brings some laughs though, I guess, the movie-within-movie "Time After Time" (later changed "Blair B---- Project") must be by far funnier than this one.
Rating:
Summary: Sez who?
Review: You know *America's Sweethearts* is a romantic FANTASY when it asks you to believe that John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones are the biggest stars in Hollywood with several gigantic blockbusters to their credit. Yeh yeh, I get it, the 2 actors are playing made-up people, but their mannerisms are real: Zeta-Jones is, let's face it, not much more than a really hot babe, and John Cusack, he of the endless camera-mugging, is getting more and more annoying with each passing romantic comedy. The movie is instantly bad, right from the start: we're shown scenes from the popular married actors' work which merely look like bad SNL sketches (not exactly *To Have and Have Not*, here). The plot is preposterous: Cusack and Z-J are now divorced, yet there remains one final collaboration that a "renowned" and eccentric Hollywood director (Christopher Walken) is trying to edit in a cabin somewhere (a swipe at Stanley Kubrick, I suppose). Meanwhile, Billy Crystal, playing a sleazy publicist (as opposed to the other kind of publicist?), is trying to get the two megastars back together so that the studio can make a killing off the mysterious unfinished movie. To do this, the publicist needs to get the stars to be civil to one another long enough to sit together for *E! Channel*-type "junkets" promoting the film. Oh by the way: Cusack is falling in love with Z-T's sister, who happens to be Julia Roberts. In one of the movie's presumed jokes, we're supposed to believe that Roberts is an ugly-duckling -- hey, in a flashback, Julia has fake "fat-padding" under her clothes, so that proves it, right? Of course, the supreme irony is that Julia Roberts does not look particularly ugly, or seem the least bit glamorous in comparison with Zeta-Jones . . . an example of the shallowness that *America Sweethearts* is presumably spoofing. (She is, after all, JULIA ROBERTS. The make-up is always spot-on, the "charm" is relentless.) Besides being a plot contrivance, Billy Crystal also gets to make lots of jokes involving the male anatomy. But that's no surprise -- after all, the director, Joe Roth, once directed *Revenge of the Nerds 2* a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.
Rating:
Summary: john cusack is in this...
Review: but that doesn't make it good, surprisingly enough.........wish for better!
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