"He never said that, and wearing a wedding dress is not gonna change his mind." -- Izzy, "I Could Never Be Your Woman"

Film It would be interesting to find out exactly what went wrong with Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman. Slamming straight to dvd in most of the world, this May to December romance with a satirical wink towards the politics of US network television seems unfinished, with poor pacing, stilted editing and irritating shot choices. Heckerling previously directed the flawless Clueless and underrated Loser as well as the cult Fast Times at Ridgemont High so obviously has some idea of what a proper film looks like. Having created all of those films, could she really have decided that this was finished or did the studio fire her?

Though Michelle Pfeiffer sparkles as usual and has some convincing chemistry with her on-screen pubescent daughter Saoirse Ronan, Heckerling somehow manages to make Paul Rudd (playing her toy boy) seem like the least charismatic actors around, employing almost every unspeakable cliché imaginable to indicate their romance. She the older woman, he’s a young buck, so it uses The Graduate as a point of comparison even to the point of having Rudd say glibly at one point: “Mrs Robinson, I think you’re trying to seduce me.” Oh do sod off. And just what is Tracey Ullman doing there as a kind of imaginary conscience for Pfeiffer dishing out advice apparently with the glow of a desk lamp following her around?

One of the other chief irritation is that since it was partially shot at Pinewood, so a raft of our comedy actors drift through in a series of minor roles. Look there’s David Mitchell playing an English comedy writers! Steve Pemberton as the studio censor! Sarah Alexander using an admittedly pretty decent American accent as a conniving secretary! Graham Norton playing Pfeiffer’s gay best friend and camp fashion designer! Even rent-a-face Mackenzie Crook sits on screen for a few minutes as a rude producer and with Ed Byrne appearing fleetingly as a delivery boy, it starts to look like a pilot for the new series of Carry On films. I know all of this sounds intriguing, but don’t. Really don’t.

Unpredictably, about the only point of interest is for Doctor Who fans since Yasmin Paige, Maria from The Sarah Jane Adventures oddly plays Ronan’s best friend and sings along to a cover parody of Alanis Morissette’s Ironic, which is admittedly one of the few genuinely funny scenes. There’s also a slow pan across the cover of Cult Times advertising the return of the Cybermen in Season Two. Though quite what that magazine is doing amongst the fashion mags on Pfieffer’s table in LA is anyone’s guess. Other than that it’s a godawful drift through a world were an unfunny Saved By The Bell knock-off appears in prime time (at least until its cancelled) and Henry Winkler still goes through life doing Fonz impressions.