Kate (Jennifer Aniston) leads a generally happy life - there is just one problem. She has contributed over and over to her job, but she just can't seem to get ahead. Most recently she saved the Gulden's mustard account at the last minute with a creative approach, but now she's not even on the team that will be handling their advertising.
When she confronts her boss, she is told to dress not for the job she has, but for the job she wants - which perhaps isn't completely appropriate, since it has nothing to do with the way Kate dresses, and everything to do with the fact that she has no ties to the company.
Everyone else who is getting promoted is in debt and can't afford to get up and leave, while she is just waltzing through her life, so her boss is worried that if she gets promoted, she could get cozy with the clients, and when she decides that she's tired of working there, she can just get up and leave, taking them with her. She needs to have the mortgage and the family or she'll never get anywhere. Bizarre, but that's the way it works.
Kate's "friend", Darcy, (Illeana Douglas), picks up a picture taken at the wedding of a friend, where she notices Kate with a man, and passes that off as the man that Kate is engaged to marry. Unfortunately, Nick, the man in the picture, doesn't even really know that Kate exists - and he lives in a different state to boot.
But at least because of this it's easy to make up the story as she goes along, and at least it gets her the job she wants for now. That is, until Nick shows up on the news for rescuing some people in a fire. Then her boss sees her "man" on the television and says that they have to have him for the ad campaign. Uh-oh.
Kate manages to get Nick (Jay Mohr) on the phone, and have him agree to come to town for dinner with the boss, and agree to break up with her (though they aren't actually dating - he's a nice guy). But when he meets her, he decides that he'd rather just date her for real. This is a problem, because Kate wants to date Sam (Kevin Bacon), the womanizer in the office who is finally paying her attention now that she has another man in her life.
When Kate embarrasses Nick at dinner, he does what he came to do and breaks up with her, humiliating himself in the process, and slinks back out of town. But when that happens, Kate finds that she doesn't get what she hoped for - even Sam doesn't want her, now that she no longer has the appeal of being the bad girl, so naturally she has to run after Nick, a move that you can see coming from a long ways away. The end isn't a surprise.
Rated PG-13 for sensuality and related dialogue.
Comments