Romantic comedies can live or die on chemistry alone, and 1997’s Just Write is a good example of a movie that has a serviceable meet-cute concept, but a certain gulf of personable connection between its two leads.
Hollywood tour bus driver Harold (Jeremy Piven) spots his favorite actress, Amanda Clark (Sherilyn Fenn), sitting alone in a diner, and decides to approach her. When she assumes he’s a screenwriter, he doesn’t correct her, and then tumbles deeper into deceit by offering up the name of a hotshot agent as his own. When Amanda proposes a date to discuss her next movie with him, Harold finds himself scrambling to make good on his white lies.
Written by Stan Williamson and directed by Andrew Gallerani, Just Write has a nice set-up, and the ability to make good on plenty of cool local locations. Unfortunately, Piven and Fenn are just never really a good match. Williamson’s script favors cutesy interactions over digging into Amanda’s psyche with any appreciable depth, and Piven — for all his surface charisma — just isn’t really an actor into which an audience can invest an enormous amount of sympathetic identification as a vessel for pent-up sexual or romantic yearning.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Just Write comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, absent any supplemental features or Final Draft trial offers. To purchase the DVD via Amazon in this, the latest iteration of several bare bones home video releases, click here. C (Movie) D (Disc)
