The Fractured Mirror entry: She Wants Me (2012)
10 months ago
– Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 08:53:20 AM
She Wants Me (2012)
There are few commodities in film less valuable than scripts from struggling screenwriters. Yet in the maddening 2012 romantic comedy She Wants Me the mere news that Sam Baum (Josh Gad), a frustrated screenwriter with only an unsuccessful film to his name, is working on another script inspires a frenzy of excitement in two very different writers: Sam’s impossibly beautiful actress girlfriend Sammy Kingston (Kristen Ruhlin) and movie star Kim Powers (Hillary Duff).
Even more perplexingly, in She Wants Me everyone acts as if a newbie screenwriter has total control over casting for his next film when he wouldn’t even have a voice in the matter. The script in question hasn’t even been finished, or green-lit but that doesn’t keep the film’s characters from acting like it’s a done deal and he’s a big deal.
Alas, She Wants Me has issues beyond being a film world comedy that seemingly knows nothing about the film industry.
In She Wants Me Gad’s lucky schmuck is working on a follow-up to his first produced screenplay based on his life and his relationship with Sammy. Sammy understandably thinks she’ll be perfect for a role based on her but when big time movie star Kim Powers expresses interest in a screenplay Sam helpfully says will include “humanistic characters and a wide variety of different plots” she immediately becomes the front runner for the role.
Charlie Sheen, who Executive Produced, shows up to fat-shame Sam, call him ugly and express shock that a man who looks like him had a romantic relationship with a woman who looks like Sammy. Not to out-done, Sam slut-shames Gwen (Melonie Diaz), a beautiful woman who throws herself at Sam for having been with two many men before him. Sam is an extremely unattractive character, but that has everything to do with his sexism and insecurity and nothing to do with his weight.
She Wants Me is a curdled concoction about an insecure creep who doesn’t deserve to be happy or in love but as the protagonist in a romantic comedy is fated for an unearned happy ending all the same.