I’m an Alec Baldwin guy, make no mistake about it. Post leading man Alec Baldwin has consistently turned in some of the best performances of any actor in the past decade, certainly doing the best stuff I’ve ever seen. I’m also a pre-leading man Alec Baldwin guy since I used to watch ‘Knots Landing’ with my mom when he played that crazy religious fanatic on that nighttime soap back in the day. Seriously though, in almost every film that Alec Baldwin has showed up in post ‘Mercury Rising’ like ‘The Departed’, ‘The Last Shot’ ‘Running with Scissors’, ‘Brooklyn Rules’ just to name a few, he shows up for what I’m sure sometimes is just an afternoon, kicks its ass and then goes on back home to stew about his ex-wife and her complete inability to properly raise his children. Even in THIS movie, a flick that was a complete and total waste of my time, Alec Baldwin was good. I will admit that watching Alec and Buffy together was slightly unnerving, but this is Alec Baldwin we’re dealing with here and game does recognize game.

Okey dokey, Brett Eisenberg (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is young associate book editor at some New York publishing house trying to make a name for herself, but is finding the ultra competitive world of book publishing a bit daunting. What the girl is lacking is confidence, which is heading her way in the form Archie Knox (Baldwin) one of the most influential and respected publishers in town who she meets by chance at a book signing event. Archie finds Brett attractive, as I’m pretty sure most fifty year old dudes would find just about any twenty three year old woman attractive, and throws his mad older dude ultra smooth game her way, and poor Brett doesn’t stand a chance.

Before we know it, Brett has packed her stuff and moved in with the somewhat scurrilous recovering alcoholic, and the two start off on quite the commensurable

relationship with Archie assisting Brett with valuable advice and assistance with her career, learning her about different things such as fine music, wine and song, showing her the more sophisticated side of New York and infusing her with a sense of class and refinement. For her end of the bargain Brett gives Archie unlimited and unrestricted access to the tight body of a twenty three year old woman. Oddly enough these trade offs seem incredibly equitable to me. However this is a RomCom, though a bit more on the Rom side than the Com, and there are obstacles for our May / December lovers to overcome which include Brett’s dad (James Naughton) not being too enamored with his little girl dating a dude who he probably went to high school with. There’s also Archie’s incredibly self destructive behavior to deal with and Brett’s equally incredible immaturity that has to be overcome and then we even have a tragic situation coming down the pike. Can love prosper for these sophisticated but whiny Mannhattanites? Please don’t be mad at me when I tell you that I could care less.

I completely understand that I’m probably not the target demographic for this kind of movie, but since this flick bypassed the Cineplex and went straight to the DVD shelves it would appear to me that after the execs at Image Entertainment saw this and  they assumed, correctly I might add, that there really is no demographic for this film. A little while ago I complained about the movie '27 Dresses’ being about as formulaic a RomCom as a RomCom can be, but still that movie had a certain amount of charm amongst it’s characters where ‘Suburban Girl’ plays out similarly, but is almost completely devoid of any charm. We’ve already discussed that Alec Baldwin is a fine actor, and he was good in this too, but his character ultimately was so loathsome that he gave us no interest in rooting for him. This leads us to assume that all rooting interest was to shift towards Gellar’s character of Brett, but she was so incredibly immature and whiny that you just wanted to slap her, no matter how good she looks in a bra and panties.

It also doesn’t help our little romantic story that our leads, aside from having absolutely no chemistry together, visually looked just plain wrong together. Alec Baldwin is like huge. He’s a really big dude. Watching Sarah Michelle Gellar’s tiny little hands caressing Alec’s massive dome just looked disturbing. In an unrelated note I’ve heard some dudes talk about how they like going out with women that have tiny hands, but I don't actually know why that might be.

I’m trying to expand my viewing awareness you see and I’m hoping that by watching all kinds of films, including lame romantic comedies, will help me achieve this goal. But seriously, just go rent ‘You’ve got Mail’ for like the thirtieth time if you’ve got to get your RomCom fix on and hopefully let ‘Suburban Girl’ sink deeper an deeper in the vat of DVD’s that’s in that cage that sits in center of Wal-Mart.