LOVE AND OTHER RECREATIONAL SPORTS

Standard love story exploring standard love in a generic New York City.

Jack’s a wannabe writer with a true calling as a banker, Sarah’s a musician who sunlights as a lawyer. The two meet at a mutual friend’s wedding that’s exactly the wrong balm for Jack, who is still smarting from Kim, his last break-up, and lamenting the dismal New York City dating scene. The two don’t hook up then, but they miraculously encounter one another at a birthday party a week later. Still, fateful or not, it will take a good bit of accidental hard-to-get and a number of discussions full of quasi-love-wisdom among lonely, uninspired, forgettable minor characters before Jack and Sarah become the center of each other’s universes. And even then they’ll have to get past little things like Jack’s insistence that hundred year-old paintings of nudes are essentially like the Playboy magazine of the 19th-century. A dinner date is in the offing, but what will happen when the chocolate-haired Kim returns to the scene of the crime via a chance encounter that starts as an argument on the B-line and winds up in a bedroom? Will Kim find a way to intrude on the pending date? How will Sarah react—after all, she’s a woman with options. This isn’t even Moonstruck, but “There is a light that hovers over Manhattan at night—a bright, expansive, incandescent glow that seems to float somewhere between the top of the city and the sky,” and that glow spells l-o-v-e. Newcomer Dearie’s fast-food writing—all plot-driven, all dependent on outrageous coincidences—will go over well with folks whose only hope in life is the lottery. In fact, one could imagine this one having been cut-and-pasted from other like novels, and people loving it just for that reason.

A sitcom praying hard for the leap to romantic comedy.