GREAT actors make the craft look easy. In the Paris Hilton comedy “The Hot tie and the Nottie,” acting looks very, very difficult.
A bright young actress named Christine Lakin, unfortunately playing most of the movie with Elephant Man scare-prosthetics (warts, monobrow and the kind of teeth last seen on British punk rockers in 1976), is the only bright spot toward the merciful end of this laugh vacuum.
Hilton’s face, like her name, is a hotel, but one in which every room is sparkling and vacant. It’s as if she’s looking past the other actors to see if anyone more interesting has arrived on the set. Possibly cue cards were involved, although that would presume she can read.
Her only convincing gesture is flicking her hair to unstick it from her visible-from-space lip gloss, a move she pulls off expertly. Otherwise she makes Bo Derek looks like Meryl Streep.
Hilton’s Christabel is the lifelong object of desire of Nate (Joel David Moore, doing a sort of Jimmy Fallon meets Zach Braff), who finds out his former
grammar-school classmate is living in LA. He reconnects with Christabel by hanging around her jogging route, on a bench where two other losers (one an albino, the other a guy in a tux holding a “Marry Me” sign) sit every day to fling their sloppy gazes at her.
Christabel instantly befriends the cringing loser in one of many unlikely developments but, on a picnic, tells him she can’t date anyone until her homely friend June also gets a boyfriend. So Nate looks at the picnic spread and says he has the perfect guy for June: “Cole . . . uh, Slaw . . . sen.”
When Nate hires a guy to play Cole, the movie becomes yet another ugly-duckling story, and I do mean ugly. It looks like it was shot on middle school AV club equipment, and the jokes, aiming for gross-out value, are merely sad. A sound effect of a horse whinnying accompanies shots of June, an old lady talks about lasering her bikini line, and one of June’s infected toenails inexplicably winds up in Cole’s mouth.
Execrable as the first hour is, the movie finishes up with a decent third act, when June’s point of view takes over. The movie works up some sympathy for her and her weary lifelong efforts to bust out of the prison cell of her ugliness. Or possibly we’re happy for the actress playing her finally being released from the putrid makeup and even more putrid jokes.
Then again, when your senses have been pummeled for an hour, the mere cessation of punishment feels like a full-body massage.
THE HOTTIE AND THE NOTTIE
Fugly.
Running time: 91 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, raunchy humor). At the Empire, Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street.