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Myles’ Berkowitz's cheeky, self-indulgent mockumentary chronicle of looking for love in all L.A. wrong places is a hit-and-miss affair that nearly but not quite broke out of the art house circuit into the mainstream a few months ago. Seeking to “combine my two biggest failures: my personal life and my professional life,” and armed with a cameraman, sound technician, and a $60,000 budget, he hopes to “capture on film the precise moment when two people really fall in love,” with luck one of them being him. His fumbling encounters, whether caught surreptitiously or filmed right out in the open with his dates’ consent, appear genuine, and as such are often pretty entertaining. But, as a parade of friends testifies, though clever and fairly good-looking, he’s not the most agreeable mensch in the world, leading various women to often find him initially entertaining yet rarely sign on for a followup, one even disappearing from the ladies’ room without so much as a “thanks for the daiquiri.” Despite himself he eventually hits it off with someone...only he’s still a few dates shy of the twenty established as a nice round-number goal for his movie title, and the new sig-oth suddenly isn’t too happy with his continued browsing: “It’s very hard to keep dating once you have a girlfriend.”
Comparisons to Woody Allen are inevitable, the result depending on the level of Woodablility in the viewer. Those who find Allen’s kvetching an annoyance might tolerate a lower level of same here, while fans who find him clever will likely consider Berkowitz a pretender to the neurotic throne. Personally, I think 20 Dates would have been a lot more enjoyable without the “mock” quotient; Myles’s post-divorce return to The Game depicts a lot of quirks and foibles most of us could identify with. But to inspire a sense of urgency he invents a shady, impatient investor, played as an off-camera voice by the film’s actual producer, who insists the only way the project can make a profit is to employ a few starlets “like Tia Carrere” (the actual producer’s actual wife) in various states of undress and faux intercourse and goes as far as to hire an indiscreet sexpot model to show Myles a really good time on date No. 9. Along the way film scholar Robert McKee appears as his personal guru, commenting on the film-with-film production as it reflectss Myles’s spiralling desperation. These glib convolutions only serve to cloud his worthwhile moral: “In real life, love sneaks up on you so quietly, you could miss it.” C+
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