Alex and Emma (DVD, 2003, Standard)

ALEX AND EMMA is the perfect date movie, courtesy of veteran comedy director Rob Reiner (THE PRINCESS BRIDE, THIS IS SPINAL TAP). Luke Wilson plays Alex, a struggling writer who owes $100,000 to Cuban loan sharks. If he could only finish his romance novel in thirty days he would earn a big enough advance to pay them off, but before he can even start, the thugs destroy his lap top. Enter Emma (Kate Hudson) the prim, highly opinionated stenographer Alex convinces to help him. The rest of the film then oscillates between their present-day budding romance and the 1920s setting of Alex's story, wherein a tutor named Adam (Wilson again) takes a job at a lush country manor and falls for his beautiful employer, Polina (Sophie Marceau). Hudson appears in the story as Anna, the au pair of Adam's student, and with Emma's input, her character eventually supplants Polina as the novel's primary romantic heroine. All in all, it's an amusing tale of how real-life romance can affect the outcome of romantic fiction, and is loosely based on the true story of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who fell in love with his own stenographer over the course of writing THE GAMBLER. In the Emma/Anna role, Hudson proves herself an adept comedienne, and she and Wilson share a natural, easygoing chemistry.