One wouldn't necessarily put Peter Chelson's saccharine-coated flick "Serendipity" in the same company as the classic romantic romps of yesteryear (such as "Pillow Talk") or even in the category of contemporary ditties like "Manhattan", "Sleepless In Seattle", or "You Got Mail" for that matter.
Images of this boy's life and that girl's existence provide a smart riff on the split-screen moments Doris Day and Rock Hudson shared in the fluffy romance "Pillow Talk.
But directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — who did the last "Jump Street" movie, as well as the sublimely superior "The Lego Movie" — keep it moving and occasionally weird (with a giddy drug trip, and a split-screen idea that seems like a nod to, of all things, "Pillow Talk").
Gordon-Levitt’s maternal grandfather, as it happens, directed the Doris Day-Rock Hudson rom-com classic “Pillow Talk,’’ which in its way is as much a time capsule of its early ’60s era as “Don Jon’’ is of our own time.
Seconds was seen as a significant acting departure for Hudson, whose career in the late 1960s was on a downward slide after successfully working in several of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas (including All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind) and a number of romantic comedies with Doris Day in the late ’50s and early ’60s (the most famous being Pillow Talk).
Fans of Alex Ross Perry will point out that hostility is his natural terrain, that people in his films are born to bridle, and that, if you want niceness, you could always stay home and watch “Pillow Talk.”