Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! is a 2004 American romantic comedy film directed by Robert Luketic, written by Victor Levin and starring Kate Bosworth, Topher Grace, Josh Duhamel, Gary Cole, Ginnifer Goodwin, Sean Hayes and Nathan Lane. The film follows a small-town girl (Bosworth) who wins a contest for a date with a male celebrity (Duhamel) and a love triangle forms between the girl, the star and the girl's best friend (Grace).
Win A Date With Tad Hamilton!
The agent tells Tad that his hedonism is damaging his reputation and career opportunities. To improve his image and convince a film director to cast him, his agents establish a competition to win a date with Tad, with proceeds benefiting the charity Save the Children. Rosalee finds an online advertisement for the competition.
With the help of the Piggly Wiggly customers and a reluctant Pete, Cathy and Rosalee raise the $100 entrance fee as Pete tells his superior that he will leave for college in Richmond after he talks "with someone about going to Richmond with me."
A news crew arrives outside Rosalee's home because she has won the date with Tad. A despondent Pete accompanies her to the airport. Awed by Los Angeles, Rosalee becomes tongue-tied in Tad's presence. The date does not go well; Rosalee vomits in the limousine, and when Tad mentions his love of animals, which Pete had warned was a signal of sexual intentions, her suspicions are raised. After seeing Tad's house, Rosalee requests to return to the hotel and soon returns home, leaving Tad thoughtful.
On a phone call with his agent, Tad insists that he wants to turn over a new leaf and won't return to Los Angeles for a while. When he gathers Rosalee for a date, he leaves a positive impression on Rosalee's father, who had studied hard for the encounter. Pete tries to stop their date by reporting them for illegally parking. He tries to convince Rosalee that Tad is using her. Despite all of Pete's efforts, Rosalee and Tad grow close over the next few days.
In a bar, Pete corners Tad in the men's room. After conceding that Rosalee is in love with Tad, Pete tells him that she is more than a "wholesome small town girl" but a wonderful person with "the kind of beauty a guy only sees once." He explains her six smiles that reveal her emotions.
After a rousing speech about great love by Angelica, a barmaid with a crush on him, Pete rushes to Rosalee's, confessing his love. She is confused and resolves to still travel to California with Tad. On the plane, Tad fails to identify one of Rosalee's smiles and then confesses his lie, prompting her to return home.
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 55% approval rating based on 149 reviews, with an average of 5.60/10. The site's consensus states: "Formulaic romantic comedy works better than it should thanks to a charming cast."[11] Metacritic reports a score of 52 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[12]
Here is a movie for people who haunt the aisles of the video stores searching for 1950s romances. I could have seen it at the Princess Theater in Urbana in 1959. Maybe I did. It's retro in every respect, a romantic comedy in a world so innocent that a lifetime is settled with a kiss. And because it embraces its innocence like a lucky charm, it works, for those willing to allow it. Others will respond with a horse laugh, and although I cannot quarrel with them I do not share their sentiments.
Maybe it's something to do with Kate Bosworth's smile. She plays Rosalee Futch, a check-out clerk at the Piggly Wiggly in Fraser's Bottom, W.Va. Her manager, who she has known since they were children, is Pete Monash (Topher Grace). He loves her, but can't bring himself to tell her so. Then she wins a contest to have a date with Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel), a Hollywood star whose agent thinks his image could use a little touch-up after a supermarket tabloid photographs him speeding, drinking, letching and littering all at the same time.
Well, of course, Rosalee is ecstatic about the trip to L.A., the stretch limo, the suite at the W hotel, the expensive dinner date, and the moment when she teeters on the brink when Tad invites her to his home, and then says, gee ... you know, it's late and I have to fly home tomorrow. That she is a virgin goes without saying. What she can't anticipate is that Tad will follow her back to Fraser's Bottom, because there was something in her innocence, her freshness, her honesty, that appealed to an empty place deep inside him.
Within days he has purchased a house in West Virginia, taken her to dinner several times at the local diner, and made friends with her father Henry (Gary Cole), who starts surfing Variety.com and wearing a Project Greenlight T-shirt.
As it happens, I'm reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina right now, and for some foolish reason Rosalee started to remind me of Kitty, the ingenue in the novel. She and a good man named Levin have long been in love, but she's swept off her feet by the sudden admiration of a snake named Count Vronsky, and rejects Levin when in fact her fate is to be his wife, and Vronsky's love is a mirage. Just today I read the charming pages where Levin and Kitty, too shy to speak their hearts, play a word game in order to find out if they have survived Vronsky with their love still intact. I was startled by how happy it made me when they got their answers right.
"Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!" could have had a similar effect, since there is a real possibility that Rosalee will wed the slick Tad instead of the steady Pete. But it doesn't have that kind of impact, because of a crucial misjudgment in the screenplay and casting. To begin with, Josh Duhamel is more appealing than Topher Grace -- maybe not in life, but certainly in this movie, where he seems sincere within the limits of his ability, while the store manager always seems to have a pebble in his shoe. And then the movie devotes much more screen time to Rosalee and Tad than to Rosalee and Pete -- so much more that even though we know the requirements of the formula, we expect it to be broken with a marriage to Tad. And yet -- what is the function of Pete, within the closed economy of a screenplay, except to be the hometown boy she should marry?
That imbalance at least has the benefit of giving a formula movie more suspense than it deserves. And I liked it, too, for the way it played Tad and Hollywood more or less straight, instead of diving into wretched excess. The dream date is handled with lots of little touches that will warm the innards of PG-13 females in the audience, and the movie wants to be gentle, not raucous in its comedy. Kate Bosworth holds it all together with a sweetness that is beyond calculation.
Parents need to know that this movie includes some strong language, drinking and smoking (scenes in a bar, character drinks to drown his sorrows), drug humor, brief barf and toilet humor, and sexual references and situations. But the movie has a positive message about sexual values, as Rosalie's decision not to have sex with Tad is an important part of his developing respect for her and wanting to get to know her better.
WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON stars Kate Bosworth as Rosalee Futch, a sunny check-out girl at a grocery store in a small West Virginia town. Her best friends are Cathy (Gennifer Goodwin) and Pete (Topher Grace). Rosalee wins an online charity contest for a date with movie superstar Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel). She is whisked away to Hollywood for a glamorous evening with the man of her dreams, or at least the man who plays the man of her dreams. Tad is better at playing an all-American boy next door than being one. As his agent says of one tabloid photo: "Congratulations! You're actually drinking, driving, smoking, leering, and groping at the same time!" They set up the charity contest in order to create a more wholesome image for Tad. Tad is charmed by Rosalee's unpretentious goodness, and he follows her back to West Virginia, interfering with Pete's plans to declare his feelings for Rosalee.
This movie is a delightful fairy tale, with Rosalee the kind of girl who's so innocent that she not only wears her retainer on her big date, she takes it out at the table when it is time to eat. And Bosworth and Grace almost make us believe that they are simply just too adorable to figure out that they should probably be dating. Pete has a tiny bit of ironic self-awareness that keeps things from getting too sugary. And Duhamel is simply terrific. He has all of the confidence, charisma, and screen power to make us believe that Tad is a movie star. But he also manages to show us Tad's uncertainty, insecurity, and dim sense that Rosalee does have something worth wanting. The tough part is making that work in a romantic comedy without making it too broad or too deep. We want to care about Tad, but not too much. Duhamel gets it exactly right.
Costars Nathan Lane, Sean Hayes, and Gary Cole lend additional snap to the story. Kathryn Hahn contributes a lovely performance as a bartender who is smitten with Pete. It may be romantic fluff, but it is brightly done and all-but-irresistibly cute.
Downrating this movie for shitty love advice and for expecting me to believe she'd rather get with a walking talking dildo she had 0 chemistry or relationship-building moments with, than a sweet boy who was trying his best to be a good man for her.
In the scene near the beginning of the movie, where the camera switches back and forth from Tad to Pete, Pete eventually sits down to dinner with a book. The book is titled "A Good Man is Hard to Find", which is a short story written by Flannery O'Connor, a prominent Catholic author who lived in the Protestant-dominant south in a small town, probably similar to that of Rosalee and Pete's small town.
Early in the film while sitting with his two agents, Tad expresses worry that Ashton Kutcher got the part in a movie he is hoping to be up for. Topher Grace who played Pete in this film, costarred with Kutcher on That 70s Show for 7 years.
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