My Date With Drew (2004)

The budget for this year's second Drew Barrymore romantic comedy is 36,363 times smaller than that of the first, Fever Pitch. Guess which film is more satisfying?

A most natural Hollywood tour guide © Lucky Crow Films

People love the notion of an endearing underdog, both in real life and in the movies. And so, when these two strands manage to come together on the big screen, be it in the form of a determined Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, a maxed out Spike Lee in She's Gotta Have It or an undetected Nia Vardalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, it can make for intoxicating entertainment.

On a smaller scale, such is the principal accomplishment of My Date with Drew, an impossibly low-budget documentary about New Jersey native Brian Herzlinger's wacky romantic quest that first scored at last year's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, where it beat out such highly touted films as Napoleon Dynamite to win the Audience Award for Best Feature. Having seen this film now several times, once with an audience full of distributors and agents and once with an audience full of the filmmaker's friends and family, I can tell you that the miracle is that the reaction of the crowd was the same in both cases.

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