NEW YORK, 1962: Sinatra and Esquivel are spinning on the hi-fi, the suits are pure gray flannel, martinis are considered lunch, and all of the Big Apple is bustling over Down with Love, the new book from "It Girl" author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) that tells women how to "liberate" themselves from love through sexual empowerment and massive chocolate consumption. She's the protofeminist bookend to cad supreme Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), the star journalist of Know magazine who decides to beat Barbara at her own game. Posing as a dim-witted astronaut, he gets Barbara to admit she's capable of falling in love – but she's not the only one who becomes smitten. Director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) and his cast play the pastiche shell game to the hilt, paying homage to those smutty yet wholesome Hudson-Day sex comedies of yesteryear by replicating their candy-coated color schemes, period-fashion parades, and double entendres. Yes, the tongue-in-cheek take on the genre's latent homoeroticism and pre-sexual revolution attitudes lets everyone in on the joke about the high camp that came bursting out of those films' inseams, but unlike another recent resurrection of that repressed decade's psychic projections, any urtext is nothing more than punch line grist. While all involved certainly fill this Technicolor trip down memory lane with the right touches (everything looks as gorgeously glossy as a Madison Avenue wet dream, and both David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson play the respective Tony Randall and Eve Arden sidekick roles with aplomb), they may have captured the spirit of their empty-calorie source material too well. The result is a pretty piece of metafluff that aims to wink knowingly and be as laughably lame as the mediocre originals it adores, a near perfect forgery of a cinematic Big Mac. (David Fear)