Simply Irresistible

The spirit of classic MGM romantic comedies hangs heavily over this resolutely unmagical picture. Amanda Shelton (Sarah Michelle Gellar) cooks in the shadow of her late mother, a divinely inspired chef who made the family restaurant, Southern Cross, a neighborhood institution. But Amanda's lackluster concoctions are running the joint into the ground. Enter her guardian angel (Christopher Durang), who appears at a produce market and presses a basket of crabs on Amanda. One of them, you see, is a magic crab, and next thing she knows Amanda has fallen for a sleek, supercilious marketing type named Tom Bartlett (Sean Patrick Flanery), who's flacking for the chic...