Two Weeks Notice

Sandra Bullock often plays a spunky all-American charmer whose beauty is only thinly covered by a scrim of depressed shlumpiness, nothing the right guy couldn’t peel away. Hugh Grant regularly plays a foppish British charmer, his posh loutishness eminently reformable under the sway of the right woman. In the romantic comedy Two Weeks Notice, a piquant little love letter to a New York state of mind, the two do nothing they haven’t done before. But they’ve never done it together before, and the pairing is inspired: Bullock and Grant are as crisp as Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes are soggy in ”Maid in Manhattan.”

This time, Grant is a rich, spoiled playboy land developer and Bullock is a do-gooding lawyer, the daughter of two unreconstructed lefties (played with panache by Robert Klein and Dana Ivey). Meaning to stop his ruthless, community-destroying real estate plans (the movie was shot entirely in great New York locations, including Coney Island), our heroine ends up working for the enemy, fighting with him, and, of course, falling for his brand of not-quite-caddishness. Written and directed by Marc Lawrence (who wrote Bullock’s ”Miss Congeniality” and ”Forces of Nature”), ”Two Weeks Notice” knows what it needs to do for both its stars, does it, and doesn’t make a federal case about it. I’d watch these two together again in a New York minute.