Directed by Nisha Ganatra. Starring Heather Graham, David Sutcliffe, and Sandra Oh. Rated PG. Opens Friday, December 2, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Filmmakers always expect, or at least hope for, a lot from their audiences. In this case, they want us to have their Cake and eat a bit more than might be good for us.

The main thing that has to be swallowed is the notion of Heather Graham as a magazine writer and editor. Granted, the beyond-blond actor-who also helped produce this romantic comedy-has more believable presence here than in her usual dim-bulb roles. And Vancouver-born director Nisha Ganatra uses Graham's buoyant physicality-she has two of the biggest eyes in the business-as a force for comedy, not carnality.

Here she plays Pippa McGee, a gadabout travel writer who can't commit to one place to sleep, let alone someone to share it with for more than one or two boogie nights. That gets tested when her dad (Bruce Gray), a rather cold-blooded publishing magnate, gets sick and she comes back to Toronto, for once not pretending to be someplace else. He asks her to take over one of his magazines, also ailing, and she accepts without realizing that it's called Wedding Belles.

Okay, that's the kind of irony even Alanis Morissette would get. But I'm not sure that it's enough to pin a whole movie on.

The script, by Canadian-TV vet Tassie Cameron (Tom Stone, The Eleventh Hour), is full of zingers. It smartly builds the oppositional tension between Pippa and her dad's overly proper right-hand man, Ian, played impressively by Canuck David Sutcliffe (Rory's dad on The Gilmore Girls). And Taye Diggs is good as a suave photographer who appeals to Pippa's dumb-fun side. But the down-to-earth best friend (Sandra Oh) and wacky side characters at the mag (Cheryl Hines, Sarah Chalke, Sabrina Grdevich, and other familiar faces) are weakly imagined, so we have a hard time caring about their realities-let alone believing that they would let Pippa put out an entire issue without noticing that it stinks until it comes back from the printer.

The movie is colourful and easy to watch, but I don't know why Pippa has to be so thoroughly rebuked in the end. By the way, Cake is the sixth effort so titled in a bit more than six years, not counting Layer Cake. Maybe it's time for that title to get iced.