In Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey, this familiar but briskly paced romantic comedy offers a relentlessly sunny and adorable central couple. Both are beautiful specimens of humanity, but their travails on the way to true love never seem all that serious, and they are more likely to engage in under-the-covers tickling and cuddling sessions than in white-hot passion. Again, that pretty well fits the movie as a whole: "The Wedding Planner" is a chaste, lively and mildly goofy romance to dispel the winter blahs. I'll take it.

Essentially, it's another variation on the "Pride and Prejudice" theme, in which the heroine is a smart, socially adept young woman who's so busy organizing everybody else's life that she has pretty much forgotten about her own need for L-U-V. Out of nowhere she meets a guy and falls for him hard, only to discover in the most painful way possible that he's Mr. Wrong. But as hard as she tries to despise him, she can't quite get him out of her head. And who knows? He might just turn out to be not so vile in the end.

Lopez has never impressed me much as an actor, but she's well-suited for the role of Mary, the efficient, officious San Francisco wedding planner whom we see, as the film opens, commanding the troops at a large Catholic ceremony. She gives the bride a heartfelt pep talk (which reappears later in the film to terrific effect); repairs a bridesmaid's décolletage with a clothespin; tells the bathroom-bound priest, "Father, you're gonna have to hold it"; and barks cryptic instructions into her headset: "The FOB is MIA." (Translation: We can't find the father of the bride.)

As ever, Lopez's acting seems dominated by vague ballpark estimates of human emotion, but I can believe her a lot better as this cheerful, slightly superficial professional gal than as a hard-ass federal agent (in the entertaining but overpraised "Out of Sight") or a high-powered shrink (in "The Cell"). Mary wears expensive but understated clothes and a modest good-girl hairdo, which successfully show off both Lopez's remarkable heart-shaped face and her celebrated physique. I meant to get through this review without mentioning Lopez's most celebrated, er, asset, but "The Wedding Planner" does feature one rear view of Mary in an ivory wedding dress -- no, that's not a spoiler -- that sent ripples of appreciative awe through the audience.

But Mary's spinsterish private life of steaming her curtains, watching "Antiques Roadshow" and playing Scrabble with seniors is thrown into disorder when a hunky pediatrician named Steve (McConaughey) pulls her from the path of a runaway dumpster. Mary is more concerned about the Gucci pump she got stuck in a manhole cover. "You saved my shoe. And my life," she says breathily, while Steve is still lying on top of her in the middle of the street. Smelling romance in the air, Mary's ditzy, meddlesome assistant -- a comic cliché wonderfully performed by Judy Greer -- manages to ditch Mary and Steve in front of an old musical being projected in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

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