Josh Duhamel wears an unidentified watch

Josh Duhamel stands at the party in a black tuxedo and a wine-red bow tie, a champagne flute in one hand and the room behind him gone to gold bokeh. On the wrist that holds the glass sits a watch: a thin dress piece, a slim round case on a dark leather strap, worn under a French cuff and a square gold cufflink.

He plays Sam Ahern Jr., heir to Ahern Records, the label his late father founded. The 2011 Garry Marshall ensemble spends his whole storyline getting him into this room. Sam is due to give the speech at the company's New Year's ball, his car gives out in Connecticut with no tow truck in sight, and he finishes the drive in a stranger's RV, all the while weighing whether to find the woman he fell for the New Year's before. He reaches the ball as the year ends and gives the speech.

The catch is the dial. The gala lighting hits the crystal head on and burns the face to a flat white disc, so the one surface that would carry a maker's mark shows nothing. The case reads as polished steel and the hands survive as faint strokes, the strap is plainly dark leather, but the watch keeps its name to itself, and no production source supplies one.

So a film built around a man racing to land on midnight puts a watch on his wrist and then lights it so hard you cannot read the time on it. The woman he spends the film deciding whether to find turns out to be Kim Doyle, a recently divorced single mother played by Sarah Jessica Parker, a character from one of the film's other storylines who reunites with him at a restaurant once the ball has dropped.