He's Just Not That Into You, 2 stars

Boy, I have now forgotten how this wound up in my queue in the first place. I blame a certain girly emotion which compels me to rent otherwise unappealing, unfeminist trash out of a misguided desire to see a happy ending and love conquering all. (See also "The Holiday".) The happy ending is provided in this particular film, but at the expense of any pretense of believability.

Speaking of believability, it is somewhat remarkable that this movie even exists in the first place. It's based on a book whose title came from a throwaway line in a "Sex and the City" episode. The book itself is not a work of fiction and has no characters. It is instead a collection of witty self-help aphorisms about relationships. (The one time I encountered the book, I turned to a random page which warned me away from having post-breakup sex.) From a book with no characters now comes a film with too many. There are at least four main couples and several peripheral characters, none of whom seem to know how to be honest or even verbalize their desires properly. We have a married music exec who can't keep it in his pants when hot young singers come sniffing for connections. There's the classic woman pushing 40 whose boyfriend refuses to commit to marriage. The film's most annoying couple is composed of a clingy simpering woman who is Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction inexplicably played for laughs. She meets her perfect match in the Mac Guy. Come to think of it, maybe that's what he deserves for so many smarmy, sanctimonious commercials.

If all of this sounds overstuffed and tired, that's because it is. Many talented actors are thrust into the film and left to spin their wheels for the movie's two-hour-plus (!) running time. Jennifer Connelly appears to have wandered here from the set of "A Beautiful Mind"; her weepy, put-upon-wife schtick works less well here when her husband has made the understandable decision to cheat on her with Scarlett Johansson. Jennifer Aniston plays another thinly disguised version of herself, and poor Ginnifer Goodwin (who I hear is actually pretty good in Big Love) is given such a thankless and annoying role that I would actively avoid seeing her in anything again. A pity, because she may well have talent that this film didn't have room for. Overall, the film is offensive, stereotypical, and an insult to intelligent romantic films like Annie Hall or Before Sunrise.