Love Stinks reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Love Stinks: The Incredible Self-Reviewing Movie

You know how it is. If a woman with a cat falls in love, her gentleman friend has to be allergic to cats. (Ha, ha, ha. Remember how funny that was on Frazier?) If two women stand at the mirror in a public restroom discussing sexual matters, a total stranger, most likely an elderly stranger, pops out of a stall with a withering punch line. (Oh, ho, ho, ho!) If an angry woman shoots her boyfriend (you know, it happens all the time), she does no damage, just grazes his-- (Pardon me, but that knocks me off my chair.)

So it goes, in the wild and wacky world of television sit-coms. Sometimes, we need excuses to waste a half hour with the tube, but I can't imagine why anyone would face the traffic and the ticket prices to see Love Stinks when you can stay home and see better fare for free. Well, I know why I saw it.

All summer, movie previews have been punctuated by sassy but misleading teasers for this product of writer/producer/director Jeff Franklin's limited imagination. Just how limited? He has said no one was interested in financing this film until he got his star to play the lead. The star is none other than French Stewart, of the tv sit-com, Third Rock from the Sun. Nothing against French Stewart, who efficiently plays a living knick-knack in his tv sit-com, but that's hardly a name or a performer to carry a film. On the big screen, he plays Seth, a tv sit-com scriptwriter who falls in love with Chelsea (Bridgette Wilson), who is not so much in love with him as she is in love with the idea of getting married.

This film doesn't leave much for a critic to do, since it reviews itself. Seth's scripts for his sit-com Ronnie and Juliet parallel his relationship with Chelsea. As that relationship gets more and more unpleasant, his scripts drive the sit-com's actors (Jason Bateman and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) to protest that their characters are unlikable, and the scripts aren't funny. Duh. Didn't anyone figure this one out? Say, before this thing hit the screen? I really don't need to continue, except to let you know what I hope you'll miss.

The battles escalate, from cat dander, hair remover in the shampoo bottle, and flatulence in the bedroom, to a palimony suit, a restraining order, and the previously mentioned gunshot. (Stop, you're killing me!) There's a reference to Fatal Attraction, but not to a film that would show up the weaknesses of Love Stinks, and that’s War of the Roses.

In Love Stinks nothing or no one is decent or right or even good. Everyone is stupid, vicious, conniving--the women more so than the men. This is a movie for the "Boyz Only: No Gurlz Allowed" crew, not just a guy flick like American Pie, but a thoroughly anti-chick flick in which he or she who is meanest wins.

Not only is Love Stinks a mess, but it is a narrated mess, and narration of a mess or of a masterpiece has a mess of problems. Narration is an easy way out, defeating the whole purpose of a movie, since it tells rather than shows. Then, too, narration adds another level of believability. We must believe the narrator and the situation in which the narration occurs. This movie fails both those tests.

Things begin with Seth being forced into an airplane's restroom by his best friend and partner Larry (Bill Bellamy). (Need I mention there are jokes about two men going to the restroom together?) Supposedly, most of the film is Larry's account (to Seth) of Seth and Chelsea's relationship, including details he (Larry) could not know. To complete the damages, Tyra Banks plays Larry's wife Holly, or at least, answers to that name.

Love Stinks is rated R, although I don't know why. The language isn't as rough as I have heard in PG-13 films, but stronger than what you'll hear on television. The bodices are filled to overflowing (nothing else in this film is so well-rounded), but you'll see more skin on a tv news report about the danger of getting too much sun. At one point, Chelsea tells Seth that he is "so not funny," and I couldn't agree more. The most "not funny" aspect of this film is that it was made in the first place. It is not only crude and offensive, but also pointlessly crude and offensive. Equally "so not funny" is that this might become a box office success, simply because it is so familiar, so close to a tv sit-com, taken one notch lower in taste and language.

As I said, Love Stinks reviews itself, and its title leaves it open for too many predictable putdowns. People have suggested I should rank films from one to four peanuts. If I did, this would be a film on a half shell. Keep your feet dry (and pointed away from the theater where this is showing) and your heart full of noble thoughts (very difficult if you do see this).