If being openly gay will get you disinherited, then don't tell your parents you're gay. If being openly gay will get you fired, then don't tell your employer you're gay. But if hiding your homosexuality from yourself makes you incapable of seeing members of the opposite sex as anything but manipulative, persecutory, and predatory, then you might want to consider admitting (to yourself at least) that you're gay.

This is the advice I found myself shouting at Seth (French Stewart), the protagonist of Love Stinks. Seth is a man who spends the greater part of the film trapped in an airplane lavatory with his face directly in front of the crotch of his friend Larry (Bill Bellamy) as Larry recounts the last year of Seth's life to . . . Seth. I have never in my life encountered a more searingly awkward frame for a narrative than this.

Larry has incredibly intimate knowledge of Seth's life. He reminds Seth of the time that Seth's girlfriend Chelsea (Bridgette Wilson) aroused Seth by dressing up like Elvis Presley. He reminds Seth of the time that Chelsea punished him at a spa with a "volcanic colonic" that Seth, according to the woman who administered the 'treatment,' received "like a pro." Later in the film, when Chelsea literally fires a bullet directly into Seth's ass, he responds by saying, "That's it! I'm gay. You've made me gay."

Of course, he's only kidding. Or at least he says he's only kidding as the ambulance drives off with the paramedic probing for the bullet. Oh that wacky Seth! Will the laughter never stop?

I wanted very much to like Love Stinks because I had heard it was a sort of spoof on romantic comedies. Instead of the perfect relationship, Seth and Chelsea have a publicly dysfunctional relationship. And instead of getting married at the end, Seth spurns Chelsea at the altar, prompting her to fire a gun at him until it is wrested away from her.

I used to think that any movie about couples that didn't end with Tom Hanks (or Billy Crystal) (or whoever) kissing Meg Ryan (or Sandra Bullock) (or whoever) would be okay by me. It turns out that my standards are a bit more stringent than that. There are worse formulas than the formulas of romantic comedies, after all. And any formula that calls for the inclusion of a laugh track in a movie is bound to be one of them.

The laugh track appears in reference to the sitcom that Seth writes for, a sitcom in which a two-dimensional character played predictably well by Jason Bateman is in the habit of walking around a soundstage and spitting out witless one-liners that invariably draw cackles and applause from the audience. Most of his lines are taken directly from Seth's life, so director Jeff Franklin tries to con us into thinking that what Seth says in life must be funny because when Bateman says the same things on his sitcom, he always gets a laugh. I'm sure I would have enjoyed Love Stinks more if I had had a neon sign in the corner of my living room that occasionally lit up to instruct me to laugh.

Franklin tries to con us in other ways as well. He likes the trick of playing sappy, cheesy songs about halfway through before allowing them to be interrupted by upbeat, cheesy songs with raucous guitar licks. In this way the audience is cleverly reminded, again and again, that Love Stinks isn't playing by the traditional rules of the romantic comedy. No way, dude! It's like those Indigo Girl babes got thrown off the stage by David Lee Roth and Axl Rose. Righteous!

Love Stinks concerns the courtship of two mind-bendingly shallow people. Seth writes whole chunks of dialogue between himself and Chelsea into his sitcom, but thinks it's outrageous for her to claim credit as a co-writer. Chelsea is a woman who decides to marry Seth as soon as she's convinced that he can provide her with a comfortable income and lots of jewelry.

I know there are people in the world who are really like Seth and Chelsea. But it's a mistake to assume that the reason we don't usually make movies about them is because they're morally reprehensible. The reason we don't make movies about them is that they're dull. Please remember this point: Shallow people are dull.

Shallow people think it's funny to fart on each other. Shallow people think it's funny to drop cats on bungee cords. Shallow people think Married with Children is funny and go out of their way to quote lines from the show and to live their lives according to the precepts of the ineffably great Bundy's. But shallow people are supposed to know that even American society, shallow as it is, cannot stand them for more than twenty-two minutes at a time. We give them their sitcoms and let them promulgate their codes of conduct over the airwaves in an effort to appease them.

But they're not supposed to make movies for each other. They're supposed to know better than to imagine that anyone wants to watch people reduce the marital relationship to an exchange of blow jobs for diamond rings. If jewelry and oral sex is all there is to your life, have a great time getting pierced for that genital ornament. But don't, under any circumstances, imagine that the rest of us are interested in hearing your stories about the trials and tribulations of love.

Recommended: No