There must be some kind of comfort in seeing a film that is a carbon copy with only minor variations of a bazillion other films exactly like it. Or maybe the champions of something like Must Love Dogs come equipped with a sensory mechanism that makes them more attuned to detecting nuance between what appear to my untrained eyes to be identical low-aspiring/low-achieving, plug-and-play clockworks. Or maybe, just maybe, the people who will love this movie just don't expect that much from their movies and will, in fact, resent it mightily if you say something that falls out of line with their miniscule expectations. If that's the case, the demographic that loves stuff like this (or anything by Garry Marshall or Nora Ephron) is as zombefied and brainwashed into acceptance of communally-approved garbage as the demographic that loves stuff by George Lucas and Michael Bay. Dimwits, in other words--ones with a Y chromosome and ones without, but a dimwit by any other name would still spend their hard-earned money on feckless garbage masquerading as art. Must Love Dogs is more extruded, like an iron casting, than created--more a mold than a piece of art. Not everything needs to be art, of course, so here goes your proof.

In this version of Under the Tuscan Sun (immediately better because the singularly hostile and unpleasant Sandra Oh is nowhere to be found), Diane Lane plays, just like in the first version, an incredibly hot single woman of about forty who is having a lot of unbelievable trouble finding a suitable mate. The first mistake is that Must Love Dogs begins with a series of Woody Allen testimonials ending with a snarky bit in which two supermodels profess ignorance of any trouble getting dates (they're beautiful and stupid, see--happiness comes easy to them!)--the mistake being that Diane Lane is probably one of the four or five most beautiful women in Hollywood and always has been, meaning that anyone with a thought in his or her head has immediately drawn a line from the supermodels to Diane Lane instead of from Diane Lane to themselves. But no, the women who slavishly flock--most often in large groups--to movies like this (Bridget Jones's Diary, Maid in Manhattan, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Miss Congeniality, and so on and so forth) seem to think that they and their plight resemble the silver screen's perfect size-2 beauties, dowdy'd up in sweat pants and binge-eating pizza but cleaning up real good just in time to embarrass themselves for the "right" guy (sensitive artist, no visible means of support). It's an act of mass gender delusion, I think--a way of misdirected bonding like men going to a strip club. The good love interest is Jake (John Cusack), a maker of obsolete skiffs who demonstrates his coolness by wearing a Ramones T-shirt in almost every scene. The bad love interest is Bobby (Dermot Mulroney), who demonstrates his badness by not being played by one of the cast members whose name is above the title.

Sarah (Lane) has a (let's say it together) gay best friend, a pair of meddling Hanging Up sisters, a dog, a job working with adorable and precocious kids, and a couple of dating montages with monstrous men. Jake has an incorrigible best friend and a moment where he walks in on Sarah and Bobby sharing a misunderstood kiss that could be cleared up in seconds if anyone in this movie about the femme-aphrodisiac of gold-plated communication opened their one-liner-spewing talk-holes to actually communicate with each other. A couple of gorgeous younger women (and a third off-screen) are erected to work the older-women audience's innate fear of being childless into their forties when their husbands decide to impregnate a younger woman, while an oversexed senior is there, of course, to reassure that there's sex after menopause should no John Cusack come calling with a boombox held soulfully over his trench-coated frame. (Must Love Dogs, for all that, happens to include one of the most eloquent excuses for philandering and womanizing in any film this year.) With writer-director Gary David Goldberg having cut his teeth on such never-dated wonders as "Family Ties" and "Spin City", all the dialogue and all the circumstances are pure sitcom--forgetting of course that sitcoms, for the most part, suck, and never go on for 100 minutes at a time without the sweet release of commercial interruption.

Must Love Dogs is in love with the violin note, delicately held, released by a sad, melancholic piano tinkling and, of course, by the buoyant pop song, preferably from Sheryl Crow (though any Lilith Fair participant will do). It's a movie that anyone could make and, sure enough, anyone makes them--but the real question isn't why they still do (they still turn a profit is why), the question is why someone of Diane Lane's talent, fresh off an Oscar nomination for her work in Unfaithful, has only had these scripts from which to choose. Does a woman turning forty, no matter what she looks like, automatically relegate her to the status of sexual eunuch? The answer that Must Love Dogs suggests is "Of course not, doll, you look fantastic for a woman your age," but the answer that it provides by its very existence is a far different, far uglier one. It's not fair to castigate a particular group for their addiction to this kind of stuff--just like it's not fair to target casinos for their habitual gamblers or Big Tobacco for smokers. But only the addicts would say that this stuff is harmless, that it doesn't prey on their weakest natures with cold, calculated, avaricious intent.-Walter Chaw

*Also available in fullscreen.

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DAD