Three interwoven plotlines with occasional points of intersection, one of them to do with the tested friendship between homosexual couples of opposite sexes, one to do with the boat-rocking new female lead singer of a garage band, and one to do with a wannabe documentary filmmaker who focuses his camcorder on a Mexican immigrant sex worker. Children feature prominently in each line, not as actual presences, but as life choices, abstract concepts: the sperm-bank baby, the aborted baby, the adopted baby. The entire cast of characters, however widely scattered, comes together in a fantasy finale reminiscent of Places in the Heart or Fellini's 8 1/2. Despite that stab at magnanimity, the film doesn't really amount to much, though it whiles away a couple of hours. Writer-director Don Roos keeps the tone on the light side, the glib side, the superficial side, the self-conscious and posturing side. His principal tone-setting device is the intermittent split-screen title card, dispensing silent narration in the omniscient third person, an uncommonly chatty, catty third person, omniscient into the future in addition to the past, telling us, for instance, that so-and-so has had sex with twelve women since his wife died and will have sex with two more before he himself dies. Verbatim prose samples: "She's not dead. No one dies in this movie. It's a comedy, sort of" and "Charley is now gay. Who isn't?" and "Nicky never lies. He's not her son, if that's what you're thinking." Apparently intended to be ingratiating but more apt to be just grating, these bring to mind the old Saturday Night Live gimmick of picking out an audience member with the camera and captioning the image with some potential embarrassment such as "Has hemorrhoids" or "President of the Olivia Newton-John Fan Club." Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tom Arnold. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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