Girlfriend please! You and I know what is romantic. "The Wedding Planner" is not romantic. There are so many problems with this trite, contrived and stupefying film that I don't know where to begin.

For one thing the idea is just dumb: A wedding planner who can't find a husband. If this is a scenario rife with possibilities, scripters Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis do not unearth any of them. The film flounders around forever trying to establish anything interesting about Jennifer Lopez's titular character Mary (get the irony - her name is pronounced marry) and Matthew McConaughey's love interest named Eddie and finds absolutely nothing for them to do. Here's an example of how unromantic and ridiculous the dialogue is in the film. When Eddie meets Mary's ex- boyfriend, who is now married with a pregnant wife, he calls the woman a "poor-man's Mary." He does this as an effort to console the distraught single woman. This is his idea of romantic talk? To belittle the "other woman" as if she were a Buick?

There are lotsa good actors in the film but none of them can outshine Lopez's lip gloss. Her lips steal attention away from everything in the film. Alex Rocco, Kathy Najimy, Frances Bay, Charles Kimbrough, Joanna Gleason, Kevin Pollack - none of these folks can help because none of them are in the film for more than 5 minutes. When characters had to be drawn, the powers-that-be here opted to throw a familiar face on the screen rather than actually try to essay some sort of "character." It gets annoying.

Worse yet is the lazy direction, the boring visuals and the cheesy score. Good, the score is atrocious. It's like something out of a 1970's romantic comedy. I really think they just recycled some old score from some old innocuous comedy from 1979 rather than actually pay someone to compose something new. It might even be the music from "Home Alone" or something. And speaking of music, the pop songs in the film are as bland as everything else here. There isn't a romantic song in the bunch.

Of course none of this is as compelling as the most obvious problem here, namely that Mary ends up with the wrong guy. We'd much rather see her walk down the isle with cute puppydog Mossimo (Justin Chambers) than with McConaughey. Mossimo may be a bit rough around the edges but at least he knows what he wants, unlike anyone else in this convoluted and archetypal mess. Lopez's Mary even wants to be with him at one point. But instead of giving him some sort of fault or problem, which would only make the film even more typical, the scripters simply let her break his heart. It's sad. It dilutes the happy ending.

You knew there was a happy ending right? You've seen the commercials and the trailer which show McConaughey going to get Mary didn't you? Yep, that's the end of the film. Why should we give these marketing dolts our money? Anyone who thinks Lopez doesn't end up with McConaughey here is a bigger sap than Mossimo. All we can do is pity him - and the people who pay to see this crap. The only ones who will see something they haven't seen before is eleven year old girls, and that's about the audience this goop is aimed at.

Notes:

Directed by Choreographer Adam Shankman. Score by Mervyn Warren.

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