Christian Bale, a Harvard Medical School graduate, is bored having sex his fiancée, Kate Beckinsale, also a Medical School graduate working on another degree, in his mothers', Frances McDormand, glass and redwood mansion in the Hollywood Hills, which, instead of being vacated, is occupied by his record producer mother recording a British rock band while having sex with the very much younger lead singer. The Malibu beach house is currently occupied by the mothers' current ex-boyfriend. Nude poolside parties with joints the size of Louisville Sluggers lead to threesomes with Beckinsale. Bale's fellow psychology resident, a slavic accented Israeli with big eyes, big hair and big breasts, gets around to speculating about performing oral sex on him. I sat watching the film knowing that it was 19 degrees outside and a magazine editor had just informed me that my review of The Pianist, which I wrote for them in November, wasn't going to be in the issue he just took to the printers and he doubted whether it would still be relevant for the next issue in May.<br /><br />I tried to figure out what problems the film's protagonists were dealing with. In pre-war Italy there were all of these films which dealt with the middle classes and the minor nobility and their various mating problems which became notorious as 'White Telephone' films for the prominent use of the apparatus which few ordinary Italians could even hope to use in plain black mufti no less possess. It was precisely these films which inspired the younger generation of Italian filmmakers to revolt against and create the neo-realism revolution after the war. Thus we have the present day equivalent of the White Telephone film, a film which exists because the writer/director, Lisa Cholodenko, needs to make films in order to be a filmmaker. Other than that there is no real reason for this film to exist. This is a film which says nothing and is about nothing and does not do it with either charm, wit, or the slightest amusement. I am always curious as to who thought this a worthy enough enterprise to invest the time, money and energy in so empty a project? By the way, there is a scene in the film where Christian Bale catches Kate Beckensale in the lead singers bed wearing a black lace thingee where she gets to say that deathless line: 'It's not what it looks like. We didn't do anything' surely the second most used line in films after 'Let's get outa here...'