film | Not funny!

Yeah, yeah, I get it. DATE MOVIE mocks date movies. You know, date movies, feel-good flicks for the hand-holding set like My Best Friend's Wedding and The Wedding Planner and My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Wedding Crashers — the 1990 Alan Alda/Molly Ringwald comedy Betsy's Wedding was, presumably, too obscure — and Hitch and Notting Hill and Meet the Fockers and What Women Want and ... um ... Napoleon Dynamite and King Kong and Kill Bill and Lord of the Rings and ... er ... MTV's vehicular-rehab series Pimp My Ride and the no-one-cares-anymore reality show The Bachelor and the commercial in which Paris Hilton has sexual intercourse with a hamburger.

That half those titles aren't date movies isn't even the real problem. Most of the rest of them were so utterly forgettable to begin with — hello, does anybody remember anything about The Wedding Planner other than that it's one of those romantic-farce dustballs Jennifer Lopez does when she's taking a break from getting married? — that the parodies seem limp and clueless by default. It's akin to "Weird Al" Yankovic releasing an album of wacky covers based on any record Alanis Morissette made following Jagged Little Pill.

Chuckles? I counted three. Erstwhile Buffy sidekick Alyson Hannigan, cute as several buttons despite the Stay-Puft fat suit she wears for the first 20 minutes of the film, plays a lovelorn plus-plus-sizer who jiggles down the street to Kelis' inescapable dance hit "Milkshake," lustily thrusting towards a construction worker who nail-guns his own head in disgust. (Check!) In a borderline-clever twist on My Big Fat ethnic humor, she waits tables in a Greek restaurant owned by her African-American dad and Indian mom (check!), and later — after Hannigan's liposuctioned her way into the heart of a winsome British customer (Adam Campbell) — Best in Show scene-stealers Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge stop by for an amusing riff on Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand's cheese-and-matzo-cracker performances as the frisky Jewish in-laws of Meet the Fockers (check!).

And that's about it, really. Aside from the 45 seconds or so of mild titters those moments provide, Date Movie is just plain old unfunny — a comedy you don't watch as much as you wait out. D-