film | You've got male

So you adore Brokeback Mountain, but you secretly wish it contained a scene in which Heath Ledger snorted bad cocaine and crapped all over the floor in front of a stunned Jake Gyllenhaal. Well, ADAM & STEVE, a gay relationship farce from actor/director/writer Craig Chester, is here to at last realize the scenario — if not with Ledger or Gyllenhaal — in a There's Something About Mary-ish opening sequence that showcases perhaps the worst one-night stand in cinematic history. Chester's timid goth takes home a hardbodied go-go boy (Caroline in the City's Malcolm Gets) while clubbing in 1987 New York City, but a diarrhetic bump spurs a highly unpleasant surprise that causes gets to bolt in embarrassment. Nearly two decades later, they reconnect but don't recognize each other, and ... uh, if you can't figure out where this is headed, you probably think the romantic-comedy oeuvres of Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon and Meg Ryan are home to some of the most brilliantly original plotting since The Crying Game. Also, I'm the brains behind this pyramid scheme that'd totally make you tons of money. Call me.

Anyway, discounting the same-sex angle and its ensuing shtick (i.e., the queasy running gag in which beer bottles are hurled at Chester whenever he shares a public clinch with Gets), Adam & Steve's narrative is par for the genre's course: Two people meet, date, confide in wisecracking friends (here, Saturday Night Live's Chris Kattan is Gets' typical-straight-guy roommate, and the incomparable Parker Posey plays Chester's gal pal, a formerly-chubby comic whose deadpan stand-up act consists of wildly inapplicable I'm-so-fat jokes), fall in love, face complications, break up, reconcile, and presumably live Happily Ever After. Yawn. While Chester unleashes some choice bon mots ("Oprah has made it impossible for me to have a close relationship with anyone ... besides Oprah"), his stabs at whimsy — oh no, not a cutesy line-dancing showdown! — are too awkward to shake the movie free from its rom-com doldrums. Adam & Steve has a heart, and it's usually in the right place, but its funny bone needs to be checked for osteoporosis. C-