The Romantics

It is always dicey for an author to adapt and direct the screen version of their own novel, since you can’t blame talentless hack filmmakers for compromising your vision when you’re the talentless hack. Galt Niederhoffer has been a prolific producer of unwatchable indie shit for years, but she’s completely a sea as writer and director of the paint-by-numbers The Romantics. Katie Holmes plays a tart intellectual who reconnects with her romantically incestuous college clique at the wedding of her best friend (Anna Paquin), yet can’t shake her feelings for the groom (Josh Duhamel). The expected sexual high jinks lead to the expected post-adolescent self-analysis, culminating in the expected life lessons and set to the expected twee-pop soundtrack. It still might have worked if we ever regarded the characters as recognizable humans—Holmes is particularly wooden, clutching a beer bottle as though it were an envelope of anthrax.