LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES (22)

Directed by: Emma-Kate Croghan

Starring: Frances O'Connor, Alice Garner, Matthew Dyktynski

The Pitch: A day in the lives of four students at an Australian college.

Theo Sez: Anyone who felt MTV's "Real World" was, like, far too real for their taste will presumably enjoy this incredibly precious movie, in which everyone is gorgeous, intelligent, wacky and incessantly fun-loving (some are also film students, which is the cue for some dismally unfunny references to cultish movie-makers). There's a germ of an idea in the contrast between the openly lesbian heroine, who's positive and life-loving, and her closet-homosexual (or at least bisexual) friend, who's tortured and unhappy - but nothing is made of it (not even the obvious) and "unhappy" is in any case a very relative term in the film's glossy universe. Despite undeniable energy (especially in the inevitable party scenes) it's phenomenally witless and superficial, and even the jokes are mostly crap - stuff like a girl pouring too much sugar in her coffee because she's too busy staring at a boy she fancies, or a man in the throes of divorce going on (and on) about how his estranged wife "can't have Angus" and how "she can keep the house, but Angus stays with me" (yes, Angus turns out to be a dog ; no, there's no prizes for guessing). The only surprise is its (mercifully) short running-time, under 80 minutes : you'd expect at least another couple of hours in a film so obviously based on Alfred Hitchcock's injunction - used as an intertitle about halfway through - to "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."