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Pay attention, class. Jennifer Aniston makes two kinds of movies. When she has her hair tied back, it's usually an independent film (like last summer's "Management") and usually worth watching. But when her hair is loose it's usually a big, glossy, studio film like this one. She tends to hide behind her hair in these films, flipping it around or holding her head to keep it still instead of acting. And it hasn't been working out that well for her. Other than the ensemble film "He's Just Not That Into You," and the movie about the dog, "Marley & Me," she has not been very successful at the box office lately. And this charmless, predictable, and downright dull unromantic romance is another big dud. I'd call it manipulative, too, except that it never came close to manipulating any emotions in me. It's a romance without an ounce of chemistry between its leads or between its story and its audience.

Aaron Eckhart plays Burke, a successful self-help author and motivational speaker about to sign a huge multi-media deal. He specializes in helping people deal with tragic losses, inspired by his own struggle to deal with his wife's death in a car crash three years earlier. But like two other self-help authors in movies within the last couple of months (Kevin Spacey in "Shrink" and in Jeff Daniels in "Answer Man"), he is better at giving advice than taking it. Burke has been using his work, the book and seminars, to insulate him from his pain instead of dealing with it.

At a Hilton in Seattle, he (literally) bumps into a florist named Eloise (Aniston). For the first time since his wife's death, he feels something. She has just broken up with an unfaithful boyfriend and has no interest in feeling anything. He likes her because (I'm not kidding about this) she writes obscure words on the wall of the hotel behind paintings. She tries to dissuade him from his interest by (and I'm really not kidding about this) pretending to be deaf. Defacing property, exploiting a non-existent disability, and making money from the pain of ordinary people. They are meant for each other!

Even Aniston cannot make the antics forced on her by this screenplay look adorable -- including a parrot-stealing adventure that is, like everything else in the film, poorly paced and over-long. Eckart's best moment is early in the film when a photographer asks him a question and a range of emotions flicker across his face, giving us a glimpse of how much more he has to offer than this film allows. The delectable Judy Geer, go-to best friend in studio romance films, featuring actresses named Jennifer or who look like they should be named Jennifer is as usual criminally underused. And I don't even want to tell you how mistreated poor Martin Sheen is. Worst of all is the screenplay. There is a lot to be said about the way that self-help gurus are this generation's Elmer Gantrys, but this movie's decision to try to have it all ways leaves the story without any point of view, forcing the characters to behave in completely inconsistent ways just for a preposterous "feel-good" resolution.

At one point in this film, a minor character in great pain from a devastating loss begins his recovery with a trip to a hardware store. We expect that this will lead to some building project with a positive impact that will help him and the other people in the group work on something constructive and generous. But it turns out to be just a shopping trip, a lot of money and a lot of building materials for nothing. The same can be said of the movie.

Somewhere deep inside this movie, like the little tiny pea in the bed of the princess, is an idea that could have been an interesting movie. Unfortunately, as with that bed of the princess, it is smothered in 20 mattresses of awful and 20 more mattresses of just plain dumb. Warning: the screenplay is by Kim Barker, who was also responsible for the execrable "License to Wed." Two strikes and Barker should be out for good.

Sandra Bullock produced, so she is responsible for both Barker and casting herself in the lead role, plays Mary Magdalene Horowitz, a cruciverbalist (constructor of crossword puzzles) who has gone way past endearingly quirky and well into the land of the annoying oddball. It could be kind of goofily charming that she wears the same red boots all the time. It could be sort of intriguing that she has some of that Adam-style social dyslexia. But instead she is the kind of person who recites endless random arcana and then, when told to be quiet, lists several entirely audible synonyms for silence. As happens so often in this movie, she gets the letter but not the spirit of what people are saying to her.

So, when she sees Bradley Cooper (the title Steve), a news station cameraman, she immediately jumps on him, which he quickly realizes is too good to be true. He scrapes her off like gum off the bottom of his shoe, and she then commits career suicide and follows him to a series of increasingly un-funny news stories he is covering. Even the always-welcome appearances of top character actors like Beth Grant (glammed up for once), Thomas Haden Church (as a cliched self-centered television correspondent), Ken Jeong (relatively calm for once), D.J. Qualls (bringing class to a barely-written role), and the delightful Katy Mixon (doing more than I would have thought humanly possible as a cliched hick) cannot breathe any life into this soggy story. The best that can be said about Cooper is that he escapes unscathed, a tribute to his true talent and star power.

Bullock is producer, too, and once again she seems to gravitate toward roles that run contrary to conventions of romantic comedy, and I respect that. She likes to play characters who are socially clumsy ("Miss Congeniality") or incapable in relationships ("Forces of Nature") and she does not always go for the happily ever after pairing off at the end of the movie. But here the story spirals past edgy into disturbing, with comic references to an infant's deformity (and the idiocy of the public response) and an accident involving deaf children. While the film is making fun of the media circus about the rescue, it commits the same crime it is satirizing in its treatment of one of the children. The problem with this movie is not the cluelessness of Bullock's character; it is the cluelessness of the script.

Books and movies are two very different modes of expression. Books tend to be more subjective and internal, focusing on what the author or characters think and feel. Movies are usually better at showing what happens. Even a hugely popular book about a deeply passionate romance like The Time Traveler's Wife made with diligence and respect and starring beautiful people who are good actors, does not always produce a movie that lives up to the vision of the author and the readers.

Henry (Eric Bana) has become an involuntary time traveler following a traumatic accident that killed his mother when he was a child. He has no control over when or where he goes, but a force he describes as being like gravity pulls him back over and over to places and interactions that are most meaningful to him. When a beautiful young woman named Clare (Rachel McAdams) asks him for help at the Newberry Library, he can tell from her expression that she knows his future self and he knows her past self, but at the moment he has no clue who she is, much less that they are in love with one another. The special challenges (disappearing and re-appearing) are painful, often life-threatening, and even the benefits (it can be very helpful to know what is going to happen) can be stressful. But like all great love affairs, the connection between Henry and Clare transcends time.

Like the book, the movie gets weaker as it becomes more convoluted and far-fetched in the last third of the story. Unlike the book, it does not have the evocative and graceful prose written by Audrey Niffenegger. The novel is very internal, and no matter how able Bana and McAdams are, the script gives them little to do to convey the book's power other than gaze lovingly at each other. The movie eliminates many secondary characters and much of the conversation and interaction that makes us care whether Henry and Clare figure out a way to literally stay together. They seem to have no personality, no substance beyond those longing glances. By far the most interesting character in the movie does not even arrive until the last 20 minutes. As the storyline gets more preposterous (and, in the screening I attended, provoked some unintended laughter), a new character arrives to give the film more weight and honesty than anything that has gone before, making us wish we could go back in time to start the film with that story instead.

A little edgier than the "High School Musical" series and a little smarter than the usual tween fare, "Bandslam" is a refreshing late-summer treat for tweens, teens, and their families from the always-welcome Walden Media, a top provider of quality family entertainment.

Will Burton (Gaelan Connell), an Ohio music-loving loner who knows his Thin Lizzie from his Velvet Underground and has mental conversations with David Bowie, is relieved and delighted when his single mother (Lisa Kudrow) tells him that they are moving to New Jersey. He is often picked on, with no friends, and he looks forward to starting over in a new school.

Though he fears it will be just like Ohio ("Different kids, same me"), the new school is different. A music group competition called Bandlam is "Texas high school football big." A confident and popular senior named Charlotte ("Aly & AJ's" Aly Michalka) invites him to help her take care of the day care kids, and they become friends. Once a part of the school's champion band Glory Dogs, Charlotte and some other musicians are forming a new group. Before he knows it, Will is their manager, naming them for a line from "Waiting for Godot" -- "I Can't Go On, I'll Go On." Will is in "uncharted territory," making friends, separating from his mother, and even developing feelings of more than friendship for the winsome Sa5m ("The 5 is silent") (HSM's Vanessa Hudgens).

There are heartaches, misunderstandings, and setbacks (this is high school, after all), but there is music and there is a public apology (this is a romance, after all), and triumph (it is a movie for kids after all).

Hudgens, unfortunately, is saddled with a character who speaks in monotones. It would be nice to see her in a role that gives her more of a chance to show her spirit. Newcomer Connell is able, especially in his scenes with Kudrow, who makes the most of her underwritten mom role. Michalka has the most challenging role and handles it very capably. The characters talk rock but sing pop. Only Michalka has a rocker's attitude. But these characters have more depth and believability than most movies in this genre. Director Todd Graff, who made "Camp," again shows his sympathetic understanding for kids who want to perform. And, most important, this movie has a strong foundation in its understanding of classic rock that does as much as any of the writing, directing, or performers to keep us rooting for Will's group to go on.

Adam (Hugh Dancy), appropriately shares his name with the first man because even though he lives in contemporary Manhattan, he is in a very real way new to the world. He seems at once tightly wound and untethered. When he talks about astronomy and outer space he seems not just vastly knowledgeable but more at home there than he is where he works or where he lives. We can tell right away that he is unusual, but we do not learn how or why until mid-way through the film. He has Asperger Syndrome, a sort of social dyslexia, an inability to pick up on social cues that "neuro-typical" (most people) recognize instinctively. For him, what happens in the sky makes more sense because it is rational and predictable than what happens in human interaction, where people do not always say what they mean and what is most interesting to work on is not always what his employer needs him to do.

We first see Adam standing at a grave site. His father, his tether to and buffer from the world, has died and for the first time he must try to make sense of things on his own. A young teacher named Beth (Rose Byrne) moves into his apartment building. She, too, is at a vulnerable moment, struggling with loss and betrayal. A man who cannot lie has a lot of appeal to her, and for a while at least that may make up for what he lacks.

Writer/director Max Mayer has crafted a sensitive, even lyrical, script that quickly makes us care about both of these characters. We want Adam and Beth to be happy, but Mayer wisely is not clear whether that means having them together or apart. This is not a movie about an exotic set of Aspergers symptoms. It is a movie about Adam and Beth, who have struggles that will be familiar to anyone who ever tried to find trust, connection and a place to feel at home. Like the raccoon they watch in Central Park, all of us feel at times that we are not supposed to here, but we are, and we must find a way to make the best of it. Perhaps Mayer's canniest choice as a writer was to give Beth such good reasons to find Adam appealing. Her vulnerability after a bad breakup has her thinking at first that Adam's standoffish behavior just means he is not that into her. It does not occur to her that it is because of his social limitations. As a warm-hearted teacher, she is naturally drawn to someone who needs her. Her father (Peter Gallagher) objects to Adam, but it is her mother (a most welcome Amy Irving) whose own example tells Beth what she most needs to know.

Byrne is appealing as Beth, and the cast includes strong support from Irving and from Broadway veteran Frankie Faison. But the heart of the movie is Adam and Dancy is excellent, relinquishing the leading man aura he carried so effortlessly in films like "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "Ella Enchanted" and showing us Adam's literal sense of tactile friction with the world as well as his longing for the kind of relationship he can not quite understand. It's as though he is very, very far-sighted, the stars clear to him but what is right in front of him is out of focus. Dancy's performance and Mayer's thoughtful script and direction are just right in bringing Adam into sharp focus to illuminate not just his struggles but our own.

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