Earlier today Frosty and I bicycled to the Mayan for a matinee. The theme of Jill Sprecher's pretentious 13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING is that we don't know whether we'll be happy or unhappy in the future. If you don't already know this, I urge you to see the film; otherwise, you might be better off catching SCOOBY-DOO or DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD.

Each of the thirteen episodes is contrived in an embarrassingly obvious and heavy-handed way to teach us that the vicissitudes of fortune are unpredictable, an idea that Sprecher treats with reverent seriousness, as though it were some intricate and profound truth revealed to her in a mystical vision. Sprecher studied philosophy and literature in college, and what she learned there is reflected in the dialogue, which is sophomoric, stilted, pseudo-intellectual, and hackneyed. The actors do the best they can; Alan Arkin in particular struggles heroically to make his platitudinous, overblown speeches sound like real talk, but it's an impossible task.

Sprecher alternates the conversations with meaningless drawn-out shots of the characters driving, walking up stairs, standing in front of doors, sitting in chairs, and hanging their heads over glassfuls of Scotch on the rocks. The same sappy mood music floods the soundtrack again and again in a futile attempt to keep these prolonged shots from seeming to be the dead spots they actually are. The music also overlays some of the conversations, muting them and making it difficult to hear the words, an effect I found pleasing considering the artificiality of the dialogue.

There's one aspect of CONVERSATIONS for which Sprecher does deserve some sort of praise or special award: she's succeeded in creating the most completely unbelievable cleaning ladies I've ever seen in a movie. Don't blame Clea Duvall and Tia Texada; the fault lies entirely in the clothing they were required to wear, the "cleaning equipment" they were required to carry around with them, and the lines they were required to deliver with a straight face.

At first I was going to give this flick a zero, but then I realized that it's actually a wee bit better than THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, the film by which a Watson rating of 1 is defined, so to be fair I must grudgingly admit that 13 CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING deserves a rating of 1.3 -- one tenth of a point for each episode.

My rating on the Watson scale: 1.3