We’re really sorry about this. Honestly we are. Here it is, the trailer for That’s My Boy:

Where do we even start? Hilarious paedo-LOLZ aside, it’s just more of the same dreadful, soul-muting tripe – girls catching things with their breasts, a hilarious hat, a vaguely offensive voice, a coma-inducing, dead-limbed premise, Leighton Meester for some reason, and the fun of tattooing your own pre-teen son. What depths are left, Sandler? Now that you’re genuinely showing us the fun side of child-abuse, what’s left?

We all hate you now, Adam Sandler. You know that, right? The fact that this film is quite obviously a hollow, desperate cry for medical attention isn’t enough anymore. Some people deserve their demons. The people who make paedophilia fun – those are the people that deserve their demons.

What can be done about this? What? Help us. Please

This piece of bland teeny-bopper fluff tells the story of Grace (Gomez), a Texan waitress who goes off to Paris to live the dream post-high school graduation. Along for the ride are Emma (Cassidy) and Grace’s uptight stepsister Meg (Meester), who hate each other’s guts and will – fingers crossed – learn to put aside their differences and be BFFs. Upon their arrival in Paris, however, the girls discover their dream tour is actually a disastrous tourist trap; their ‘luxury’ hotel is a fleapit with a panoramic view of a bathing French man in the building opposite (we know he’s French because he’s wearing a beret).

The girls end up stumbling into a swanky hotel where – by superb, ridiculous coincidence – Cordelia (Gomez again), an aristocratic English girl who is the spitting image of Grace, is staying. They overhear her planning to swan off to Majorca instead of attending a charity event in Monte Carlo, and – lo and behold – Grace ends up taking her place. Suitably tame chaos/hilarity ensues.

At its core, Monte Carlo is a fairly skilful exercise in wish fulfilment along the lines of Anne Hathaway’s breakout film, The Princess Diaries. At one point, when the girls crack into Cordelia’s suitcases and uncover endless supplies of makeup, shoes and dresses, a young girl a few rows ahead of me whispered a breathy, awestruck “Oh my god!”. But the film doesn’t push its concept very far, and the fun is somewhat limited to a couple of clunky set-pieces involving a band of very French policemen. Even when Grace is unexpectedly forced to participate in a polo match, she manages to canter elegantly around the field without causing any monocles to drop. On the contrary, she only further charms her French love interest Theo (played by the improbably named Pierre Boulanger). Elsewhere, Meg’s dull storyline involves her falling for some Australian guy sadly stricken with the inability to button his shirts all the way to the top.

The more interesting parts of this story are concerned with Cassidy’s Emma, a diner waitress who has never been out of Texas and is in a long-term relationship with Finn from Glee (Cory Monteith). Once in Monte Carlo, Emma is wooed by both the luxury lifestyle and some dishy French chap who whisks her off to dinner. Her illusions are promptly shattered when Frenchie is rude to the waitress, and – in one of the film’s more thoughtful moments – Emma takes it upon herself to begin clearing the table, still decked out in an extravagant evening gown.

Monte Carlo does its best to rise above the usual level of stupidity associated with this sort of fare, and despite a few clangers along the way – “I’m not going to stand in the way of those kids”, “I hate hospitals” – succeeds in being marginally more intelligent than expected. But ultimately, it lacks the charm of its 90s predecessors, such as Clueless and Ten Things I Hate About You, and becomes a tedious affair fairly swiftly. Gomez’s character is virtually non-existent, defined mostly by the fact that she wears cowboy boots under her evening gown and once owned a snowglobe, and Catherine Tate’s phoned-in performance as an English aunt feels pointless. It’s largely inoffensive, and probably good fun if you’re a girl aged between 9 and 13, but other than that Monte Carlo falls a little flat.

Meester is indeed well-versed in extreme characterisation, best-known for her resident TV role as a conceited, vengeful and highly paranoid débutante. But while it is the vacuous Gossip Girl that is responsible for meticulously honing her skills for brainless theatrics, it is The Roommate that has succeeded in showcasing the totality of Meester’s artistry for all it’s worth, in a flourishing apotheosis of bad acting and worse histrionics. Her performance as a spoiled and dangerously imbalanced non compos fluctuates between an excruciating Mommie Dearest mimicry of psychosis and a nauseating, glazed-over vapidity; every affectation is seasoned with an indigestible petulance, reminiscent of her Upper East Side GG character but far less intelligent.

That being said, it does feel minutely unjust to heap all of The Roommate‘s dreadful inadequacies upon Meester’s already burdened shoulders. The storyline plays out like a Cluedo game for unimaginative college drop-outs: Meester in the shower with a sharp instrument. Meester in the bedroom with a blunt instrument. Meester in the shadows with a shadowy intrument. The co-stars/characters are equally dim-witted, undeveloped facsimiles, the likes of which we are only too happy to see exterminated at the undefined-object-wielding hands of Meester. The closest thing to a climax is a bellyring-extraction scene in which blood does not feature and shock barely registers – those involved are of little importance – the actual fulcrum being Meester, in a room, with an implement.

Admittedly, Meester doesn’t have much to work with, but the little she does have, she ham-fists the hell out of. It’s a tortuous chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, the conclusion of which is that in today’s substanceless landscape of mass-marketing, both products have been rendered useless, if not toxic to our health; neither Meester nor The Roommate can sustain us with any food for thought. Ironically set within an institute of higher learning, the story assumes limited comprehension and undeveloped taste, the most frightening thing about the idiotic Roommate being that by sheer comparison it makes the pseudo-wit and partner-swapping convolutions of Gossip Girl‘s teleplay read like a Brontë novel. For the target demographic, the film is either a consummate insult, or a terrible omen portending the future of our youth.

A suspenseless, insipid piece of drivel, The Roommate‘s bankability rides solely upon prime-time, pubescent celebrity, mindless consumption and girl-on-girl tease. The tagline for the promotional poster poses the question: “2000 colleges. 8 million roommates. Which one will you get?” Answer: the worst one, apparently.

When we meet super-star-gone-bad Kerry (Paltrow), she’s crooning happily on a rehab bed with her “sponsor” (read: sex monster) Beau (Hedlund). Although she’s not due out for another month, she seems healthy, happy, and more than content to sit with a handsome gentlemen dreamily batting around country ballads. But her husband and manager James Canter (Tim McGraw) is impatient to get Kelly back on the road and back in the spotlight – it seems her fall from fame was quick and extremely painful, and the only way to claw back respect, fame and fortune is to get her performing again as soon as possible. When Kelly presents James with a deal: she’ll go back on tour only if Beau (a singer-songwriter in his own right), can open her shows, he agrees on the condition that they take along sweet-faced young pop/country singer Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) to open with him. Uninterested in anything except Kelly’s welbeing and a love of singing about whiskey and putting on/taking off your boots in various places, Beau agrees to tag along. He doesn’t much care about the fame game, but someone has to be there to make sure Kelly stays on the wagon…

What starts out as a interesting and delicate love story between the deeply haunted Kelly and the almost paternal young Beau is quickly beaten down by the writer/director Shana Feste’s desire to cover every possible subplot around it: Kelly’s drinking, Kelly and James’ marital relations, Kelly and James’ tragic past relations, Beau and Chiles’ developing sexy relations, Kelly and Chiles’ volatile relations, Chiles and James’ possible relations – with so many strands dangling and time running out the only way to tie them all up is to resort to spine-slumpingly dull cliché. The initial, charming chemistry between Paltrow and Hedlund is rapidly squashed by the desire to make this film about LOADS OF IMPORTANT STUFF, and with the only interesting character tension tossed aside, following the surrounding players feels a bit pointless. Credit where it’s due, Hedlund gives a truthful and lovely performance as the kind-hearted Beau, and if we follow this tale through anyone’s eyes (/pants), its his.

It all gets rather too much (for both the audience and Paltrow’s acting abilities) about half-way through, when any faith you had in the characters has been thoroughly extinguished by both their constant, ridiculous decisions and by the fact that they’ve all insisted on singing country music for like an hour with no sign of stopping. From then on it’s just all a mess of booze, weepy weepy ‘messages’ and stomping about in grief-lined leather boots towards a finale that couldn’t be more obvious if you painted the details onto Miss Gossip Girl’s taut breasts and flung her on-stage naked (see the director’s cut for more details). All in all, it’s actors doing that singing business perfectly well, in a film that is far, far too dependent on that fact. Watch for lovely Garrett, stay off the booze kids and for God’s sake leave the soundtrack well alone.

The LA Times’ 24 Frames blog has reported that Laurie is in serious discussions to play the lead in a small indie-film entitled Oranges, in which an older man (Laurie) has an affair with the daughter of a family friend. Mila Kunis (of That 70s Show fame) is apparently set to play the foxy youngster, and Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester also fits in somewhere, though it’s too early to know where all the pieces fit. But of what we’ve heard so far, this is looking to be a pretty exciting jigsaw (and we wouldn’t say that lightly).

Though there’s no director attached as yet, the script (by Jay Reiss and Ian Helfer) was good enough to earn itself a place on the 2008 Black List of Best Un-produced work (which last year featured Inglorious Basterds). So already, our hopes are pretty high. And frankly, it’s about time that our mate Hugh (what? He’d like us if he met us, OK?) got a starring role. Anyone able to play The Prince Regent as well as House deserves at least a chance at leading-man-dom, and we can’t wait to see what he makes of it if it goes ahead. Hurrah for Laurie! Un-biased journalism eh? There’s just nothing like it…

Opinions on the God that is Hugh Laurie? We’re open to all thoughts (as long as they’re ones that start with ‘I love Hugh Laurie because…)