The pre-Oscar leftovers continue with this extended sitcom on the big screen. You've seen the commercial previews that have been thrust upon us for weeks, you've watched the stars and production teams sell the movie for weeks, and you've been bombarded by tangential information from Tinsel Town for weeks. Red light on! It's either a brilliantly made, offbeat movie that doesn't follow the well trod comedy format - or it's a bomb and everyone behind the scenes knows it, thus the bombardment, supposedly the best moments guaranteed to pique curiosity just enough to get moviegoers dipping into their purses and wallets for a ticket.

Critics don't matter when a movie is targeted at a specific audience; true here, with women raving about this unoriginal chick-flick and men rolling their eyes but going along to avoid a date war.

If you haven't heard what it's about by now, you're either deaf, dumb or blind. In capsule, two 26-year-old longtime friends (Kate Hudson & Anne Hathaway) discover that their wedding dates are the same. Neither will change, so the war begins and goes on, and on, and on, and on, and with the same childish stubbornness found on larger, more serious scale in places like the Gaza Strip, the war escalates. A pampered, treacherous lawyer (Hudson) is pitted against a schoolteacher (Hathaway), normally accustomed to helping others, but now discovering her inner "Bridezilla," counterattacking with venom and an exchange of juvenile tricks.

With a plot (from Greg DePaul, Casey Wilson & June Diane Raphel at least) loaded with superficial material that we don't buy for an instant - including the fact that the finest, most sought-after wedding planner (Candice Bergen, who also doubles as narrator) messes things up from the start, arranging both celebrations in the prestigious Plaza Hotel at the same time. No one noticed, three months in advance?

In one of the many TV interviews, Hathaway insisted she was not interested in perpetuating stereotypes, and that "there was no point to making a movie that is reductive to women and the whole process. So we would never do anything that would set women back." (To what?)

Hudson added, "As producer of the filmŠit's so easy to sort of get carried away with the cattiness and the pettiness and the stereotypes of women, of how women handle a lot of situations. For me, I looked on this as a challenge. I thought, 'Well, wait a minute. This is such a great thing for women to be able to make fun of themselvesŠ.I felt there was a way to try to make a movie that's appealing to all ages of women that doesn't leave anyone out.'"

With director Gary Winick seeing things differently - stereotypically, -something went terribly wrong along the way. Either you buy the premise and go along with it for all its shallow humor or you don't. I didn't.