I’m a man who loves the love.  Who doesn’t love the love?  So to take a break from the Seagals and the Snipes and the Van Dammes and the low budget, but very plentiful horror movies that litter our Direct-To-Video shelves, I decided its nigh time I put on my velvet bathrobe, sit back with a snifter of Hennessey and enjoy a wonderful, touching sweet romantic comedy.  After truly, truly suffering the banal, stupid, uninspired dung filled exercise that was ‘Her Minor Thing’, which was neither wonderful, touching nor sweet, it’s going to be a cold day before I do anything that stupid again.

24:50.  That would be the number on my DVD player indicating the amount of time that had passed before this alleged comedy was finally able to pull a laugh out of me.  And making me laugh is one of the easier things to do on this planet.  Hell, ‘Schindler’s List’ was funnier than this mess.

The very lovely, tall, thin and shapely Estella Warren plays Jeana, a computer something or another at the local fire department.  What she does there at the fire department with computers I can’t tell you, other than wear Polos that are a size too small and skirts that are about a foot or so too short.  But I do understand why this is necessary because otherwise how would we tell how phenomenally smooth her legs are and completely successful her perfect bronze tanning experiment has turned out.  Jeana is dating hunky local news personality Tom (Michael Weatherly) who is really stupid.  Michael's cameraman is Paul (Christian Kane) who on first sight we all know is going to be Jeana’s true love before the end of the movie because he’s presented as a man of ‘substance’ where Tom is a man of ‘vacuousness’.  Though I don’t think that’s a word.  Tom is eager to ‘get down’ but Jeana keeps putting him off

because as it turns out she’s a virgin, and she eventually confides in Tom this little fact, which she considers no major thing.  Tom though, who we’ve established as being stupid, tells his cameraman Paul this little sensitive nugget without knowing that he was broadcasting to the entire city at the time. 

As you can imagine, mayhem and chaos ensues as everyone has an opinion on Jeana’s minor thing, and she finds she has no shortage of volunteers to ‘cure’ her of her little problem.  Of course along the way she meets her true love Paul, who naturally doesn’t tell her about his relationship as Tom’s cameraman so that we can have that totally original Three’s Company-esque scene, with all due apologies to the far superior ‘Three’s Company’, where she finds out, he apologizes, he hates her, she hates him,she considers going back to Tom, Paul is upset, Paul declares true love, Tome declares true love…  It’s actually too horrible for words.  Horrible.  Horrible.  Horrible. 

Around the thirty minute mark of this thing I was thinking how cool it would be if Tom and Jeana screwed right there, on the spot.  That would mean the movie would be over and there would be no reason to continue on as her virginity would be lost forever!  But no, they didn’t and the trite, inane, lameness of ‘Her Minor Thing’ continued on for more than an hour.  I’m no filmmaker, but I’m thinking if the genre for the film your making is a romantic comedy, then the damn thing should be either Romantic or Comedic, preferably both if possible.  Romantically speaking, Estella Warren is mighty good lookin’, but that attraction seemed lost on both of her male co-stars as there was NO chemistry between her and either of them.  It actually seemed as if they couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other on some occasions.  It doesn’t help that every single character in the film was a cardboard cutout of a real person, with no depth or substance.  Even if the actors were Royale Shakespeare Company members (they aren’t by the way), they couldn’t have done anything with what they given character-wise AND dialog-wise. 

Comedically speaking the vast majority of the gags were forced and flat.  The timing on the jokes was poor and things that I’m sure might have looked funny on the printed page sure didn’t translate well to the visual screen.  To try to fortify the comedic vein of this thing, comedians Kathy Griffin and Flex Alexander make a few appearances, but it didn’t help.  I mean if THEY can’t be funny in this, what hope is there for Estella Warren and those other two dudes?  Not a lot I’m afraid.

I’m all for abstinence and all, but I’m not sure that was the message that writers Debra and Jim Myers were shooting for.  The character of Jeana wasn’t holding out for marriage or religion or principle.  Simply circumstance.  If abstinence results in anything remotely resembling life in this movie, then folks need to get to getting down.  And fast.