‘Something Borrowed’ is nothing worth keeping

Leafing through Emily Griffin's glossy chick-lit book Something Borrowed, you see she's mastered the use of relevant genre language - Rolex, Prada, etc.

The movie adaptation follows her lead, romantic shenanigans among well-to-do New Yorkers shuttling between Manhattan and the Hamptons, hauling Heineken in their Land Rover. Nobody ever seems to work, but money is never a concern, and selfishness passes without comment.

And yet "Something Borrowed," ironically, is almost worth sitting through just to hear the best all-time put-down of Hamptons culture on record - I don't know if it belongs to Griffin or to screenwriter Jennie Snyder Urman, because I could not endure the torture of reading the book. (Forced consumption of Griffin's novel is how they got the guys in Gitmo to dime out bin Laden.)

I'm not going to spoil the line, but parties uninterested in seeing "Borrowed" can find it in the Hollywood Reporter review.

Uninterested parties are likely to include dudes (see you at "Thor") who've sniffed this out as another wedding movie, and one that's decidedly not man-friendly (as opposed to next week's raunchy "Bridesmaids").

The story revolves around BFFs Darcy and Rachel - Darcy (Kate Hudson) the self-centered man-magnet blond party girl, Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) the sweet brainy brunet wallflower.

Darcy is about to wed Dex (Colin Egglesfield), the man whom Rachel has loved since college, and when Rachel gets drunk and reveals her feelings to the groom, we have a two-minute romantic problem that takes two movie hours to resolve.

This involves an intolerable amount of waffling on the part of Dex, whom men will instantly detest. Women will not, because some mad scientist in Hollywood has scraped the DNA from Tom Cruise and Christopher Reeve to create a heterozygous central casting dreamboat.

Handsome as Egglesfield is, his vapid character can't make a decision, Rachel can't assert herself and Darcy can't stop being self-involved. "Borrowed" understands what a problem this all is and brings in John Krasinski to provide a Greek chorus of stinging criticism.

His jabs are usually right on target - these people are kind of loathsome.

Which makes you wonder, after awhile, why you're watching.