‘Love’s’ a weird combo of romance & grief

You call your movie "Love Happens," you're just asking for trouble.

Especially if your movie is as lousy as this one, thus encouraging hundreds of critics to remind readers that love isn't the only thing that happens. (Like Oscar Wilde, we can resist everything except temptation.)

In defense of "Love Happens," we can say only that it's not as hair-raising a combination of romance and grief as last year's "Seven Pounds," although it's close.

"Happens" stars Aaron Eckhart as Burke Ryan, a celebrated self-help author and motivational speaker who lost his wife to a car accident and now counsels others on how to heal.

The movie takes place in Seattle, where Ryan is conducting a seminar for the bereaved, who are presented by director Brandon Camp as an unwieldy combination of the cute and devastatingly tragic.

So, one minute Ryan is dealing with a lady who has baked her husband's ashes into cookies, and another who has had her husband's junk preserved as a plaster cast, and the very next minute he's listening to a bawling father describe how his only son snapped his spine trying to please daddy by doing extra work at his construction site.

Ugh.

In the midst of all this emotionally incoherent muck is Jennifer Aniston, modeling the world's largest collection of darling hats, and functioning as the daffy florist who provides Ryan's kooky-charming love interest.

This leads to one of the year's worst sequences, an obligatory montage of the new couple doing cute things (smoking the hookah pipe, climbing on art installations) as some trendy ballad blares in the background, until they suddenly turn up in front of the graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee, and all is suddenly solemn.

Remember "The Naked Gun," wherein Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley come piling out of "Platoon" laughing? It's kind of like that, only it's not meant to be funny.

"Love Happens" sets some kind of record for badly calibrated emotions as it pursues its predictable story. Ryan wants to fall in love, but he's blocked, because (brace yourself) the man who tells others how to move on hasn't found a way to do so himself.

The movie also has the nerve to mount an attack on the commercialization of grief. This is beyond ironic. Remember the grieving contractor? His healing process involves a shopping spree at Home Depot, in what has to be the most grotesque product placement in recent movie history.