SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Let's be realistic.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Rather incredibly, Gutierrez marketed this movie as giving women in Hollywood more interesting things to do than be "the good girlfriend" or "the bad girlfriend." Well, technically that's true. For example, a third of women in a Gutierrez film can apparently be hookers-with-a-heart-of-gold. Yet more of them can be sexually-available flight attendants and masseuses. A smaller fraction get to be ostensible professionals of some (usually unspecified) kind... although actually all of their story lines turn out to revolve around men, which is only true of one of each among the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold and sexually-available service-industry types, so I guess Advantage: Team Hooker there. Oh, and there's room for a precocious child in there, too, who's like all totally quirky and stuff.Okay, so maybe it's not exactly promising as a progressive vision for female characters: well-written, well-acted, given believable dialogue and backstory and interesting situations to work with, this could have still been rescued. No such luck, unfortunately. Gutierrez strikes out.I mean, the actors certainly do their best. But the characters and situations they're given are either dreary clichés or hilariously forced and unbelievable, more often in a lame way than in a funny way. (Yes, it's comedy, but comedy still has to have believable characters in order to work.) Worst of all is that so many of the characters are unbelievably dumb, to an extent that we're basically being invited to laugh _at_ them and by extension at how ridiculous women are: the airheaded blonde flight attendant who agonizes for all of sixty seconds before cheating on her fiancé in an airplane bathroom; neurotic woman-in-a-nice-suit Doris who, in spinning out her absurd life story to a total stranger while they're both stuck in an elevator -- after they've stripped down to their panties, natch -- actually utters the line "I loved him so much I didn't even know I had a meth problem"; Doris' pathetic sister, who takes her daughter to therapy sessions so she can boff her therapist's hubby in an office literally just down the hall.And then there's Holly Rocket.There was actually a time when characters like Holly Rocket were a staple of "comedy": the beginning and end of the "joke" was always that this was a bimbo so dumb she could barely be relied upon to spell her own name. Goldie Hawn made her bones cranking out caricatures like this... four decades ago. It's pretty heartbreaking to watch the undeniably talented Adrianne Palicki go through the same grind in 2009, in a movie that sells itself as empowerment.And Holly Rocket is if anything a far dumber and more insulting caricature than the bimbo-types of yore. She doesn't just speak in malapropisms: she's literally too stupid to know how to get out of the path of a moving car. She doesn't know when her own birthday is. Her poignant backstory involves the one time in her childhood when she let her dog give her head, as a result of which her entire character arc is about her quest to learn how to go down on another woman without puking. More than stupid, she's contemptibly weak, as the film carefully points up when she orders a Pina Colada at a bar, the bartender comes back with a beer instead, and she doesn't say anything. Holly's biggest punchline, right at the end of the film, comes when she shows an astonishing ability to do trigonometry in her head -- certainly a surprising skill for someone who can't remember their own birthday. "Wow!" says Elektra Luxx. "You could get a Ph.D!" "I know," says Holly. "That's why I get tested twice a year." Hyuk! Hyuk! Because she's still just rilly stupid, get it? There's plenty else wrong with this film, and despite the best efforts of Carla Gugino, not enough else right with it to rescue it. But it's Holly Rocket that signals there's something not just bad or clichéd, but rankly misogynistic and creepy going on here. Her character is insulting in such an over-the-top and weird way that it jangles the nerves; and put bluntly, it's hard to come away without the impression that Holly is what Gutierrez *really* thinks of women. Pass.

An odd but strangely compelling indie comedy, "Women in Trouble" does just what the title suggests; it puts an assortment of lovely ladies into humorously dire predicaments. Two women, Connie Britton ("Friday Night Lights") and the newly pregnant porn star Elektra (Carla Gogina), are stuck together in a stalled elevator; Adrianne Palicki (also of "Friday Night Lights") and Emmanuelle Chrichi are sex workers who witness a crime and have to run to safety; Sarah Clarke ("24") is a therapist whose husband ("The Mentalist"'s Simon Baker) is having an affair with one of her patients; and Marley Shelton is an engaged stewardess who's unfortunate enough to have the rock star (Josh Brolin) who's performing sex on her in the airplane bathroom die when the plane hits turbulence. The story lines, which seem disparate at first glance, do manage to dovetail into one another by movie's end.As written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, the situations are played for both humor and sentiment, as we get to see just some of the absurd things women are forced to go through on a daily basis. And in each case, it seems, the women who are "in trouble" are aided by other women who are in trouble, essentially leading to a special bond of womanhood that helps get them through tough times. The dialogue is generally sharp and witty without ever becoming denigrating or smart-alecky, and the situations the women find themselves in are just absurd enough to keep them from becoming soap-operatic but realistic enough to make us care.As with most movies that engage in multiple plot lines, some of the stories and some of the scenes are better than others, and, honestly, the film might have benefited from a little less cleverness and a little more focus overall. Still, it has its moments.

On the surface, "Women In Trouble", the fifth film from Sebastian Guitterez ("Rise"; co-wrote "Snakes On A Plane") looks like your typical sex comedy, packed with attractive, well-endowed dames. It does have the dames, but they-and the film-are surprisingly three-dimensional and quaint, making the film a must-see.Circumstances, wacky and serious, locks the film's vignettes, featuring different women, all Los Angeles residents: infamous porn actress Electra Luxx (the impressive Carla Gugino of "Watchmen", "Faster", Sin City", "Sucker Punch" and other films directed by Mr. Guitterez, her longtime boyfriend) learns she's pregnant; her ditzy co-worker Holly Rocket (Adrianne Palicki of "Friday Night Lights: The Series") gets in trouble with gangsters during a "pro gig" with pal Bambi (Emmauelle Chirqui of "You Don't Mess With The Zohan").Meanwhile, therapist Maxine (Sarah Clarke of "24") gets drunk when she learns her husband (Emmy nominee Simon Baker of "The Mentalist") is having an affair with a patient's mother (Caitlin Keats) from the patient herself, old soul goth gal Charlotte (Mr. Guitterez's niece, Isabella) and flight stewardess Cora (Marley Shelton of "Grindhouse" and "Scream 4") has a Mile High Club fling with rocker Nick Chapel (Oscar nominee Josh Brolin of "Milk") ends gallows funny. If you're expecting full frontal nudity, forget it, but that doesn't mean "Women In Trouble" is a waste of time. Imagine the sexiness of a soft-core porn film on Cinemax, the female angst from a Lifetime movie and the profane/profound humor of a Kevin Smith film and you have this underdog gem.With a fun script and tight direction, Guitterez treats his cast pretty well and, while in their roles, they shine in their ups and downs. Also included in the mix are Connie Britton (also of "FNL") as Charlotte's "aunt" who has a dark secret; Rya Kihlstedt as a shotgun-totting, lesbian barkeep; Cameron Richardson as the barkeep's masseuse roommate from Canada and Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon ("The Jamie Foxx Show") as Cora's pal. There's also a Q&A session, post-end credits scroll, involving Electra and Holly with an over-eager Internet reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of "Brick" and "Inception") that starts out a bit weak but ends funny. Ms. Shelton's sister, Samantha, belts out a sweet tune in a bar.Pretty girls have problems too, and "Women In Trouble" proves that with a thoughtful chuckle.

This movie works sort of like "Crash" or "Magnolia", with different characters having their own story lines that turn out to be related to each other in some way, and intersect at certain points in the film. Also like Magnolia, there's a lot of self-discovery and unburdening of the heart. It's about two thirds drama, layered within outrageous situations and humor. There are a lot of characters. I don't know how the writer kept them all straight. There's a porn star, a prostitute, a porn star/prostitute, a therapist, a flight attendant, a masseuse, and a couple others. Some of these are strangers at first, but form strong bonds, resulting, I think, from some natural female instinct to support each other in crisis. I'd like to run down the various crises they deal with, but to avoid spoiling things I'll just say they involve being stuck in an elevator, infidelity, porn, lesbian relationships, bestiality, and unusual sexual dysfunction, to name a few.This movie basically ends up being about womanly camaraderie, and the bond that ties all women in all walks of life together, I think. However, it's also got enough sex talk, women in underwear, zany situations, and even a degree of bathroom humor, that'll keep guys interested. It's also a great story with an outstanding script and superb performances that combined to have me completely absorbed by the end. I'm a guy, in case that wasn't clear.I have to extend extra-special props to Adrianne Palicki (Holly, the call girl/porn actress), who had a provocative monologue near the middle of the movie that was impeccably and movingly delivered. I was completely entranced.PS. Keep watching after the credits. There's a cute little satirical interview with the "porn stars", conducted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's not quite up to the level of the material in the rest of the movie (probably why it was placed after the credits), but still worth watching.