Taylor Swift

Those revisions include sage advice like "Just 'cause you wear thick glasses in marching band don't mean you're undesirable," and a special message for Swift's newly deflowered friend Abigail from the original song: "If you're a virgin and some jerk steals your hymen, your life isn't over/Because your hymen ain't all you've got to offer in this world." After she segues into an unexpected and slightly dizzying blend of "Fifteen" and "Bad Romance," her final suggestion for all young ladies in the Taylor Swift demographic is something we at Broadsheet can thoroughly get behind: "If you're going to listen to someone, listen to Gaga." Listening to Madinthemoon is all right by us, too.

At the risk of being both pompous and blindingly obvious, Marshall is not exactly Bergman, or Shakespeare either. Neither of those guys, as far as I know, ever tried to drag laughs out of a resolutely unfunny production with gags about cute puppies spurning a newly jilted lover or 2-year-olds kissing each other or Ashton Kutcher driving a purple, early-'60s Chevy low-rider badly through Los Angeles traffic. (That last is absolutely slanderous: I'm saying here and now that Ashton can roll low, slow and smooth when the situation demands.)

But the problem with "Valentine's Day" is not just that it's mawkishly sentimental and highly predictable -- it's supposed to be those things -- or that Katherine Fugate's screenplay is too ambitious by half, and certainly too complicated for Marshall to grasp in his leathery but lovable mitts. (Once in a while Fugate will get off a good line, and it gets swallowed: "Valentine's Day is like a cosmic bitch-slap from the universe," says Jessica Biel, in a rapid monologue apparently delivered to her wall.) I'm saying that a Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.

Most of the gestures made at gags in "Valentine's Day" fall amazingly flat, and feel as if they were retrieved from the reject drawer on one of Marshall's vintage TV sitcoms, several decades back: High school students want lattes in their vending machines! Jews converse with nuns! Blondes are not that bright! Mexicans actually speak and understand Spanish! The movie is 125 minutes long -- which is already wretched excess for a showman of Marshall's experience -- but it feels like hours or years or geological epochs. Generations of mice lived and died under the theater seats, spawning aspartame-poisoned new generations while I was watching this. Taylor Swift began the film as a teenage country-music superstar, and ended it by replacing Shirley MacLaine in the wizened-grandma role. Seriously.

No, that's not true. That's a lie I made up out of bitterness. What is true, though, is that Swift, a movie neophyte assigned the nothing role of a crazy-in-love high school airhead, is one of the few actors not wasted in "Valentine's Day." Her overgrown-pixie look and odd, widely set eyes lend her a little bit of Marilyn and a little bit of Lucille Ball: She's Taylor-made for comic greatness! (I can't believe I wrote that either. But if I am the first among Internets to supply that particular whore-quote, it will have been worth it.)

There are a handful of other bright spots, none of them sunnier than Anne Hathaway's performance as Liz, a struggling receptionist cum phone-sex entrepreneur whose free-spirit ways may be too much for her brand-new Indiana-bred boyfriend (Topher Grace). Is it just me, or does Hathaway possess a remarkable ability to make a pat, stupid and underwritten character -- and Liz is 3-for-3 -- into the goofy, unjaded, moderately sexy little sister of Holly Golightly? And then there's Jessica Biel as Kara, who is both the second-rate publicist of a disgraced football star (Eric Dane) and also a romance-averse chocoholic who hosts an annual "I Hate Valentine's Day" dinner. Is Biel actually any good in the role? I'm not sure, but she's got long legs, a brilliant smile and a form-fitting designer wardrobe, and those things helped me sit through "Valentine's Day" rather than flee to some happier place, such as an Iranian prison.

Taken as a whole, though, "Valentine's Day" involves watching talented and attractive people squander their energies on a pointless and random exercise, which ... hey! Wait a second! That's an excellent description of what the real Valentine's Day does to the rest of us (less talented and attractive though we may be). Maybe Marshall and Fugate are playing a deeper, trickier, more influenced-by-Godard game than I think. Except that if they were they might make better use of Ashton Kutcher, a renegade talent whose likable persona has overwhelmed his acting chops, at least thus far. (Catch David Mackenzie's little-seen gigolo saga "Spread" for Kutcher's best movie performance.)

In "Valentine's Day" Kutcher plays a milquetoast florist named Reed, who pops the question to his scarily tan girlfriend (Jessica Alba) at daybreak on Valentine's Day, thereby launching our City of Angels relationship round-robin. Alba's spray-bronzed character says yes and pretty much disappears thereafter, leaving Reed to don a pink long-sleeve T-shirt and pink baseball cap and utter lines like, "Now I can be a sugary cheeseball mooning about love to total strangers all day long without people thinking I'm a moron. Because it's Valentine's Day!" Uh, yeah. About that moron thing? Let's give that more thought.

It's no wonder Alba packs her bags and gets her supernaturally hued hide out of Dodge, leaving Reed alone on the commercially mandated Feast Day of Romantic Love -- alone, that is, except for his suspiciously hot but totally platonic "best friend" Julia (Jennifer Garner), whose boyfriend, slithery cardiac surgeon Patrick Dempsey, is supposedly out of town on this night of nights. I'm not saying that Kutcher's character reads as gay, exactly, and I'm not saying that a female writer can't do convincing guys. I am saying that both Reed and Julia seem like incompetent first drafts for human characters rather than the real thing, and that Marshall's not a good enough director to pull more out of these actors than what's on the page.

Of course we can see where Reed and Julia are heading, but all I can say is that it takes a special gift to build a rom-com around Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner and have it be almost no fun at all. Their prospective relationship is a sketch, a vague rumor; most of the movie is filled up (at least as I recall it a full 24 hours later) with super-awkward man-hugs involving George Lopez, piano-bar renditions of "I Will Survive" led by Jamie Foxx, and romantic wisdom imparted by Hector Elizondo to a 10-year-old kid.

Who else is deployed herein, to minimal effect? Hell, who isn't? Julia Roberts actually has a fetching cameo as an Army captain, returning from overseas duty on a long plane flight, who develops a transitory something with her buff seatmate (Bradley Cooper). There's the tiniest germ of another, better movie in their unshared secrets, but I'm grateful not to see any more of the movie in which Shirley MacLaine and Elizondo play a later-life couple facing Important Realizations about their marriage. I bet you didn't know this, but old people can feel the pangs of love too! Also, they like gardening, and chinoiserie, and Willie Nelson's quieter, more noodly material.

By the end of "Valentine's Day," well, you know what to expect: Couples have broken up and reassembled and reconfirmed their commitment and whatnot and we're all supposed to feel a little philosophical and wistful and maybe soggy inside. Queen Latifah has performed her designated role as the sexually ambiguous big black lady who gets no action, which is so retro I think that part of the movie came out before she was born. Marshall reportedly hopes to reassemble his cast for a New Year's Eve-themed sequel set in New York, in which Kutcher's florist will switch to dealing ganja in hipster Brooklyn nightclubs and Hathaway's phone-sex gamine will become a hard-boiled Long Island City stripper with four kids by different dads. OK, given that it won't be like that: I am powerless to stop that sequel from happening, but you, ladies and gentlemen, are not.

First, let's acknowledge some major points in the Not Feminist column. As Hess says, "Taylor Swift sings songs about waiting around, being a princess, and crying for her 'Romeo' to rescue her from her dad, who is so mean. Then, she makes videos for these songs where she is literally waiting in an ivory tower for her prince to come." And here's Doyle's interpretation of Swift's song "Fifteen": "Teen Girls of America, here are your choices: have sex and wind up broken and sad and feeling as if you've lost 'everything you had,' or wait until your untouched vagina accumulates enough charge to make you rich and famous." Doyle concludes, "Telling girls stories about how being too sexual will make them broken hollow sluts who can never succeed at life isn't new, and it isn't cute. Not even coming from sweet little Taylor Swift. "

So, OK, I'm gonna allow that Taylor Swift's lyrics, generally speaking, do not advance the cause of feminism. But she also wrote songs as a little girl as young as 7, as Broadsheet editor, former music critic and unabashed pop fan Sarah Hepola pointed out to me today. Hepola, who is in her 30s, has spent a lot longer than me thinking about Taylor Swift (a fact she is, believe it or not, proud of). "I LOVE the song 'White Horse.' I think it's so simple and heartbreaking, and if I were 14 years old I would listen to it a million times on repeat." (As it is, she only listened to it four times on repeat this afternoon.) That one -- in which a girl who's been cheated on realizes she's better off without Prince Charming -- is certainly a nice counterpoint to "Romeo," the waiting-around-for-Mr.-Right song Hess took apart today. Also, after informing me that Taylor Swift started out as one of the Jonas Brothers' girlfriends only to become even more famous than her ex, Hepola added, "She is subverting the story of the groupie -- she's the girl who dated the superstar and got cheated on, and she turned it into a great album, and she became her own superstar. (This is not new, of course. Stevie Nicks, etc., etc.)."

And that brings us to the crux of the "Is Taylor Swift good for women?" debate, which -- exceptions like "White Horse" aside -- really comes down to Taylor Swift, lyricist, vs. Taylor Swift, public figure. It's her superstardom (and apparent business savvy) itself that provides the most compelling pro-Swift argument. As music critic Ann Powers wrote in the L.A. Times last year, "Swift might play a princess in many of her songs ... but in the studio she's her own boss, writing and producing those fairy tales." Hess is unconvinced: "This is the Sarah Palin theory of feminism. If she's a woman, and she does stuff, it's feminist -- even if that stuff is writing songs about waiting around for boys do stuff to you." But that's not all Taylor Swift does. You can't completely wave away the symbolic value of all that writing, producing and bossing in a typically male-dominated industry, especially when Taylor Swift, unlike Palin, is not known for being ignorant of vitally important aspects of her own business.

Furthermore, I'm already on record as believing that, content aside, there's a certain value in entertainment products that reveal the full power of the obsessive teenage girl market. Sure, the music industry has long known that such girls will shell out for throwaway (and even sometimes good) pop by swoon-inducing young men and carefully packaged, basically interchangeable young women -- but for female singer-songwriters who seem to be in charge of their own careers? That's pretty new. Citing other big names in today's pop pool, like Katy Perry, Rihanna and Adele, Powers writes, "Pop culture has never wanted for 'it' girls, but the authority these fledgling artists claim is a great sign of feminism's ripple effects ... Swift is exceptionally precocious, but cowriting credits are the rule in this bunch, and Svengalis are rare. Whether they've actually spent time listening to the Ronettes, the Runaways or Lauryn Hill or not, these women have benefited from their elders' hard-won lessons." That sounds a lot like overall progress, which doesn't seem to have slowed in 2009; the question is only whether the sexist messages in their music are an equal or greater setback.

Powers' article doesn't ignore the less feminist aspects of recent girl pop -- in fact, she discusses them in detail -- but she ultimately makes a strong argument that the success of Swift and her peers on more or less their own terms represents an important, hopeful change in the music industry and in how we regard young, female performers. I mostly agree with Hess when she says, "These women don't deserve our ire, but they don't deserve a cookie, either. Swift should be celebrated as a promising entertainer who writes catchy tunes I like to listen to on the radio. Feminist? Not so much." But I guess I'm a bit more optimistic about what young women like Taylor Swift are accomplishing, at least in big-picture terms. It will be a great day when more female artists are calling the shots, topping the charts and writing lyrics that don't make me cringe -- but two out of three isn't a bad start. And given that Swift just snagged those Grammy nods a week and a half before her 20th birthday, right now I'm in more of a mood to celebrate her success as a businesswoman than pick apart her failures as a girl-power pop princess.