Maybe the most startling thing about Judge’s first live-action movie (he of course directed the marvelously psychedelic animated feature “Beavis and Butt-head Do America”) is how effortless it seems. His satiric vision is as sharp as ever: In the first scene we watch a white guy stuck in traffic, popping and flowing with the gangsta lyrics pumping from his stereo, then nervously rolling up his windows and locking his door as a black flower vendor approaches. So is his ear for the monotonous, petty absurdities of life under capitalism: Within five minutes of Peter’s arrival at the sprawling suburban offices of Initech, the woman two cubicles away has chirped, “Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking” at least a dozen times.

But “Office Space” doesn’t depend solely on its gags or its near-perfect parodic pitch, as hilarious as those are. Its plot may be a standard-issue office drone’s revenge fantasy, but its characters and its nowheresville setting are uncannily realized. (“Office Space” is loosely based on Judge’s “Milton” shorts for “Saturday Night Live.”) It’s not a cartoon in any sense, but an honest-to-God movie with some fine, understated acting and a human heart. Its finest moment, not surprisingly, is a particularly anarchic celebration of doing nothing. When Peter and two other rebellious Initech employees get drunk, haul their hated copy machine out into a field and smash the damn thing to bits, the result is pure, electric cinema, as headlong and wordlessly giddy as anything in Godard and a hell of a lot easier to understand.

We never learn exactly what Initech is or what clean-cut everyguy Peter (Ron Livingston) and his friends do there, except that it’s somewhere in Texas and has something to do with bank software. Who cares, anyway? The point of “Office Space” is that none of us actually want to spend our time in anonymous, soul-crushing environments, constantly being told we put the wrong cover sheets on our reports or chided for having “a bad case of the Mondays.” Many of us, however, don’t have other realistic choices, and so the idea of doing almost anything else — or nothing whatever — looms like a vision of paradise. Peter’s persecuted colleagues include Michael Bolton (David Herman), the rap fan from the first scene whose unfortunate name provides him with limitless opportunities for humiliation and bitterness; Samir (Ajay Naidu), whose surname no one at the company can pronounce; Tom (Richard Riehle), a 50ish functionary who lives in constant — and justified — terror of being downsized; and the fateful Milton (Stephen Root), an impossibly nerdy misfit who is storing up an endless list of grievances behind his Coke-bottle glasses and permanent shaving rash.

When he can escape from his unctuous boss, played with creepy accuracy by Gary Cole in gold-rimmed aviator glasses, a ski-resort tan and a contrasting-collar dress shirt, Peter goes home to a brand new apartment complex so shoddily built that he and his redneck neighbor Seymour (Diedrich Bader) can have conversations through the walls. He has a girlfriend he doesn’t really like and spends his breaks brooding in a mall restaurant called Tchotchke’s (where the specials include something called “extreme fajitas”) fantasizing about a waitress named Joanna (Jennifer Aniston). Judge’s script doesn’t give Aniston a whole lot to do in this role, but at least she’s nowhere near an airhead sex-symbol stereotype. She’s entirely believable as an appealing if rather harried young woman trying to make the best of a crappy service-sector job where she’s required to wear at least 15 jokey accessories, or “pieces of flair,” on her uniform.

When a hypnotherapist’s mishap gives Peter an unexpected jolt of confidence, the plot — an admittedly threadbare merger of “Beavis and Butt-head” with “Dilbert” — kicks into gear. Peter dumps his girlfriend, asks Joanna to have lunch with him at the restaurant next to hers (“Do you mean Chili’s or Flinger’s?” she asks) and begins scrupulously ignoring his job, marching blithely in whenever he feels like it to play Tetris or clean the fish he caught earlier that day. This is great as far as it goes, but a pair of evil consultants (one of them the always excellent character actor John C. McGinley) admire his independent spirit so much they decide to promote Peter and fire his pals Samir and Michael Bolton (after determining that he’s not related to the real Michael Bolton). From there we lurch into a computer-virus conspiracy that teaches us the dictionary definition of money laundering, provokes Joanna into telling Peter, “You’re just this penny-stealing, wannabe-criminal man” and introduces the specter of a lengthy sentence in “Federal Pound-Me-in-the-Ass Prison.”

“Office Space” isn’t quite the demented, overimaginative comedy that Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” is, but in some ways I liked it better. Anderson’s bizarre ’60s-cum-’90s amped-up Holden Caulfield universe is entirely his own invention, while Judge is a social satirist making a political and even moral point, and his world is an only slightly exaggerated version of our own. (If you’re guessing that the long-abused Milton will get his reward before he goes to heaven, you’re on the right page of Judge’s script.) In one of these movies, a guy’s dream that he can do everything is defeated; in the other, a guy’s dream of doing nothing is fulfilled, and it turns out not to be enough. Both of these stories are about growing up, and the logical question for both of these talented young filmmakers is, what happens after that?

In television series, it’s true that some famous pairings between
attractive men and women have gone unconsummated for a long time. But this
imposed celibacy (which almost always leads to wedding bells, or at least a
night of bliss) owes less to a desire to explore the phenomenon of
just-good-friendships than it does to something far more practical. Sexual
tension generated plots and maintained audience interest for everything
from “Get Smart!” to “Moonlighting” and “The X-Files.”
(When the male and female leads finally do get down to business, ratings
tend to go down, too.)

Perhaps in response to the inevitability of sex on the big and small
screens, on records and CDs, in your face and in your ear, a mini-spate of
recent movies has discovered a built-in obstacle that even Viagra can’t
cure. In last year’s “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and, even more explicitly,
last month’s “The Object of My Affection,” the male half of the leading
couple has been gay. (In the 1997 film “In and Out,” neither the guy nor
the girl realized he was gay, but oh well.)

Straight women and gay men have been forming fast friendships for years:
Both, after all, are faced with the annoying dilemma of just what to do
about men. (Or with them: A 1997 book is called “Sex Tips for
Straight Women from a Gay Man.”) Hollywood’s recent interest in these
straight girl-gay guy pairings suggests, at least superficially, that
despite our cultural obsession with sex, and “relationships,” many of us
dream secretly of an erotic demilitarized zone in which we can just relate.

What’s frustrating is that these three films don’t do their potentially
interesting subject real justice. Each, in its own way, avoids the issue,
as if sexless male-female friendships were something terribly dirty,
something we have to avert our eyes from. Perhaps that’s because all three
of these movies are crypto-fag hag stories — films about a special subset
of straight girl-gay guy friendships, those well-documented (if only
informally) relationships between gay men and women who, for whatever
reasons — some subconscious anxiety about male sexuality, presumably –
prefer to be around men who aren’t interested in them as sexual objects.

The cliché about fag hags is that they’re overweight or unattractive in
some other obvious way that betrays their subconscious desire to avoid
sex with men. But a movie about a fat girl who prefers the company of gay men,
however psychologically on-target, would be doomed from the start in
Hollywood, which is even more nervous about unattractive female leads than
it is about sex. As a result, each of these movies has made its heroine a
svelte beauty. “My Best Friend’s Wedding” asks its audience to believe
that Julia Roberts’ character was having such a hard time getting laid that
she spent all her forlorn free hours hanging out with her gay pal, played
by a just-as-improbably desexualized Rupert Everett.

But why is Julia spending so much time with Rupert? Yes, he’s outré
and sardonic and tries on funny hats in stores — everything we’ve come to
expect from gay best friends in films — but the picture fumbles its
opportunity to investigate the deeper currents in the friendships between
straight girls and gay guys, why it’s Rupert and not the straight-arrow
leading man, Dermot Mulroney, who’s obviously Julia’s real best friend. It
would have been fun to see them bonding in some grittier or more revealing
way, and not just comparing blow job techniques, say, or reading to each
other from “Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man.” What is it like
when men and women meet and connect emotionally in a territory free from
the land mines of sex and romance? “My Best Friend’s Wedding” is never going
to show us that.

“In And Out” circles around the straight girl-gay guy friendship thing
even more frenetically, by making its hero, Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline),
totally unaware of his homosexuality until halfway through the movie.
Howard’s fiancée, Emily, played by the adorable (and still underused) Joan
Cusack, didn’t mind not getting any sex during her three-year betrothal
because Howard was “smarter, more sensitive, more interesting” than all the
other guys, and because he taught her about “art, life and magic.” (Huh?
She didn’t know he was gay?) When you learn that Emily used to be 75
pounds heavier, you get a tiny whiff of the other, more interesting movie
that’s buried here — the one about fey, gay Howard the English teacher and
his intense friendship with his fat-but-pretty colleague Emily, a movie
about the things that men and women may want from each other (art, life,
magic?) when sex isn’t an issue. But even with a funny gay screenwriter
like Paul Rudnick, this is Hollywood, and the real movie here, the fag-hag
movie, gets buried under “In and Out” just as surely as the real, fat, fag
hag Emily remains buried underneath the cute, slim Joan Cusack.

But the most frustrating of these three movies, the one that raises the
most interesting interpersonal issues and then refuses to really deal with
them, is Nicholas Hytner’s “The Object of My Affection,” from a Wendy
Wasserstein script based on the 1988 novel by Stephen McCauley. “Object”
keeps promising that it’s going to break out of the old Hollywood mold and
find out what happens when the cute girl, Nina Borowksi (Jennifer Aniston),
and the cute guy, George Hanson (Paul Rudd), are never going to be more
than Just Good Friends.

But, although the movie’s characters may have their theories about
the psychological core of the straight girl-gay guy relationship (“You’re
not a threat to her, right? — that’s the attraction,” Nina’s boorish
boyfriend, Vince, patronizingly asks George), its screenwriter doesn’t seem
to get it. Soon after Nina and George meet, the telltale signs appear: They
giggle with adorable, photogenic self-consciousness while taking tango
lessons; they go on rides at amusement parks while breathlessly exposing
their flawless teeth; and they have serious talks at night while eating
expensive ice cream. In the movies, this is shorthand for Budding Romance.
It’s not long before Nina’s smashing dishes into the sink when George goes
off with another … man.

McCauley’s book — which, like its non-comic counterpart, Michael
Cunningham’s lyrical 1990 novel “A Home at the End of the World,” came out
at a time when the tantalizing new possibility of a post-nuclear,
gay-straight family hadn’t yet ossified into Benneton-ad cliché — focused
on complex people in unconventional situations. (After Nina gets pregnant
by Vince, George agrees to stand in as the child’s father.) But even though
the movie pays lip service to the book’s interest in new kinds of
relationships between independent-minded people — “We can make this up for
ourselves,” George says in the movie — Wasserstein’s adaptation, which
makes Nina the heroine, bizarrely refashions the story, willfully
re-sexualizing the dynamic by having Nina fall for George. The
Wasserstein “Object of My Affection” is, unsurprisingly perhaps, all about
a cute, funny Jewish girl whom most guys are too clueless to appreciate.

The provocative and elaborate questions raised by the gay boy-straight girl
coupling in the book end up as moot points. This “Object” becomes just
another Feminist Lite single mom comedy, in which Mom finds herself
standing alone when the boys run off to play or get laid — in short, just
another movie about guys’ inability to commit. “I want Paul,” George
responds to a besotted and increasingly bitchy Nina’s impatient “What do
you want?” He tears up guiltily as if he, rather than she, was demanding
something emotionally unreasonable.

Wasserstein just can’t imagine the new kind of emotional world McCauley’s
book tried, however breezily, to envision. That’s most obvious in the
movie’s climactic confrontation between George and Nina, which takes place
at the lavish wedding of George’s serially affianced and crudely womanizing
brother, Frank (Steve Zahn). Painfully aware of her desire for George,
overwhelmed by sexual frustration and hugely, uncomfortably pregnant
(men!), Nina waddles away from her table into a deserted room; a solicitous
George follows. “Look at this,” she says, gesticulating angrily at the
wedding, the fancy-shmancy guests, the food, the band, the Manhattan
skyline in the distance. “This is real. We’re not real.” Why not?
Because George and Nina haven’t registered at Bloomies? Because their
relationship won’t culminate in a $100-a-person catered affair and Aunt Ida
dancing the hora in a walker? If George and Nina’s dream of gay-straight
co-parenting isn’t “real,” that’s simply because Wasserstein has made it
unreal. She’s stacked the dramatic deck.

I’ll come clean here: I’m helping a straight single woman raise a child –
admittedly sans roller coasters, sans tango lessons, but also sans broken
dishes in the sink. A lot of other gay men are, too. Any time Wasserstein
wants to see what “real” looks like, she’s welcome to join us for our nightly
7 p.m. rendezvous with the potty (bring rubber gloves). Whatever its
pretensions to exploring new emotional and social territory, this version
of “Object of My Affection” just keeps backsliding into an entirely
conventional, nice-Jewish-girl, Upper West Side fantasy of what life’s
supposed to be like. (You could say the same for the way Wasserstein fobs
the lovelorn Nina off on the black cop who rescues her from a
purse-snatching: Once again, the schwartzers are left to clean up
the mess.)

Earlier in the movie, at the point when Nina has her final argument with
the horrible Vince and tells him to get lost, there’s a moment when Vince
gets belligerent with George, who has sprung to Nina’s defense. George draws
closer to Nina; Vince looks from one to the other and realizes he’s been replaced.
Finally, Vince snaps. “You homo!” he snarls, two inches from George’s face,
and things look like they’re going to get physical until Nina breaks it up.
The scene bugged me at the time, and I couldn’t think why; it wasn’t until
much later that I realized what was wrong with this picture. When straight
guys get pissed off at gay men, they don’t say “homo” — they say
faggot. (There’s something more satisfying about the consonants.)
Wasserstein’s inability to bring herself to use the N-word of gay culture
is a kind of symbol. It’s a symbol for this movie’s failure of will.
Despite its liberal trappings, “Object of My Affections,” like other
Hollywood movies about gay men and straight women, takes the conservative
way out; it prefers looking nice to being real.

For the most part, though, the new romantic heroines, like Sandra Bullock in “While You Were Sleeping” or Jennifer Aniston in the new “Picture Perfect,” are dithery nice girls, flummoxed at how to go about getting that man or that job. They spend a lot of screen time moping around in schlumpy clothes as if apologizing for being attractive. The days of romantic-comedy heroines who were confident and sexy and independent, who were taken by surprise when they fell in love instead of sitting around pining for it to happen, seem far in the past. There is a woman like that in “Picture Perfect,” Aniston’s best friend, Darcy, played by Illeana Douglas (whose performance in the otherwise hapless “Grace of My Heart” was one of last year’s unheralded gems), but she’s the second banana here, doing one of the roles that Helen Broderick or Eve Arden used to play; sassy and essentially sexless. If Douglas were the heroine, there’s a chance that audiences might find her too assured.

At least “Picture Perfect” doesn’t make the mistake of asking us to believe that Aniston’s Kate can’t get dates. The director, Glenn Gordon Caron (the creator of “Moonlighting” and the director of “Clean and Sober” and “Love Affair”) puts her in the more credible position of just not being able to get the right kind of date. I had hopes for the movie after the first scene, where Kate stops a guy in the middle of foreplay and sends him home — after he announces that “it” won’t feel as good if he wears a condom.

But Kate turns out to be another girl who just can’t stand up for what she wants. She can’t keep her meddling mother (Olympia Dukakis doing her Olympia Dukakis bit) from bugging her about wanting grandchildren. At the advertising agency where her concepts are landing one account after another, she can’t get her boss (Kevin Dunn) to promote her. He tells her that she hasn’t shown enough commitment to going after what she wants, that at 28 she’s still living like a student, without a house, a car or a serious relationship.

When I told a woman friend who works in an ad agency about that particular plot point (and that the boss denies Kate a promotion for those reasons, in front of witnesses), she said, “I’d be thinking, ‘Yippee, I’m gonna get a settlement!’” Not our Kate. She has a good cry in the ladies’ room until Darcy comes in and tells her she’s gotten the promotion after all. Darcy has shown the boss a picture, taken at a wedding, of Kate with Nick (Jay Mohr), a guy she met when she caught the bouquet and he caught the garter. Darcy tells the boss that the two are engaged, and things start to go swimmingly for Kate. She learns to dress for success, she’s even able to attract the interest of Sam (Kevin Bacon), the office stud who had previously dismissed her as a mousy good girl. Then Nick gets national attention when he saves a little girl from a fire and Kate’s boss wants to meet him. Kate arranges for Nick to pose as her fianci at a dinner party where they’ll have a preplanned fight and break up.

The message of “Picture Perfect” is that it’s OK to be yourself, and when Kate’s deception comes unraveled, Aniston has a speech about how she was selling her talent short by pretending to be something she wasn’t. But the movie has a strange definition of what it means to be phony. Kate really does need to learn to be more aggressive, and she does need to sell herself. “Picture Perfect,” however, appears to be saying that she’s selling out because she shops at Henri Bendel’s and learns to keep her hair out of her eyes. The movie can’t let Kate enjoy her new power and confidence. When she wears a saucy little strapless brocade dress to a cocktail party, she seems to spend the entire night tugging up her bodice. And though Aniston is likable enough, much of the time I didn’t enjoy watching Kate, especially the condescending way she treats Nick. Like “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Picture Perfect” presents a heroine who behaves so nastily, you don’t feel much like rooting for her. What’s even worse is the way Caron freights the bedroom scenes between Kate and Bacon’s Sam with you’ll-be-sorry forebodings.

Bacon is too smart an actor not to subvert the movie’s view of Nick as merely a narcissistic cocksman. With his crooked dirty grin, open shirts and tousled hair, Bacon is an invitation to fall into bed. He walks through the movie with an easy, insinuating charm, totally devoted to pleasure, which is what some of us misguided souls thought romantic comedies were supposed to be about.

“Saturday Night Live’s” Mohr (who was impressive as Tom Cruise’s slimy competition in “Jerry Maguire”) doesn’t get off so easy. He’s charming and unforced as Nick, but the role requires him to stand around looking at Aniston, hesitant and unsure one moment, adoring the next and being treated like dirt all the while. And I can’t think of one actor who could pull off Nick’s sappy big speech, about how his job videotaping weddings and birthday parties and baptisms makes him feel honored to be a part of people’s lives.

“Picture Perfect” leaves its heroine with a choice between the undependable charmer who’s great in bed and the almost neuter nice guy. That’s the same choice Caron gave Cybill Shepherd in “Moonlighting” when the show got around to having her get involved with Bruce Willis. But in “Moonlighting,” neither the thorniness nor the horniness were slighted. Women may not want a repeat of that show’s infamous mating scene — where Willis and Shepherd fell into bed with the snarled endearments “Bitch!” and “Bastard!” — but will they go all swoony for the same choice stacked in favor of the faithful puppy dog? What “Picture Perfect” sells as romance is a junior high school health class morality lecture we all got years ago. And it was a crock then, too.