Now, the 41-year-old star of “The Switch,” a movie about the search for a sperm donor, has responded to O’Reilly’s conniption with great parental poise:

Of course, the ideal scenario for parenting is obviously two parents of a mature age. Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. And, of course, many women dream of finding Prince Charming (with fatherly instincts), but for those who’ve not yet found their Bill O’Reilly, I’m just glad science has provided a few other options.

I can just imagine O’Reilly’s response: She said “parents” instead of “a mom and dad” — and there’s no mention of marriage! There she goes again, slyly pushing her liberal agenda for total societal destruction! If Aniston had her way, the world would be awash with unwed lesbian parents. Also, what’s this about being glad science has provided women options? Jen, why don’t you just cut right to annihilating the male race, as you are so clearly bent on doing?

Cue head explosion in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Before we continue our Dante-esque descent into the nine circles of O’Reilly insanity, let’s review what Aniston actually said:

Women are realizing it more and more knowing that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child. Times have changed and that is also what is amazing is that we do have so many options these days, as opposed to our parents’ days when you can’t have children because you have waited too long.

Now to what O’Reilly said: ”She’s throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey you don’t need a guy. You don’t need a dad.’ That is destructive to our society.” He continues, ”The fathers who do try hard are under-appreciated and diminished by people like” — he sneers — “Jennifer Aniston.”

O’Really? That’s what she’s saying? Funny, because it sounded to me like she was saying, well, what she said, which is that women are realizing that “they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child.” That doesn’t mean that it’s preferable, that men are irrelevant or that being a single mom is a walk in the park. It means that women have options these days. Terrifying, isn’t it, Bill?

So we’re thrilled that the ever-masterful Onion has scooped even TMZ itself, breathlessly reporting Wednesday that Aniston has one-upped Angelina Jolie and adopted Negasi, a 33-year-old boyfriend from Africa. Those days of trying “unsuccessfully to get a man the natural way” a thing of the past, the inevitably nicknamed Jenegasi are already succeeding at Aniston’s greatest life goal — driving Brad Pitt crazy. Celebrities: Aren’t they adorable when they conform exactly to our own tidy projected desires?

Jennifer Aniston Adopts 33-Year-Old Boyfriend From Africa

And so with “The Bounty Hunter,” the Jennifer Aniston mystery deepens — well, just a little. Aniston plays New York reporter Nicole Hurley, who works for a paper called the Daily News. (You know this movie is pure fiction when you see that the office she works in is actually populated, with busy, productive newspeople who still have jobs.) Nicole is hot on the trail of a big story involving a suicide that may actually be a murder. But she’s also facing a felony charge, and she further complicates the situation by missing her court date. The bounty hunter assigned to haul this lawbreaking cutie-pie into jail is none other than her own ex-husband, Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler), a former detective who now shuffles around in a half-shaven state, working hard to be charming in an “Aw, shucks — who, me?” kind of way.

In their post-divorce state Milo and Nicole can’t stand each other, and he really rubs her the wrong way when he chucks her into the trunk of his car. That’s how the movie opens, and it’s a vaguely promising beginning: You can see that the director and the screenwriter — respectively, Andy Tennant and Sarah Thorp — have tried to inject some verve and wit into this thing. The goal, clearly, was to give us an old-fashioned romantic caper-comedy with lots of crackle between the leads and one or two amusing second bananas or bit players. (My heart leaped with joy when the wonderful, diminutive comic actress Carole Kane showed up as a country innkeeper, though her role is barely a smudge.)

But even though Tennant has a few reasonably entertaining pictures to his credit — among them the 1998 “Ever After,” in which Drew Barrymore plays a completely charming Cinderella — he fails to give “The Bounty Hunter” the energy it needs. The plot is overly tangled and knotty, and its resolution is dealt with in a hasty verbal explication. Those sins might be excusable, if there were at least some chemistry between the two leads. But Butler and Aniston appear to be tolerating each other at best. Their characters go through the motions of conning one another, but their hearts just aren’t in it. On two separate occasions, one handcuffs the other to a bed — whether that’s supposed to be a fear-of-commitment metaphor or a feeble effort to add some kinkiness to the proceedings, the gag just feels tired and worn out.

Regardless, Aniston has her game face on. She may be uninspired in “The Bounty Hunter,” but she’s doing her damnedest to keep the picture’s wobbly wheels spinning. I find myself once again unable to come up with anything particularly damning or complimentary to say about Aniston. This performance, like so many others she’s given, at least has a perfunctory glow about it. She doesn’t just sleepwalk her way through these half-baked roles, she actually works at them, and her gumption, at least, is admirable.

But what’s Butler’s excuse? I’ve been told that Butler is a sex symbol, the kind of guy who turns 99 percent of the female population into crazed chicks out of the old Hai Karate ads. But if he’s throwing off any heat, it’s failing to reach me. Butler’s smile isn’t cute or sexy; it’s just kind of a doughy smirk. There’s nothing smoldering behind his exaggerated swagger; at best, it speaks of “You know you want it!” entitlement. I concede that Butler generally looks artfully rumpled, if you like that sort of thing. Still, my ambivalence about Aniston notwithstanding, I think she deserves better. “The Bounty Hunter” is a comedy of remarriage that makes divorce look like a state of grace.

Into this cheery scenario bursts Jennifer Aniston’s Eloise, a florist who supplies arrangements for the Seattle hotel where Burke is holding his latest seminar. Burke has a chance encounter with her, in a hotel hallway, that intrigues him; when he sees her again, he asks her out. She rebuffs him by pretending to be deaf. Later, when he calls her out on her lie, she cuts him down with a speech about how he’s probably just another married businessman, in town for a few days and looking for a fling. Ouch. But she has a good excuse: She’s just broken up with her boyfriend after discovering he’s been cheating on her. Humans do the darnedest things.

It takes forever and a day for Burke and Eloise to even get to their first date. And, strangely, there are very few scenes featuring the two of them together: Most of the air in “Love Happens” is sucked up by the grieving process, as we watch Burke’s seminar attendees attempt to put their lives back together. Their grief is painful: You can see it, in particular, in the case of Walter (John Carroll Lynch), a contractor who lost his son in an accident. But director Brandon Camp — this is his directorial debut, and he co-wrote the script with Mike Thompson — lavishes so much attention on the grief stuff that he seems to forget he has potential lovers in his movie too. The movie strokes that grief chord over and over again, to the point of being fetishistic, playing on the emotions of anybody who’s ever lost a loved one, in a way that feels claustrophobic and dishonest. I kept counting the minutes until I could escape its cloying, self-helpy vapors.

The bummer is that “Love Happens” feels slightly alive when Eckhart and Aniston are on-screen together. Eckhart has given effortlessly appealing performances in pictures like “Erin Brockovich” and “Possession.” But he does need to be loosened up a bit: Left to his own devices, he has a buttoned-up, Dudley Do-Right quality. Aniston can be annoying as hell as an actress, but when she’s good, she gives off a nice, flinty spark. In “Love Happens,” these two misfire in every way possible, but in the rare moments we get to watch them together, they at least seem like two human beings attempting to connect.

But “Love Happens” isn’t just about recovering from loss and once again finding love. It’s also about the process of examining and reexamining feelings until they’ve been worn down to mere scraps, like bits of blanket obsessively fingered by a child. During the course of the movie Burke fulfills a long-neglected promise he made to his late wife: While she was alive, she asked him to free her pet “parrot,” Rocky, into the wild if anything should ever happen to her. Eloise tells Burke he needs to do right by his late wife, and by Rocky. And so Burke dutifully steals the bird from the in-laws (who have been caring for it, somewhat grudgingly, since Burke skipped out on his promise) and sets it free in the forest.

Although I’m no bird expert, a quick Google Image search confirms something I suspected: The bird in question isn’t a parrot, but a cockatiel. I also suspect that it’s not really a good idea to release a domesticated tropical bird into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, but what do I know? If Camp had been too persnickety about the parrot/cockatiel’s needs, he wouldn’t have been able to avail himself of this nifty plot point. The parrot/cockatiel isn’t, by the way, seized and eaten. No harm befalls him, which is a very good thing: He’s the only character in “Love Happens” worth caring about, because in his forthright, honest bird state, he never unduly milks our sympathy. Love does happen. But even when it’s painful, it shouldn’t hurt this much.