(Romantic comedy) Romantic comedies generally serve two purposes. The primary aspiration is to give wooing couples a socially approving nod that will get them in the mood — or at least sidetrack personal fears and social worries long enough — to jump into the sack together. The lesser of the two motivations is to give members of the fairer sex an outlet to contemplate a game plan to get in position for romantic comedy’s principal purpose. As a rule, guys don’t attend these cinematic rituals unless it’s to satisfy their date’s desire to vicariously get him on a romantic playing field. For the guy, it’s a bit of indirect punishment for being a bad boy with defiled and muscular intentions. Splendor proves to be an especially punishing movie for young males because of the way it trades on female fantasy with a one-girl/two-guy live-in menage a trois that’s a crash course in male degradation by way of its dense male characters. Splendor embellishes chic postmodern Los Angeles (i.e. a vapid southern Californian mentality) with angular sets, groovy house music, and multicolored lighting schemes that render a candy-coated visual palette of sickly sweet celluloid floss.

Writer/director Gregg Araki’s (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation) attempt to crack into mainstream movies by implementing his newly formed grasp of cinematic techniques is as vapid as it is tedious. Araki spews about capitalizing on screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s by directors like Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and Leo McCarey as if he were boxing in their weight-class. Akari states his mission to revive a ’30s film style in "spirit, structure, and convention by infusing it with a forward-looking aesthetic sensibility." The naïf director puts himself in troubling, deep waters by attempting to associate himself with directors he can’t hope to hold a candle to at this stage of his career. The days when young directors would apprentice with well-established, powerhouse filmmakers before being entrusted to shoot studio-approved scripts has been gone for decades. While Akari has a good, innate sense of where to put the camera, he falters in the screenwriting department. His use of sub-plot, character development, and self-aware kitsch-style eclipse all narrative momentum.

The culminating scene in the movie involves Abel (Jonathon Schaech – That Thing You Do!) and Zed (Matt Keelsar – Last Days of Disco), two pathetic bohemian Gen Xers in love with girl du jour Veronica (Kathleen Robertson – Nowhere), taking slow-motion, flying leaps off of a hotel balcony into a swimming pool that’s a good twenty-five yards away. It could stand as one of the worst examples of ‘crisis decision’ in modern filmmaking. The moment comes as an asinine ghost in the machine resolution reflecting poorly on Veronica’s less-than-honorable unwanted pregnancy by one of the two bohemian fops. If this kind of fantasy sequence had come early in the story it might have better acclimated an audience for the distance of fantasy Akari intended the story to travel. Instead, the spectators are handed a silly smack that sends up the film’s entire construction without much attention from Veronica as Akari’s unjustified protagonist.