Quotes of the Day

The movie calendar is weird. The summer blockbuster season begins the first week in May (this year: Wolverine), reaches its twin peaks the weeks of Memorial Day and July 4, then gradually subsides. We're still in midsummer, yet there's only one ginormous action adventure (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) awaiting release, and not a cartoon hero or a dinosaur — or a cartoon dinosaur — in sight. Suddenly it's the time of real people learning how to cope with recognizable problems. The Hollywood kind of problems — the ones that can be solved in under two hours.

Mind you, there's nothing intellectually strenuous in the late-summer offerings. These are quirky romantic comedies in which dissonant figures struggle to achieve harmonic convergence. They take their cues from a pair of summer releases 20 years ago: When Harry Met Sally, which described a friendship that was sometimes a courtship, and sex, lies, and videotape, in which a man's impotence was the spur to romance.

Since then, eccentricity has become the norm. The characters might be two people who hate each other and thus are bound to fall in love, as in The Ugly Truth, or strangers with complementary needs, as in The Answer Man, or, for a change, folks who seem simpatico but have trouble becoming a couple, as in (500) Days of Summer. What the new films share is an aim to evoke familiar laughs and perhaps a climactic tear. That's the difference between an action movie and a comedy: the first makes you gasp, "I've never seen that before!"; the second has you nodding, saying "Hey, that's me."

Worst first. In The Ugly Truth, directed by Robert Luketic, Abby (Katherine Heigl) is the producer of a Sacramento, Calif., TV-news show whose ratings skyrocket when Mike (Gerard Butler), a macho man with a Cro-Magnon spin on dating, joins the team. Desperate to get a man — any man but Mike — Abby takes his advice on landing the hunky surgeon (Eric Winter) who lives next door. Mike will play a burly Cyrano to the doctor's winsome Roxane, until Abby realizes that Mr. Wrong is right for her.

Love's Labour's Lost
From the get-go, the movie is all ugly, no truth. Mike might be a little rough-edged, but Abby is a control freak, bossing everyone from underlings to blind dates. Something is very wrong when the beast is instantly more endearing than the beauty, and when a movie written by three women (two of whom did the very entertaining Legally Blonde, also directed by Luketic) becomes an unplanned essay in misogyny. Then again, everything goes awry here. A restaurant scene with Abby wearing vibrating underpants (a gloss on Meg Ryan's fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally) is an embarrassment; the R-rated jokes earn only smirks; even the obligatory falling-in-love dance number gets botched. Blame Heigl, who's also an executive producer of the film. After Knocked Up and 27 Dresses she seemed primed to be the new Sandra Bullock, but this debacle makes Bullock's lame The Proposal shine like a screwball-comedy gem.

The Answer Man, which was called Arlen Faber when it showed at Sundance this year, has more going for it. Jeff Daniels plays the long-ago author of a spiritual best seller, Me and God, who's since become a recluse in the most photogenic part of Philadelphia. He crawls out of his shell to meet a single-mom chiropractor (Lauren Graham), befriend a recovering alcoholic (Lou Taylor Pucci) and make a public display of vulnerability — all staples of the genre, as is the plangent piano score that indie films employ to tell viewers what to feel. (Sometimes watching a sweet movie can rouse the dormant grouch.)

But Daniels is always worth watching because he does a lot with a little; for him, the difference between bliss and rage is the subtle shifting of about two facial muscles. With Daniels (The Squid and the Whale) and Pucci (Thumbsucker) joined by Kat Dennings (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) and Olivia Thirlby (Snow Angels), the movie is like a convention of appealing indie stars. Writer-director John Hindman mostly gives them room to breathe, and The Answer Man is likable because it doesn't try too hard to be.

Meanwhile, (500) Days of Summer sweats like a dockworker to win your favor. All that labor could pay off: the film earned a bundle in its first week of limited release and will soon broaden its charm offensive, or assault, at a theater near you. The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, imagines that the perfect young man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom, falls in love with the perfect young woman, Zooey Deschanel's Summer. But she's reluctant to commit; she refuses to think of them as a couple, even after they've become best friends and sex partners.

The movie begins at the end of their affair and hopscotches semirandomly through the days and nights of karaoke, soulful chats and not quite connecting. Anyone who's been there knows that the one who's more loved is always in control of the one who's more loving. But Tom keeps trying. He's like the most determined participant in the Olympics of Romance. He's also our identity figure, in a woman's movie for sensitive guys. Think we don't care? it says. Think we don't hurt?

Director Marc Webb (a vide-auteur making his first feature) gives every scene a bang for comic or emotional effect; as he cuts away you can hear the rim shot. The songs that spray-paint the sound track, as well as the myriad movie references, are mostly antique (1960s to '80s); Webb wants old people to like this young-lovers film. Wants everyone to.

That's the problem with a lot of indie films: covering all the bases. For all the charm of its two leads, there's a cool calculation in Summer's chocolate-valentine heart: the urge to be the next Juno. When little films strain to be big hits, they turn quirks into formula and lose the romance of independence. They may as well be Wolverine.

• RICHARD CORLISS
• Three new comedies milk formula for romance. You may fall hard -- for the sound tracks