In Theaters

“Trixie” 117 minutes, R, written and directed by Alan Rudolph. Starts Friday, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

Alan Rudolph’s “Trixie” is an idea movie that never truly takes off. It’s meant to be a silly twisting of genres — Rudolph himself calls it “screwball noir” — but the humor more often falls flat and the characters never quite click.

At every turn, there’s a clear disconnect between the cast, the direction and the script; it’s as if all three came to the film with different ideas about what would work and what wouldn’t. Unfortunately, those ideas don’t gel into a satisfying whole.

Like his mentor, Robert Altman, Rudolph is known for being generous with his actors, giving them ample room to experiment and flesh out their characters on screen, but here he may have been too generous; a script this ambitious demands a director with a clearer vision. In “Trixie,” that’s simply not the case.

The film follows Emily Watson as Trixie Zurbo, a sweetly naive, amateur sleuth from Chicago who speaks in a wacky mishmash of screwed-up phrases, such as, “You’ve got to grab the bull by the tail and look it in the eye.” Or, “You’re not drinking yourself to Bolivia!”

On paper, this is amusing stuff, but comedy is all about delivery and timing — and Watson, one of the better dramatic actresses, reveals here she’s no comedian. She’s too rigid, too mannered, too British — and thus never seems comfortable as a woman whose weird phraseology is supposed to be endearing when, in fact, it’s cloying.

The script, of course, is at least partly at fault for that — it lays on Trixie’s malapropisms like great gobs of mud. It’s one thing to mine humor from a character’s peculiarities; it’s something all together different to shape your entire movie around them. If they don’t work — and they don’t here — the film finds a quicker death.

With Nick Nolte wasted as a crooked senator, Leslie Anne Warren as a boozy beauty named Dawn, Nathan Lane as a casino entertainer and Dermot Mulroney as the man Trixie falls in love with, “Trixie” does have some rousing moments — particularly with Brittany Murphy as the scene-stealing Ruby Pearli. But its humor is so consistently forced, whatever subtlety or nuance it could have had are completely crushed.

Grade: D+

On Video

“Supernova” 91 minutes PG-13, directed by Thomas Lee, written by David Campbell Wilson.

“Supernova” is one of those sci-fi assembly line disasters that’s so lacking in originality it has no choice but to dip into a host of other sci-fi films to find its inspiration and to construct its plot. “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Alien,” “Sphere,” the “Star Trek” movies and “Lost in Space” are all pillaged here to produce a film that’s about as sophisticated and as gripping as Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

The film is the intergalactic pits, a flimsy piece of soft-core space porn that seems to exist only so its buff cast members — James Spader, Angela Bassett, Lou Diamond Philips, Wilson Cruz — can strip down to their birthday suits and run around the set in heat in what’s essentially a sex romp in space underscored by benign moments of evil.

The problem with these sorts of sci-fi films is how characters always come at the cost of the special effects. Since the director and the screenwriters don’t care about the people they’re putting in peril, neither do we, which harms whatever dramatic tension and suspense the director could have mounted.

Not that we know who directed “Supernova.” Both Geoffrey Wright and Walter Hill — the film’s first and second directors, respectively — removed their names in favor of the fictitious “Thomas Lee,” a man who doesn’t exist.

It’s rumored that Francis Ford Coppola re-edited the film in a last-ditch effort to save it, but apparently he didn’t want his name associated with the project either, which just confirms what’s now so painfully clear: “Supernova” is a super dud.

Grade: D-

“Here on Earth” PG-13, 97 minutes; directed by Mark Piznarski, written by Michael Seitzman.

With all of its elaborately staged sunsets, its ultra-schmaltzy score, its gee-whiz world of gee-whiz retro-teens, its drag races (yes, its drag races), its vanilla milkshakes and apple pie candor, Mark Piznarski’s “Here on Earth” must be an extended joke — it just has to be.

There’s nothing here that has anything to do with Earth as we know it now — unless, of course, you recently crawled out of a time capsule or happen to be Amish.

The film drops audiences straight into the Twilight Zone world of Putnam, Mass., a charming town that has the sweet smell of the 1950s all over it.

It opens with Kelley (Chris Kline), an arrogant, poor little rich boy at a nearby prep school who goes slumming with his friends at Mabel’s Table, an old-fashioned diner that’s a favorite with the blue-collar locals.

There, he meets and flirts with Samantha (Leelee Sobieski), which infuriates her boyfriend, Jasper (Josh Hartnett), and eventually leads to a testosterone-soaked drag race that destroys Mabel’s Table in a fiery explosion.

Instead of eating bread and water in prison, where the boys belong, they’re ordered by a judge to rebuild the diner — which, over the course of a summer, also predictably repairs their damaged characters.

But “Here on Earth” has more in mind than just being a character-building exercise for teens (stop reading if you don’t want to know more); it also wants to be a three-hanky tear-jerker that tears out your heart and stomps all over it, which it tries to accomplish by ripping off Arthur Hiller’s “Love Story.”

That’s right, somebody here is going to that big diner in the sky, but that won’t surprise anyone paying attention to Andrea Morricone’s swelling, unbelievably sappy score, which tells us exactly how to feel throughout the film’s many, many, oh, so many tumultuous ups and downs.

Grade: D+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, and Tuesday and Thursday on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” and “NEWS CENTER at 11.”

THE VIDEO CORNER

Renting a video? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

The Tigger Movie — B- Supernova — D- Erin Brockovich — B+ The Cider House Rules — A- Here on Earth — D+ Reindeer Games — C+ Princess Mononoke — A Romeo Must Die — C- Whatever It Takes — B The Beach — D+ Drowning Mona — C- Magnolia — A- Angela’s Ashes — B- The Ninth Gate — C+ Ride with the Devil — C- What Planet Are You From? — D The Whole Nine Yards — B+ All About My Mother — A Down to You — D The Hurricane — A- My Dog Skip — B+ Scream 3 — B- Hanging Up — F The Talented Mr. Ripley — A Scream 3 — B- Anna and the King — A- Sweet and Lowdown — A- Topsy-Turvy — A Bicentennial Man — D+ Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo — C- The Emperor and the Assassin — B- The Green Mile — A Light it Up — C+ Play it to the Bone — D+ The Third Miracle — D Girl, Interrupted — B Miss Julie — C Next Friday — B- Man on the Moon — C- Snow Falling on Cedars — C American Movie — A Eye of the Beholder — F The End of the Affair — B+ Felicia’s Journey — B+ Sleepy Hollow — B- The World is Not Enough — B+ American Beauty — A Bringing Out the Dead — B- The Straight Story — A