An attempt to update A Star Is Born (itself an update of Pygmalion) for the computer age, Andrew Niccol's (Gattaca) thoroughly misguided comedic "satire" features Al Pacino as Viktor Taransky, a washed-up Hollywood director scrambling for a way out of the career doldrums. If he and director Niccol make any more pictures as bad as this one, they just may be doing that scrambling for real.

Waddling through the proceedings like a semi-soused goose, Pacino's Taransky is a Cassavetes-like director whose New York glory days are behind him; the opening scenes have him dealing with a spoiled star (Winona Ryder, in fine tantrum mode) on the set of his latest-and possibly last-Hollywood film. When she quits, Taransky is fired by the production executive overseeing the film (Catherine Keener)-the kicker is that she also happens to be his ex-wife.

Making his depressed exit from the studio, Taransky is accosted by a crazed man who foists a computer program on him. Back at his Malibu digs Taransky discovers that the program allows him to build perfectly realistic digital characters and insert them into films. So he builds the blonde Simone (in reality part computer-generated special effects and part actor Rachel Roberts), erases his petulant former star from his footage, inserts Simone as a replacement and-voilá-the film is a hit and a star is born. (That the movie appears to be a pretentious piece of garbage goes unremarked.) Soon all the world loves Simone, forcing Taransky to embark on a massive campaign to keep people from finding out that she doesn't really exist, while pushing her to new heights of stardom.

Even if one cuts the film some slack by accepting its ludicrous premise, the filmmakers (and I'm including Pacino here) don't understand the point of satire: Be funny. After a couple of chuckles in the opening scenes, the film plunges straight downhill, substituting an earnest romanticism awash in sentimentality for its initial satirical intentions. Further, Taransky's glee at being back on top, manipulating both the digital Simone and her audience, Oz-like, from an empty, guarded soundstage completely undercuts the noble sentiments about "film as art" that he had earlier espoused, making him both a hypocrite and a fraud.

Now that would be okay if the film was satirizing Taransky and his cohorts, but it isn't. The biggest joke in the film, unintended, of course, is how seriously the film takes itself. That there is something essentially misogynistic about Taransky's manipulation of Simone (sure she's digital, but she's still the image of a beautiful woman) to further his own ends seems to have gone over the heads of the filmmakers. And any feelings that what Taransky is doing is actually very creepy (there's a reason Frankenstein-another text about creating a "life"-was written in gothic horror style) go unexpressed. In the end, the movie comes across as a complete cock-up.