Without much reality, romance shows ‘How to Lose’ an audience

Scripts that beg to be written come out of someone's gut.

Most screenplays we see in multiplexes, including romantic comedies, come out of a meeting designed to yield high-concept ideas.

Let's send the heroine back to high school ("Never Been Kissed") or to work for her handsome political opposite ("Two Weeks Notice").

"How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" is based on a guide book ("The Universal Don'ts of Dating" by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long) and was adapted by Kristen Buckley, Brian Regan and Burr Steers.

Exactly what was improved by the extra writers in the additional drafts•

You could make this one up walking from the parking lot to the supermarket, where half a dozen magazines and newsweeklies promise dozens of ways to lose weight, stuff Christmas stockings and get the date of your dreams.

The subject was handled more adroitly anyway in a three-minute song from "Wonderful Town" called "One Hundred Easy Ways."

"How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" gives us Andie (Kate Hudson), a Composure magazine writer who does monthly "how-to" stories.

Inspired by co-worker and best friend Michelle (Kathryn Hahn), who weeps over affairs that last a week, Andie takes the assignment of attracting and dumping Ben (Matthew McConaughey), all in 10 days because, as editor Lana (Bebe Neuwirth) says, "We go to press in 11 days."

The real reason has more to do with keeping a plot about shallow, manipulative people on schedule.

Coincidence of coincidences, Ben is an ad executive who has his own timeline to land a diamonds account by proving how quickly he can charm his opposite number. How convenient that Andie is in the same club the same night.

And how convenient for the audience, knowing no one can get hurt because of parallel machinations, and they'll fall in love, or what passes for it, anyway.

Everything is facile and glib, including Andie's acceptance by Ben's down-home Staten Island family.

Imagine if the characters looked and behaved like real people, and there were consequences.

Naw, no one sells magazines saying that most of us will never see slim again and that people who look like movie stars gravitate to other people who look like movie stars no matter how long our list of ways to ensnare them.