Exiting the theater after The Wedding Date last Friday night, I found myself consumed by a question, and it's nagged me ever since. The question is not, "Will a suave and handsome male escort ever fall in love with me and renounce his profession, discovering the depths of his own soul while simultaneously tempting me with his naked bottom?" (As a member of the studio's targeted demographic, I imagine that's what I'm supposed to be wondering, or something along those lines, maybe minus the soul.) No, the question this time is, "Was that a movie or just a glorified sitcom?"

It's a distinction that matters. With profit having overtaken art as the driving force in popular culture, and with crossover marketing linking disparate brands to create a conglomerate of the senses, distinctions between genres and venues may help us remember how to think critically-which is to say, how to think at all.

What made The Wedding Date sitcom-like is difficult to define. The story-a single woman hires a professional to pose as her date at her half-sister's wedding in England, in order to appear less tragic in front of her extended family and ex-fianc??, the best man-is standard fare for romantic comedies. It's all in a day's work for a moviegoer to ignore the inner voice that says, "Why spend $6,000 for a date? Don't you have a male friend who'd do it free for the sightseeing?" Suspension of disbelief can actually make a movie more enjoyable, when not overtaxed, and I think a satisfying film could be built on the desperate-woman/handsome-escort premise.

Part of the problem with this film lies in the casting of Debra Messing; it's difficult to forget that she's the star of TV's "Will and Grace." Though this is not entirely fair to actors, who like the rest of us deserve the chance to try new things, it's somehow asking too much of an audience to embrace the transition from one-foot-tall queen of one-liners to wall-sized romantic heroine. Televisions and movie screens are technically both two-dimensional mediums, but TV really feels two-dimensional, which is why any film worth seeing is best seen in a theater and also why it's difficult for Lisa Kudrow and Co. from "Friends" to move on and move up. They don't seem to have enough substance, even for insubstantial films.

But the blame for TThe Wedding Date's failure as a movie can't and shouldn't be placed on Debra Messing and her casting agent. It's the slapdash camera work, overeager pace and wholly superficial dialogue that account for the near-unanimous critical dismissal of the film and for my sense that it isn't a film at all but a "special episode" lacking only a laugh track and commercial breaks. (A well-trained audience can supply the former and product placement the latter.) Considering that it opened at number two in the box office nationwide, I fear we're in for more of the same.