Several years ago, I received good advice concerning creative writing: write about what you know. I was told that my own experiences would give me the best ammunition for telling a story with confidence. Hollywood has often taken such advice to heart -- it loves to tell stories about itself. Well-received movies like State and Main, The Player and Sunset Blvd., make the genre welcome. But, once in awhile a clunker emerges, and that's what Full Frontal is.

Director Steven Soderbergh's (Ocean's 11) latest offering peeks into the lives of a half-dozen or so people who work in or around the movie industry. The theme uniting them all (as played by Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, Catherine Keener, Mary McCormack, Enrico Colanton and David Hyde Pierce) is their lovelorn status. We have the actor who's into meaningless sex -- and ironically stars in a movie about finding true love. We have the screenwriter who has confidence issues as he tries to live up to his wife's expectations -- and ironically wrote the true-love movie the aforementioned actor is in. Various other related characters also have problems either dealing with or finding love. The whole film oozes irony by featuring a movie-within-a-movie that's about love but surrounded and being made by people who can't figure out love in a normal fashion. By the end of the (real) movie, these characters do find love, but it's ironic since they all find it in a movie, which is what the audience was watching in the first place, which is also ironic. Or something like that.

Full Frontal, too self-aware of its own irony, makes sure the audience knows this and tries to be cute about the whole thing at the expense of its own characters. It invites us to laugh at them -- all unsympathetic except the poor schmuck played by David Hyde Pierce (Niles in "Frasier"). As neurotic by-products of the Los Angeles movie-factory, they are stuck in their own worlds. Did I identify with any of them? Nope. The feeling I got instead was more of a  "Wow, I'm glad I'm not like these losers, and not living in Hollywood, which is full of losers like this."

Focusing on character empathy may seem quite elementary, but I think it's extremely important in a movie, otherwise the audience doesn't care what happens to the people in the film.  Compare Full Frontal, which fancies itself a mockumentary with its cinema verite style and voice-over interview sound-clips, and Christopher Guest's much better mockumentary, Best in Show. Guest's movie offered quirky characters we could laugh at, but they displayed endearing qualities, and we enjoyed their company. We never got the feeling they thought of themselves as losers. The main players in Soderbergh's movie are bitter and self-loathing. Either the filmmaker is presenting some kind of statement about the kinds of people who populate Hollywood, or he doesn't actually care about his characters. Either way, we don't care either.

To make things worse, Full Frontal is shot with a hand-held digital camera that, as a friend of mine put it, "probably had the lossy compression turned way up," which is a just a humorous way of saying the quality is low. I'm sure the blurry shots, bad natural lighting, haphazard crosscutting and jumpy editing comprise some kind of artistic expression, but an ugly movie is the final result. Because the film also emphasizes ugly characterizations, Full Frontal doesn't make a mark as one of the more memorable movies about Hollywood. Sure, write about about what you know, but it helps if you make it interesting for the audience, too.

(Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com)

Released by Miramax and rated "R" for language and some sexual content.