Culturally, it's an awkward moment to be a chick. The Republican Party's pandering selection of an appallingly under-qualified vice presidential candidate rightly offended many of us, but far too many Democrats are embracing talking points straight out of 1957 in declaring Sarah Palin unfit for the presidency because she's a mother. There are enough reasons to dislike Palin without making one of them the fact that she's a woman.

Were you inclined, though, to dislike women merely for being women, Diane English's unasked for and profoundly unnecessary remake of 1939's The Women is just the fuel for your misogynist fire. I happen to enjoy the company of women quite a bit—and am pretty cool with being one—but this histrionic est-fest made even me want to claw out my own vagina.

Meg Ryan plays Mary Haines, a housewife/fashion designer who discovers her husband's infidelity thanks to a gossipy manicurist at Saks, and must decide if she can forgive him or not. Since there are no actual men in the movie, we get a one-sided version of events that mostly succeeds in making Mary seem irrational, spoiled, and immature. True, the movie makes a vague stab at connecting with some of the issues of the day, but any film that earnestly takes as its subject a wealthy housewife who finds personal fulfillment through designing frocks has no business even referencing the world in which the rest of us so unfabulously live.

The Women is little more than a glossy revue of every Hollywood-imagined feminine trope to simper across the silver screen: There's the unfulfilled housewife, the bitchy, power suit-wearing working woman, the kooky, free-spirited friend.... They're all here, batting limp jokes around with all the enthusiasm of overfed, declawed lap cats. It's a weird enough time to be a woman without subjecting yourself to unrelatable, unfun interpretations of women's lives.