I discovered something important about myself this week: exactly how long I will watch an incredibly bad movie just because I find Lauren Graham pretty and charming.

Forty-two minutes, it turns out. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty long time, especially considering how completely loathsome The Answer Man is (so loathsome, apparently, that IMDB can’t even be bothered to change its name to the right one). In my defense, though, Lauren Graham is pretty goddamn charming.

Actually, Lauren Graham was responsible for only about 30 minutes of my watching; I’ll chalk the other 12 up to Philadelphia, because The Answer Man was filmed here. So while Graham and Jeff Daniels were having their insipid conversations about God and The Meaning of Life, I could zone out and concentrate on geography. Walnut Street! City Hall!

I used to live just a couple blocks from here:

But man, this movie sure is fucking terrible.

Here’s the plot, basically: Jeff Daniels’ character, Arlen Faber, is the author of a book called Me and God, which he wrote over a decade ago and which has since become an international best-seller and has sprouted its own cottage industry: books like Understanding Me and God, audio tapes and seminars, even The Me and God Diet. Faber has become a grumpy recluse with back problems. Lauren Graham, meanwhile, is really cute and charming and plucky. She’s also a chiropractor with an office down the block from Arlen Faber’s house.

You can see where this is going, right?

I realize it’s not the most exciting premise, and it’s a premise I was fully aware of when I put the movie into my Netflix queue. So you might be thinking: what gives you the right to complain?

But here’s the thing: even as predictable schlock, this movie is uncommonly bad. This movie is so bad it makes You’ve Got Mail look like Truffaut.

There were some early warning signs: like in the very first scene, when Arlen Faber gets a bag full of fan mail and promptly throws it into a room in his house already cluttered with bags of fan mail, the door of which is affixed with one of those black plastic office-door labels that says MAIL ROOM.

This is his house, let’s recall, not an office. And while the door-labeling could perhaps be interesting — maybe he’s obsessive-compulsive, or has amnesia? — it becomes clear, quickly enough, that its only purpose in the movie is to make sure that we, the borderline-retarded audience this movie was apparently intended for, get the joke: See? He gets a lot of mail! So much mail he has a whole room for mail! In his house! He calls it the mail room!

I should have turned the damn thing off right then. But Lauren Graham! So cute! So charming!

Also, I was holding out a thin hope that the movie was going to be a satire. It seemed like it could maybe be a satire. Faber’s book, after all, seems really satire-worthy: a kind of Frequently Asked Questions manual written by God, as channeled through Arlen Faber, with questions like: Why do people do bad things? and Where do we go when we die? In the movie’s early scenes, we see Faber acting like kind of an asshole, and trying (unsuccessfully) to meditate and read various self-help books, so it seemed possible that the movie’s joke would go something like this: cynical opportunist writes idiotic book and America eats it up with a spoon, because America is fat and dumb. Maybe not the most complicated joke, sure, maybe a little too much like shooting joke fish in a joke barrel, but it’s a joke springing from a worldview I can at least comprehend, even if I find it kind of idiotic. I mean I’ve been to outlet malls two weeks before Christmas. I’ve seen the kinds of books they sell at Target.

But at a certain point it became clear we were meant to believe that Faber had actually talked to God. And so his book is, apparently, an actual work of Scripture. God, it turns out, has never met an empty cliche he didn’t like. The “answer,” for instance, to the question Why is there war? (and this is from God, let’s not forget): Because conflict is part of life; without bad things we’d never appreciate the good things.

Thank you, Hollywood. Once again, you’ve successfully tackled life’s most critical questions. Without you, and perhaps our well-worn copies of Chicken Soup for the Semi-Literate’s Soul, we would never fall asleep at night.

In the end, this movie’s not just idiotic, it’s actually offensive. In attempting to connect with “real” people with “real” faith and values — or, rather, what Hollywood thinks “real” people with “real” faith and values might be like — the movie becomes so simplistic that it’s completely patronizing. I may be a soulless, secular-humanist Blue Stater, but I know people with religious faith, and this is not how their brains work. They are not nearly this stupid, nor so easily pacified. And to add insult to injury, the movie’s version of Philadelphia is waaaaaay too clean.