By Bill Browning

In this installment of the fabulous J and J Project, Paula and I take a look at writer-director David Wain’s Wanderlust and Jennifer Aniston’s work in it. Ken Marino collaborated with Wain on this film and Judd Apatow produced it.

I’ll just start my part of this by saying: if, for any reason, you are on any sort of quest to find Jennifer Aniston in a bra or a good movie, Wanderlust will not end your search.

Paula, of course, liked the film. But as you know by now, Paula’s got no taste. It’s not her fault, really. Paula’s from Elizabethtown and people from there are culturally deprived. Elizabethtonians are all addicted to Mountain Dew, Oxycontin and lottery tickets, and a high percentage of them have hideous, near calamitous taste in shoes. In short, Paula is backwoods and wouldn’t know art if it bit her on her mostly uninformed ass.

I, on the other hand, spend every waking moment observing and appreciating all manner of refined shit. People all over the globe look to me to tell them what’s worthwhile in the art world, and when it comes to Mary Janes, moccasins, mukluks and mules, both the celestial and the common seek my counsel.

But I digress.

I sincerely hoped Wanderlust would be the kind of movie that’d make me howl with laughter. But, at its best, it’s only funny in a smile-and-nod-appreciatively kind of way.

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston play urban couple George and Linda. George loses his job and their pricey New York studio apartment, so they haul ass to Atlanta where George’s unnecessarily crude brother puts him to work.

On their way to Atlanta, George and Linda stop at Elysium, a commune the couple mistake for a bed and breakfast. When things quickly turn ugly at George’s brother’s place, George finds himself drawn back to Elysium’s laid-back, alternative environment. He decides to return and stay there and Linda dubiously agrees to give it two weeks.

(Yawn). Hilarity ensues.

I didn’t have to pick up the remote control to know Jennifer Aniston plays an unlucky-at-love girl with a heart of gold in this movie. She plays an unlucky-at-love girl with a heart of gold in every movie, but lawd help me the world ought to be over it by now. Like Brad Pitt, Vince Vaughn and John Mayer, I think we just need to see Aniston is boring and move on.

Say what you will about James Franco (not you Paula: you keep your fat mouth off  him), but he did act in his last three movies. He was serious and sympathetic in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brooding and bereft in The Broken Tower and cheeky and fun in Your Highness.

In Just Go With It, Horrible Bosses and The Switch, Jennifer’s last films, she was cute, cute and cute. And braless, braless and braless.

If you like so-so hippie jokes, pointless bathroom humor, tired free-love anecdotes, unattractive guys running amok or boring-ass Jennifer Aniston, you should see Wanderlust. If you have taste in movies or shoes, you’ll likely want to skip it.

In fairness, before I wrap this up, I should mention the amusingly dry Linda Lavin is wonderful here as George and Linda’s realtor, but she’s not in enough of the film to make a lot of difference.

The definition of wanderlust is “a very strong or irresistible desire to travel,” and you start to feel it about five minutes into this movie.