Self-affirming, boastful, best-selling piece of nonfiction Chick Lit transformed into a two-and-a-quarter-hour blandishment for a major star. While there is a lot of sightseeing on the heroine’s Search for Self (“I want to go someplace where I can just marvel”), Italy for food, India for meditation, Indonesia for romance — the three I’s on the road to the central, the egotistical I — it is all of the whirlwind variety, flitting, dizzying, bustled along with dictatorial pop songs, opera aria, indigenous instrumentals, and shot, what’s more, in mushy focus and muddy color. (Ryan Murphy of Running with Scissors, director and whip-cracking tour guide.) We’re probably lucky to be allowed to see anything at all around the screen-eclipsing face of the leading lady, a gaunt Julia Roberts laughably cast as a lusty eater, heedless of packing in the pasta and packing on the pounds. Billy Crudup, James Franco, Luca Argentero, old bald Richard Jenkins (romanticizingly said to look just like James Taylor), and Javier Bardem, in various states of emasculation, are her men-in-waiting, the last-named the anointed Prince Charming at the end of the trail of arbitrary rejects. Insights acquired along the way, often talked out in first-person narration, boil down to glib one-liners, bromides, bumper stickers. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd