It has a rather weighty science-fiction component: the time-honored theme of the superiority of emotional humans to unemotional superhumans. But then it's supposed to be funny in addition. The idea -- fairly intelligent for a Hollywood comedy, which might help explain its pratfall at the box-office -- is to take the central metaphor of the Pop. Psych. best-seller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, take it quite literally, take it and run with it. (The "man" is technically from four solar systems away, but that's just standard comic exaggeration. And he has come to our planet, to impregnate one of our women, on an incomprehensible world-takeover mission, but that's just standard comic drudgery.) Almost inevitably, the idea is taken farther than it's worth, and run into the ground. That goes doubly for the filmmakers' proudest inspiration, the laurel upon which they seem to feel entitled to rest: the electronic whirr that accompanies any stir of hope in the alien's surgically attached penis. Garry Shandling, who also co-wrote and co-produced, is an amusing enough actor, but his amusingness is tied up inextricably in human qualities -- in insecurities and in vulnerabilities. More simply, he is miscast, and he has no one but himself to blame. His most alien quality, the thing that most sets him apart from the earthlings, is his asleep-under-the-sunlamp complexion, but that sets him apart from his fellow aliens as well. His chosen woman, meantime, is individualized in a moderately flaky, completely human way, and Annette Bening is a deft and spirited comedienne. Up to a point, anyhow. Singing "High Hopes" unaccompanied in a pair of striped p.j. 's is beyond that point. With John Goodman, Greg Kinnear, Linda Fiorentino, Ben Kingsley; directed by Mike Nichols. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd