Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

A good way to measure the general quality of a film is to count how many times you look at your watch between the opening and end credits. ãDivine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhoodä is a 1,571.

Of those times, 1,516 are provoked by Sandra Bullockâs acting. Or perhaps regurgitation is a better word. As always, forget what the movieâs about. Forget who else is in it, or who is directing or where it was filmed. Sandra Bullock is to her movies what dead rats are to drinking water. She makes them intolerable.

Still, in all honesty, Bullock is not ãYa-Yaâsä problem. Itâs a stupid movie. Itâs a movie where average people have problems resulting from their averageness for which they can only find an average solution.

The film opens with a midnight meeting of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a group of little girls who claim some sort of connection to nature, although throughout the movie their over-the-hill counterparts, who tell the story, are perpetually caked in animal-tested makeup.

Okay; girl power. Cool. Yet this is a pretty mindless approach to it ÷ but whatever.

So then we flash forward to decades later, a long-term hissy-fit montage depicting aging southern belle Vivi (Ellen Burstyn) having a bitter girl fight with her Broadway writer daughter Siddalee (played by the aforementioned contaminant). It is full of foot-stomping, pouting, name-calling and ãgirl-fight tacticsä such as barring oneâs opponent from oneâs wedding reception and large-scale whining campaigns, which, apparently, the audience is supposed to find amusing.

This behavior is, however, repulsive. Itâs honestly embarrassing to watch; that there are grown women willing to act this way for money is sad. Sandra Bullock is that way anyway, granted, but Ellen Burstyn? How could someone so talented participate in something so, for lack of a better word, degrading?

It gets worse. This whole movie is about whining: ãOh you messed me up!ä and ãNo you ruined my life first!ä back and forth and on and on and, in between, incessant jokes about old ladies and alcoholism and racism and how delightfully dysfunctional everything is.

According to ãYa-Ya,ä women are just dysfunctional by nature; they are flighty, easily-spooked creatures who cry at the drop of a hat and think a man is sweet if he simply refrains from beating them. And everyone thinks thatâs just a hoot ÷ just an absolute hoot.

But this movie isnât about men and the problems they cause women, surprisingly. Itâs about women dealing with their own problems (which are due, of course, only to their own inherent silliness and not to the repression of a patriarchal society).

Viviâs friends, the other three priestesses of the Sisterhood, try to speed the healing process by actually kidnapping Siddalee using the date-rape drug called roofies. If thatâs not women trying to bury the horrors of male-dominated society in light-hearted farce, then nothing is.

Still, ãYa-Yaâsä women are not all patriarchyâs fault. They are the writhing, repugnant spawn of aging pop culture. They are the American womanâs image of her old, wrinkled, sagging, no-longer-fetching self.

They are what will happen, inevitably, to Sandra Bullock.