Ben Stiller sells his soul to VH1 for Zoolander

I really wanted to give Zoolander a chance.

I'm not one of those aesthetes who disapproves of anything made with a reasonable budget by Americans and that is shown in a suburban multiplex. Every now and then, I like dumb movies, so when I found out that the star of There's Something About Mary, directed and stars in a film about male models saving the world, I decided it would probably be worth the price of admission.

My hopes remained high until somewhere around the fifth frame.

It was at that point that the neural networks in my brain connected the image being seared into my retinas with a memory and an emotion, which ruined the rest of the film for me.

Let me explain: the image on the screen was the VH1 Films logo. Up until that point, I did not know of the connection between Zoolander and VH1 - if I had known that, I wouldn't have gone to see it in the first place. This may sound harsh, but as someone who watches a fair amount of VH1, I have my reasons.

First of all, VH1 has a tendency, or perhaps an unholy and abnormal compulsion, to cross-promote and recycle everything they put on the air. For example, a musical act may be featured on Behind the Music and then, over the next few weeks, that act may end up on Before They Were Stars, Where are They Now, VH1 Storytellers and, if they're as lucky as like Def Leppard, they could even be the subject of their own made-for-T.V. movie. That being said, I knew that Zoolander would promote VH1 shows and that VH1 would feature endless Zoolander promotions, such as countdowns - even a Behind the Music, even though it's a movie.

Not long after seeing the VH1 Films logo, my fears were borne out. The action begins at the VH1 Fashion Awards and features Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) in front of a wall covered in VH1 logos. Could they be more crass?

Still, the movie had a plot, the beginning of which I feel compelled to summarize. Derek Zoolander is a famous, although vacuous, male model, who has just lost his title of Male Model of the Year to Hansel (Owen Wilson), an equally dumb male model with a druggie-hippie-surfer-dude twist. His career in free-fall, Zoolander contemplates quitting the business to figure out the meaning of life beyond modeling and goes back the mining town where his father (Jon Voight) and brothers still live. He is not accepted back home and returns to New York to model for the eccentric fashion designer Mugatu (Will Farrell). What Zoolander doesn't know - among most other things - is that he has been selected by Mugatu to kill the Malaysian Prime Minister in order to satisfy a murky cabal of clothing manufacturers who oppose the Prime Minister's crackdown on unfair labor practices in his country.

Working to uncover all this is Matilda (Christine Taylor, who is Stiller's real-life wife), a magazine reporter, who starts to like Zoolander after initially being repulsed by his sheer stupidity. Add dumb jokes and advertisement parodies, stir and throw in the microwave for 90 seconds. That's Zoolander in a nutshell.

Will Zoolandermake you chuckle now and then? Probably. Will you be glad you went? Probably not. Will you see Ben Stiller on a VH1 program at least once every other hour? You can bet on it.