Early in Nick Cassavetes’ chick-flick misfire, Cameron Diaz says, “I’m too old for this s**t.” Indeed she is. Not that the star isn’t still gorgeous. But the last time there was a movie about a bunch of females who bound together to take vengeance on an unfaithful cad who was two-timing them all—“John Tucker Must Die”—the conspirators were high-school coeds, and it seemed nutty even for girls of that age to get into such a tizzy over any guy, although he was the campus stud and sports star. In “The Other Woman” two of the trio are in their early forties, and the notion that at that age they’re still basically defining themselves in terms of their relationship to a man is demeaning to women generally, particularly since the movie is obviously aimed at them—and written by a woman to boot. (The man, it should be added, doesn’t seem like such a great catch in any event.)

But this is a film that’s insulting to women not only in those terms, but because it’s exploitative of them physically. It takes pains to show Diaz and another of the stars, Kate Upton, running around in bikinis as often as possible, leaving little to the imagination. One wonders how wives who bring their husbands (or girls their boyfriends) to the movie will react when their partners start drooling over these sequences.

Even apart from such considerations, “The Other Woman” is pretty awful. It begins with Carly Whitten (Diaz)—supposedly a powerful NYC attorney, though as far as we can see her only real distinction is an awesome wardrobe (at the beginning she’s handed a major merger to oversee, but that plot thread is completely dropped when the plot kicks in)—being involved with hunky hedge fund manager Mark King (Nikolas Coster-Waldau). When he’s called away to deal with a plumbing problem at his Connecticut house—missing an introduction her father (Don Johnson) in the process—she takes her dad’s advice to surprise him at his place in sexy garb. Unfortunately, when she arrives the door is answered by Mark’s mousy wife Kate (Leslie Mann).

This is the same preliminary set-up you might recall from last year’s “Baggage Claim”—or perhaps not, since it was little seen—but the script goes off in a different, though no less terrible, direction when gonzo Kate shows up at Carly’s office, making an embarrassing scene there before showing up at her apartment to ask for help against the man who’s wronged them both. The two decide to spy on Mark, only to discover there’s a third woman in his life—curvaceous young Amber (Upton), who as far as this viewer can discern has no job at all. When she finds out Mark’s been lying to her too, she joins forces with the older duo to punish him.

It would be dispiriting to go to undue lengths recounting what the women do; their schemes involve stuff like putting hair remover in Mark’s shampoo, adding laxatives and estrogen to his drinks and finally removing all the illegally-gotten funds he’s stored in off-shore accounts and informing his business partners of his malfeasance. It all ends in a gruesome final confrontation in which the guy winds up bloodied and financially ruined—a finale that, with its unpleasant level of violence, comes across as tonally off the charts.

But that’s just the culminating misstep in a movie that has plenty of them. Some ugly potty humor seems designed to exceed the notorious bit in “Dumb and Dumber,” and earlier on there’s a vomit scene that’s almost equally depressing. Slapstick moments, like one in which Diaz supposedly crashes onto a lawn from a second-storey window, literally fall flat. And the script is peppered with clichés of the genre that grate. A big, slobbering dog? Check. (And watch it urinate on a hardwood floor, too.) A wise-cracking secretary? Check. (And fill your need for diversity by having her played by Nicki Minaj.) A good new guy for Carly? Check—he’s Kate’s handsome, supportive brother Phil (Taylor Kinney), who couldn’t be sweeter. And needless to say, Johnson’s father figure is a charming philanderer working toward a sixth marriage. No prizes for guessing whom he’ll wind up with.

The performances jibe with the shabbiness of the material. Diaz is broad and curiously brusque, while Upton is pretty but dull. Minaj, Johnson and Kinney do what the script demands and nothing more, while Coster-Waldau exudes sleaze and endures humiliation several times over. Then there’s Mann, whose over-the-top mixture of primness and goofiness is irritating at first appearance, only to grow more and more annoying as the plot rolls on. The fact that we’re asked to accept the fact that Kate’s also a brilliant “idea person” takes implausibility to new heights. On the technical level “The Other Woman” is okay, though cinematographer Robert Fraisse gives the images a plastic gloss that marks sitcom style.

Numbingly stupid and uncommonly nasty, this is the sort of chick flick that gives chick flicks a really bad name.

“I wanted to make a movie about intimacy, about people’s unceasing, unending need for human connection,” said John Turturro of his new film “Fading Gigolo,” which he wrote and directed as well as starring in. Of course, the story concerns a reserved, gentlemanly florist who’s persuaded by his friend, a failed bookseller, to serve as a male escort—as the script puts it comically at one point, as the ho to his buddy’s pimp. And the pimp is played by Woody Allen.

“I wanted to do something with Woody,” Turturro explained in a recent Dallas interview. “I think we’re a good team. He’s always liked me, and I like him. I thought maybe we could actually have some chemistry between us. He liked the idea of us together. And I think what you see in the movie is our relationship in an imaginary circumstance. You see we have a real affection for each other.

“But he would never have done it if it wasn’t this film,” Turturro added. “Because he said, ‘I don’t want to do something silly.’ He said, “Ninety-seven percent of the movies that are made are silly.’ He likes the old movies, he likes Turner Classics.”

Turturro explained that Allen’s eventual character, Murray Schwartz, who lives with an African-American woman and her children, had a basis in fact. “A lot of it is based on my friend, who had a bookstore, who had a relationship with this woman and took care of all her kids,” he explained. “It’s not usual, but it’s not unusual. It’s based on something real. And I thought it would be interesting to see Woody with a black woman.”

Turturro explained that it was the barber they share who in effect brought them together on the project, mentioning the idea Turturro had talked about to Allen. “And Woody really liked the idea,” Turturro explained. “So I started writing it, and Woody would give me feedback. At first I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to do it—it was very broad—and Woody encouraged me to develop certain aspects of it.”

Turturro mentioned that his first notion was a story that would feature actress Elaine Stritch: “My original idea was to have an eighty-year old nun who was a virgin and who wanted to have sex before she died. And there was this man, and a whole sex scene. They talked about it, and then she went in the bathroom to wash her face and when she looked up—it was like a Bunuel thing—she was twenty-five years old, and she had the habit on. She went to the bed, cut to the guy in the bed, black out, cut to her smoking a cigarette. That was my idea. Of course, Woody was horrified. It didn’t sustain. But that feeling led me to Avigal.”

“I stumbled onto this character, this woman Avigal—she almost lives beyond the film for me,” Turturro continued. Avigal is a beautiful Hasidic widow who becomes one of the clients of Fioravante, Turturro’s character, in the process causing consternation among her very closed community.

Avigal is played by Vanessa Paradis, whom Turturro had been introduced to during planning for an earlier project that hadn’t been produced. One of his colleagues suggested her for the role in “Gigolo.” Turturro recalled that he had doubts about her suitability for the part but “I thought about it, watched [her] in another movie, sent her the script, and she loved it. And now I can’t imagine anyone else playing it. She has this delicacy to her. She’s very beautiful but interesting and strong and graceful, really graceful. She was a star at fourteen, but the most unspoiled person you could ever meet. Everybody on the crew loved her.

“She changed the movie, in a way. She raised the stakes for the movie.”

Turturro especially enthused about what Paradis brought to a scene toward the film’s end, when she intervenes in a hearing in which Schwartz is summoned before a Hasidic court. “That’s the whole movie,” he said of the sequence that joins her poignancy with Allen’s trademark humor. “I know there are people who don’t like two things together. But life doesn’t have a consistent color. You have a great moment, and then a ridiculous moment. And the people I like—I’ve done Chekov plays, and Beckett plays, I like Jean Renoir, I like Bunuel, I like Fellini—I love that. It’s a comedy, but it can also be tragic, and it can be dramatic, and it can be sensitive. Life is so much more absurd than movies. Most movies just have explosions—that’s what I think they try to do. This movie’s about that moment.”

How did Turturro insure that his portrait of the Hasidim would be accurate? “I talked to people, I talked to rabbis. Then I found this group of people who’s left various communities—the outcasts. I did a lot of research. I found people who had left, and I found people who were happy,” he said.

Turturro also discussed the decision to cast Sharon Stone as another of Fioravante’s clients, a successful dermatologist. “I could see there was something vulnerable about her, and I thought I could get that out of her,” he explained. “And she was responsive.”

Ultimately, Turturro said, the success of “Fading Gigolo,” at least as far as he’s concerned, stems from the fact that it’s about characters who are very much individuals, but whose story points to larger truths. “So many movies want to be universal, and they’re just general,” he said. “You can be universal and be specific. “The core of the film is this unlikely love story about a guy who doesn’t trust the longevity of romance but is actually comfortable with women. He’s a gentleman. He actually likes women. Lots of men have sex with women, but they don’t like women. It’s how he listens to them, how he’s comfortable with them.

“And it’s interesting that the response from the female audience is so strong.”