In his book of short stories, “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” David Foster Wallace’s fictionalized transcriptions of men answering questions (not included in the text) about relationships and love serve as self-deprecating character studies. Apart from a character’s description of himself, we know nothing else about the man who yells “Victory for the forces of democratic freedom!” as he climaxes.

Without describing his hair or his laugh or his background, Wallace had the reader imagine the kind of person who would say things like: “My father’s proclivity for rage, especially [unintelligible or distorted] the Emergency Room for the umpteenth time, afraid of his own temper and proclivity for domestic violence, this built over a period of time, and eventually he resorted, after a period of time and periods of unsuccessful counseling, to the practice of handcuffing his own wrists behind his back whenever he lost his temper with any of us.” Clever (the bracketed “recording error” occurs in the text) but not too clever — his “interviewee” repeats himself and drones like real people do.

However, the movie “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” removes both the Crispin Glover creepiness of the book and its acid language, molding the shredded remains around an inflated plot about a heartbroken university woman studying men. Where we once had a simple, intelligent story-telling device, we now have a stale piñata.

Melancholy pixie Sara Quinn, the researcher, is the core of what’s wrong with this movie, (although quick cuts without moving the camera, to provide the illusion of action when just a second of silence has been cut out of a still shot, is pretty annoying too). When it’s Wallace’s made-up men speaking their minds, even crudely (for instance about the perky breasts on a jilted woman in an airport “bitchslapping” herself as she sobs) it’s funny. Dark, but funny. Sara, transcribing aghastly, kills the party. She is a humorless, wan, sneering observer when a tipsy co-worker tries to cheer her up, telling her she’s beautiful and smart. You can almost see her throwing up a little in her mouth when an interview subject tells her about his vanilla gym-goddess sex fantasy.

Through her eyes, all we see are dumb, brutish louts who unfairly occupy her privileged milieu. She recoils at each one she encounters. No wonder. Clipped down to her supporting cast, their observations are no more than 30-year-old sitcom clichés. Agonizing minutes go by as we eavesdrop on the blandest cliché conversations about how hard it is to know what women want, and how “schizophrenic” Cosmo is, and how you “just can’t stop women from shopping.” One man drones on about how most men are either animals who “roll on” and “roll off.” Another talks about how he uses his mangled arm to get sympathy sex. It’s like waiting for the one bathroom in a coke-fueled frat house. Even her professor, presumably a smart guy, bumbles on in recalling his fondest memories of his wife, about how she kept her looks, amazingly, “even after she had a kid.” One anecdote centers on a hippie chick, raped by a psychotic, who is able to make him sob by staring soulfully at him.

That woman’s pain is Sara’s pain, is all women’s pain, the movie seems to moan. Poor Sara. She is a non-indulgent, serious woman walking amongst pleading penises! How brave she is, to take it all with detached and fragile horror. Let’s avert our eyes and leave her fluttering heart to the talky, non-sexy sanctuary of faculty teas.

Give me a break. Actually, give me “Brief Interviews With Hideous Women.” And sign her up first.