Sometimes, when a movie is presented in a certain light, it can fool you into thinking it's not really bad. A lot of low-budget indie movies are like that -- you go in with low expectations, you don't expect the cinematography or the acting to be all that great, so you cut it a lot of slack. Hey, it happens to all of us.

Perhaps you're a sucker for big action movies, so you may not realize that Michael Bay can't direct his way out of a wet paper bag. Or maybe you're so starved for a good love story that you willfully ignore that anything that's got Nicholas Sparks' name attached to it is pure hokum. If you're a parent, the mere fact that watching that Hannah Montana movie didn't inspire you to hook a hose to your tailpipe and gas yourself in the garage might make you think that it wasn't quite as awful as you'd feared.

With a movie like Ripple Effect, released this week on DVD by Monterey Video, it's all about the casting. Forest Whitaker, Virginia Madsen, and Minnie Driver all play good-sized roles in the film, and the writer-director-star is French. I don't know about you, but I always think that French actors are somehow better than American actors, probably because their accents make everything they say sound much more dramatic. Often, I'm wrong. This is yet another way that movies can fool you.

Here, Phillipe Caland plays a hip-hop clothing designer named Amer Atrash, who can't seem to get a handle on his fabulous life. He's rich, but he's having trouble financing his clothing line. He has a gorgeous, loving wife (Madsen) and an adorable child, but his preoccupation with his business is damaging his marriage. Amer believes that his bad luck is due to a hit-and-run accident 15 years previous that left his victim paralyzed, so he decides to seek out that man and make amends.

Before he does that, however, there's a lot of time devoted to Amer and his problems. What initially seems like an intriguing look at a man struggling to save his business becomes a tedious exercise in which Amer pouts, rants and slouches his way through endless meetings, broken up by repetitive scenes in which Madsen pats him on the head while he sulks. She repeats again and again, to Amer and to others, that she loves him unreservedly and that he's as vital to her as oxygen, but it's impossible to see why, since he behaves like a precious, self-absorbed git. With his unkempt, straggly dreadlocks, skanky half-beard, and his ill-fitting clothes, he also looks like he probably smells bad. Which, when you think about it, may be another reason that he's not going over so well with potential investors.

After a full hour of this, Amer goes looking for the man he ran over, played by Whitaker, and finds that he's happy as a clam. Living with his white-trash, folksinger wife (Driver) in a trailer, he doesn't hold the accident against Amer -- in fact, he's a cheerful philosopher, who likes to pontificate on metaphysical stuff like creating our own realities, which is obviously the whole point of the movie.

Whitaker is, as always, excellent, and perhaps if he'd shown up sooner the film might have been a lot better. But coming as late in the movie as he does, it only underlines how awful everything else has been to this point. It also places Whitaker firmly in the role of the "magical negro" who provides the hero with all the amazing insight he needs to turn his life around and ... blah, blah, blah. Whitaker's good, but his 20 minutes of navel-contemplation is ultimately as deathly dull as the previous hour's worth of business meetings and marital moping.

Ripple Effect is a ridiculous vanity project for Caland, and a baffling one -- does he not realize what an unsympathetic, unpleasant person he's playing? Or is he like that himself in real life, walking around with scraggy hair, throwing tantrums, and calling his wife "bay-BEE," so he doesn't know what a jerk he is? It's a puzzler. It's also a bad movie, no matter how many better actors he managed to coerce into appearing in it.

The DVD from Monterey Video offers a decent enough transfer of the film, which was shot on digital video and often looks fuzzy, particularly in low-light scenes. Extras include "Thoughts from the Director," a slide show of images with text, plus a still gallery and actor bios.

Dawn Taylor always thought that "ripple effect" was the hangover you get from cheap fortified wine.

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