13 Going on 30

13 GOING ON 30 OPENS APRIL 23

THERE ARE MANY consequences to God's sadistic plot for the female sex. One is that you can't make Big for women.

Someone should've told this to the producers of 13 Going On 30. The one genuinely comic thing about this preview is that they didn't even bother altering Big. Thirteen-year-old girl hates being young; she gets some "wishing dust" for her birthday and wishes she was grown-up; she wakes up and she's 30. Cue goofy 80s soundtrack: "Girls Just Want to Have Fu-un" for starts.

Big worked because most American men never really grow up-at least not until they've had their first stroke. Women, on the other hand, wake up to something awful by the age of 30. In 13 Going On 30, the heroine cups her great perky breasts and boasts about her "incredible boobs." For 99 percent of over-30 women in America, boobs are not perky and "incredible"; they're a source of saggy shame, a disfigurement requiring corrective surgery. Their asses have widened into a ripple of elephant flesh, midriffs spilling over low-cut jeans, pelvic bones cracked and stretched.

The American woman is told to be beautiful and thin, yet to pay no mind to conventional concepts of "beauty." She's on Paxil, Xanax, slathering creams over every square inch of her hide just to arrest the decay, desperately bouncing from diet to diet, trying to remain bouncy as she trades her expectations ever-downward for the kind of career she expected to attain through sheer hard work, and the kind of man she would wind up with.

By the age of 30, woman is a horrible mess, a victim tossed overboard by God and life. That's if she's lucky. She could be married and have squatted out a kid or two-but this movie doesn't look at that. Who can blame it? Better leave that in the hands of Ingmar Bergman.

"She's truly a kid at heart," says the voiceover. Well, isn't that cute.

No, it's not cute-a 30-year-old woman who behaves like a teenager isn't cute. It's depressing, like a quadriplegic chirpily bragging about how he's going to participate in a triathlon just as soon as he recovers.

As if the plot weren't sadistic enough, casting Jennifer Garner makes it all the more painful for America's 30-and-over female viewers, most of whom will struggle to fit into the theater's narrow seats. Garner, who turns 32 around the time of this movie's release, looks better than most American teenage girls. Her body is perfect, her complexion is like fresh dairy milk and her features are finely chiseled.

I don't get it-are they trying to increase the female suicide rate with this movie?

MARK AMES