Kiss a frog and you get a prince. Kiss a tadpole and, it seems, you get Oscar Grubman (Aaron Stanford), 16-year-old æsthete, dilettante, and ladies' man. Not only does Oscar pursue women old enough to be his mother, he actually goes after his mother, or at least his stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver). He's so slick, hip, and coy, he's insufferable.

And so is much of Gary Winick's film. Set in a snobby Upper West Side ambiance of academics and other snooty professionals, it evokes the overanalyzed amorality of a Woody Allen movie with few laughs (which these days is any Woody Allen movie) as Oscar sublimates his taboo desire for Eve (a cardiologist, conjuring Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart) by following up on the interest of Eve's anything-goes best friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth, the best thing in the movie). John Ritter adds a note of risible stuffiness as Oscar's pompous professor dad, and the script by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller provides some saucy repartee, but this post-Graduate effort is mostly a case of arrested development. (78 minutes) At the Avon.