TWO MOVIES celebrating love and its complications recently opened nationwide, and if these represent how love is “made in Hollywood,” be patient, the summer blockbusters films are months away.

“When in Rome,” stars two popular former TV stars, Kristen Bell (“Veronica Mars”) and Josh Duhamel (“Las Vegas”). It follows the travails of Bell’s Beth, a bright and perky Guggenheim Museum curator who is love-challenged. Her younger sister Joan (the annoyingly perkier Alexi Dziena) shows up at Beth’s door to announce that she’s engaged to the man of her dreams after meeting him on a flight. He’s Italian, lives in Rome and the wedding is very soon. Frustrated and doubtful it’ll work, Beth wiggles enough time from a demanding boss (a wasted Angelica Houston whose role tries very hard to be Meryl Streep’s in “The Devil Wears Prada”) to fly to Rome to be Joan’s maidof honor. In fact, Beth arrives and the wedding literally starts…calmly. Huh? We meet her divorced parents, bitter mom (Peggy Lipton) and Don Johnson playing smarmy Don Johnson. Then best man Nick (Duhamel) bumbles down the aisle. Sparks fly, but when Beth sees Nick kiss another woman, she goes to the fountain of “amore” and grabs five coins - she’ll try anything to get married. The scattered coin throwers (Danny DeVito, Jon Heder, Will Arnett and Dax Sheperd) are hit by “love lightning.” What luck! All the coins she picked were tossed by all (straight) men! They stalk and profess their love for her in Rome and back to NY. Nick follows her too and she believes his attraction is based on the coin’s power until the truth is revealed at their wedding back in Rome. Why this script was green lighted by a Hollywood studio is anyone’s guess. The only justification is that it was very demo-targeted. The bright side is that Bell stars and she’s wonderful; she can make the phone book sound interesting. Duhamel delivers a fine comedic performance but everyone else is playing it over-the-top or the material makes them look silly.

The President’s Day-weekend box office champ of all time, “Valentine’s Day” (which also shares the name of the other holiday on the same weekend), continues to enjoy success but doesn’t do a whole lot more with love. Director Garry Marshall has assembled a starstudded cast including his “Pretty Woman” star, Julia Roberts, two other Oscar winners (Jamie Foxx, Shirley MacLaine) and hot properties “the two Jessicas” (Biel and Alba), the two Taylors (Swift and Launter), Bradley Cooper (“The Hangover”), they hunks from “Grey’s Anatomy” Matthew Dempsey and Eric Dane, Anne Hathaway (Marshall’s “The Princess Diaries”), Queen Latifah, Ashton Kutcher and Topher Grace (“That 70’s Show”). If you saw 2003’s British romantic comedy “Love Actually,” you’ll see what Marshall and his team tried to do. If you didn’t see it, Netflix it and save the money. “Valentine’s Day” is a trite stab at a something-for-everydemo romantic comedy that just isn’t funny. It seems the star wattage is bigger than a lot of elements, especially the collection of skits about love gone right and wrong called a (very flat) script. The stars do their own individual thing making it seem like the director was directing traffic and not performances.

Both films are MPAA-rated PG-13: Parents Strongly Cautioned.