"Post Grad" fails to make the grade

       Post Grad , a comedy about a driven, hardworking college student who's unable to find a job after she graduates, actually might have been relevant.It might have been a satirical and insightful look into how our soured economy has dashed the dreams of a generation.
       Instead, it's a flat and tonally jumbled amalgamation of Adventureland Little Miss Sunshine and Some Kind of Wonderful . In other words, it has no idea what it wants to be; as a result, it gets nothing right.
       Alexis Bledel maintains a steady level of wide-eyed pluckiness as Ryden Malby (a name that looks like an anagram), who just got out of school with an English degree and dreams of working at a prestigious Los Angeles publishing house. When she doesn't get the job she applied for, she ends up back home in the San Fernando Valley with the kind
       of eccentric family you only find in the movies.
       Michael Keaton, as her dad, sells novelty belt buckles; Carol Burnett, as grandma, is obsessed with her own death. Then there's Ryden's little brother (Bobby Coleman), who likes to lick his classmates' heads and communicates through his sock puppet.(Actually, he seems like a pretty normal little kid.) And Jane Lynch, as her mother,plays the straight woman for once - which isn't a whole lot of fun.
       Meanwhile, Ryden rebuffs the romantic advances of her best friend, the spineless and worshipful Adam (Zach Gilford), who would rather write love songs for her than fly across the country to attend law school at Columbia in New York. Instead, she enjoys a fling with her sexy Brazilian neighbor (Rodrigo
       Santoro), even though - duh the guy she's supposed to be with has been right in front of her all along. Things pick up briefly with Santoro's arrival, if only because he adds some physical spark, but then that story line goes nowhere for no reason.
       Ryden herself doesn't give us much more to hold onto - which is a problem, because we're supposed to be rooting for her to succeed. This is what we know about her: She's cute, she likes books and she wants a job.
       Animation veteran Vicky Jenson (Shrek Shark Tale ), directing her first live-action feature from a script by first-timer Kelly Fremon, awkwardly juggles all these subplots. There's a sitcommy AP quality to the way certain scenes end abruptly on a wacky or raunchy note, or sometimes with a feel-good moment of supposed poignancy.
       Jenson also squanders the comic presence of J.K.Simmons, Fred Armisen, Craig Robinson and Demetri Martin in minuscule supporting roles. If there is one funny scene in the entire movie, it's the one in which Robinson, as a funeral home director, tries to sell Burnett's character an $18,000 casket.
       Then again,Post Grad itself was already dead on arrival.