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SIMONE Certainly the oddest picture to come out of Hollywood this summer, Simone stars Al Pacino as Viktor Taransky, a self-important but sincere director whose precarious community standing tumbles even further when his leading lady (Winona Ryder) walks off the set of his latest picture. All seems doomed until an inventor (Elias Koteas) provides him with a computer program that allows him to "create" a new lead for his film: an artificial being named Simone (an uncredited turn by model Rachel Roberts) that he's able to digitally insert into his movies. Soon, Simone turns out to be an international sensation, meaning Viktor has to work overtime to prevent anyone from discovering that this actress isn't even a real person. The extent of each individual filmgoer's charitable assessment of the picture will eventually determine their overall enjoyment, as Simone can be viewed from more than one angle. Is it an obvious and overblown comedy blissfully unaware of its own ludicrous plot twists, or is it a sharp satire that beautifully skewers our society's desperate need to worship at the altar of stardom? In other words, is writer-director Andrew Niccol aware that the movies Viktor makes look truly awful, and that Simone has no more personality or acting ability than your average bland supermodel (in which case the movie's mocking our susceptibility to manufactured goods), or does he mean for us to take the components of his film seriously (in which case he's as clueless as the masses he derides)? Considering Niccol wrote the razor-sharp The Truman Show, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the result is still only partly successful, with some solid laughs scattered throughout a herky-jerky piece that remains more clever in theory than execution. 1/2