We’ve Simply Got to Stop ‘Meeting’ Like This

This “M-word” thing is starting to get out of hand.

No, we’re not talking about “marriage.” We’re talking about “meet,” as in a recent column that described the movie “Sprung” as “ ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ meets ‘Booty Call.’ ” And a book review that likened “Dolores Claiborne” to “Stephen King meets Oprah Winfrey.” And a headline that referred to the novel “The Harafish” as “ ‘Dynasty’ meets the Old Testament” (even though the main character is Muslim).

There’s also our favorite meet-o-rama mishmash: a review of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” that says the film was “intended as Anton Chekhov cross-pollinated with Oscar Wilde but arrives at something closer to ‘The Boys in the Band’ meets ‘The Big Chill.’ ”

Whoa. That one makes our head spin like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” meets the Tasmanian Devil.

What’s even scarier is that the above examples come from just two newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. But they’re hardly alone. People magazine recently weighed in with a review of the movie “Turbulence” as “ ‘Airport 1975’ meets ‘Passenger 57.’ ” Newsweek called a Squirrel Nut Zippers song “Cotton-Club-meets-calypso.” And the New York Post offered a slight variation of the theme with a commentary that “Con Air” is “ ‘Die Hard’ on a prison plane.”

So, what’s behind this fetish? Gosh, we’d hate to rush to judgment, but see if this theory fits: Laziness meets empty-headedness!

Although some meetaphors are clever, others seem to come from people incapable of original thought. Can’t figure out how to describe the mission to Mars? Then call it “2001: A Space Odyssey” meets “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

In certain circles, “(Blank) meets (blank)” has become the overused phrase du jour, a sort of “Where’s the beef” meets “Read my lips” for the ‘90s.

Critics and publicists are some of the biggest abusers. But the highest concentration of meetniks is in Hollywood, where film scripts are routinely hyped as a rendezvous of other plots, such as, say, “E.T.” meets “Silence of the Lambs.”

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Nobody is sure when the meet motif first reared its head. But one pseudo scholar believes the roots go back to 1948, with the movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”--or perhaps one of its sequels: “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy,” “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd,” “Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man,” “Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer Boris Karloff,” “Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops” or “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

(Is there anybody Abbott and Costello didn’t meet? How about Mike Tyson? Or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford? Or maybe “Abbott and Costello Meet the Press”?)

From there, the gimmick mutated into its current Roget’s Thesaurus-meets-Madlibs format. At first, it was fun, but lately, the meet thermometer is at well-done.

The newest transgression is the triple meeting. For instance, a recent Newsday review of the film “Mrs. W” described it as “ ‘My Fair Lady’ meets ‘My Man Godfrey’ meets ‘Sabrina.’ ”

And Vanity Fair concocted a recipe-style version of the meet formula to describe entrepreneur Esther Dyson: “Take equal parts Lillian Hellman, Lois Lane and Perle Mesta, add in 3 million frequent-flier miles. . . .”

What’s next? Meetings of other meetings? Will we have to endure “ ‘Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy’ meets ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Anton Chekhov cross-pollinated with Oscar Wilde’ ”?

If so, then God-meets-Buddha help us.