If, at any time during "New York Minute," you forget which Olsen twin is which, remember this helpful primer: Ashley is the one with the naifish, bewildered expression who routinely finds herself wallowing in toilet water and rubbish, while Mary-Kate is the worldly one with the brassy highlights who fondles anacondas and pummels Andy Richter. Only with a firm grasp of these important Olsen facts can one properly savor this staggering specimen of bravura filmmaking.

A crude thing, sarcasm, but in this case, perfectly defensible. Stiff, scatalogical and creepily over-sexed, "New York Minute" appears to be the work of filmmakers who secretly harbor some kind of bitter vendetta against the identical twin media stars, formerly of TV's "Full House." Ergo the toilet water. By the end of it, you actually feel a pang of sympathy for Ashley and Mary-Kate, God have mercy on their over-exposed elfin souls.

Directed by teeny-bopper specialist Dennie Gordon (“What a Girl Wants"), "New York Minute" postures itself as a "Ferris Bueller"-style hooky romp about a pair of mutually alienated twin sisters from the ’burbs who embark on a zany day trip to Manhattan. Ambitious, obsessive-compulsive Jane (Ashley Olsen) is set to deliver a scholarship speech at Columbia University, while rebellious aspiring rocker Roxy (Mary- Kate Olsen) is heading downtown to slip her demo disk to some record label guys. Along the way, they're hassled by an overzealous truant officer (Eugene Levy, slumming it) and a ring of Chinese movie piraters. Richter, the former Conan O'Brien sidekick, affects a mangled Asian accent as the adoptive son of one of the Chinatown gangsters.

If that strikes you as racially patronizing, get a load of the scene where Jane and Roxy wander into a Harlem hair salon and are treated to a blinged-out diva fantasy by some real, live black people. "Those sisters got some sista in them!" one beautician observes untruthfully. It's such an awkward, out-of-touch scene, you get the sense that it was designed strictly for upper-middle-class tweeners who live in homes where knowing a black person is still regarded as exotic. A word of advice: Send your sheltered tweener to "Mean Girls" instead. "New York Minute" also functions as the Olsen twins' coming out party as full-fledged sex symbols.

Both find love interests — played by a pair of young men so lacking in substance that their names hardly deserve mention — and there are numerous sightings of ripped skirts and Freudian slips. Evidently, the Olsens (they no longer refer to themselves as the "Olsen twins") want to be clumped into the same group of ripening ingenues as Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore.

As 17-year-old multi-millionaire media icons, that's their business. But until they grow out of those Jon-Benet Ramsey physiques, it will always seem vaguely, inescapably weird.