That “The Weather Man,” directed by Gore Verbinski (“Mousehunt,” “The Ring,” “Pirates of the Carribean”) from a script by Steve Conrad, strains at profundity without attaining it is no surprise. But the reasons why it fails are many and instructive.

This is a movie about celebrity for celebrities. Not much depth there. But celebrities need to feel good about themselves, too, and Messrs Verbinski and Conrad are here to make that happen.

Their hero, Chicago television weatherman Dave Spritz (Nicolas Cage), experiences minor celebrity in the shape of people throwing fast food at him in the street. Things can only get better, you think, but by the end you may want to throw things at him, too.

The main reason that the film doesn’t work is that Dave is way too shallow to express anything profound. Not only do several people describe Dave as an a–, including his wife, Noreen (Hope Davis); not only do we see a number of instances in which he behaves like an a–, but he seems to helplessly recognize this about himself.

As if to advertise the pathetic smallness of the distance traveled on this spiritual odyssey of an a–, Dave’s story is bracketed by two encounters with autograph seekers. To the one at the beginning he is rude; to the one at the end he is nice. There you have it, folks, as profound a spiritual transformation as you can expect from a weatherman in the movies.

Actually, we know that’s not true. For the film invites comparison with the greatest ever picture about a weatherman, “Groundhog Day” (1993). Its hero, Phil Connors (Bill Murray), is every bit as shallow as Mr. Cage’s Dave, but by making him live the same day over and over again, the film forces him into a course of soul-dredging to which Dave never comes close.

Phil’s dreams of a national network slot are forgotten by the time he learns to appreciate the ordinary folk of Punxsutawney, Penn. Dave, a celebrity wannabe to the last, ends up as the weatherman on Bryant Gumbel’s “Hello, America” – but he makes Bryant wait before he says yes!

The popularity of local TV news people with Hollywood – we could also mention “To Die For” (1995), “Lucky Numbers,” (2000) and “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004) – is that they are so easy to patronize. Just like the stars who play them – Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, and Will Ferrell in the three examples above – they are celebrities of a sort. But very small celebrities. Celebrities who didn’t make the big time. That’s what makes it especially delicious for the stars who did make it to play them as dummies.

Yet if there is an element of self-congratulation in the portrayal of stupid television newscasters, there is also an element of self-contempt. Deep down, the stars know that what they do isn’t all that different from what their moronic alter egos do.

Here’s how Dave Spritz puts it: “I receive a large reward for pretty much zero effort and contribution. That’s why people throw shakes at me.”

No, that’s why people make movies about him. The shake-throwing is never quite believable. Supposedly it happens all the time, but it really just provides the occasion for one of Dave’s meditations in self-loathing. They also throw fast food at him, he thinks, because “I am fast food.”

That is one way to express the love-hate relationship between people and their celebrities, which this movie does repeatedly. Dave’s relations with soon-to-be ex-wife, Noreen, and his two troubled children, Mike (Nicholas Hoult) and Shelly (Gemmenne de la Pena), are reassuringly difficult and help to bring him down to earth – which is where we insist our celebrities should be.

The same is true of his feelings of inferiority vis-a-vis his dying father, celebrity author Robert Spritz (Michael Caine). But from that source he also gets the words of wisdom that reach after profundity.

“To get anything of value you have to sacrifice,” says Dad without apparent irony. “Do you know that the hardest thing to do and the right thing are usually the same thing? ‘Easy’ doesn’t enter into grown-up life.”

Oh, please. In this context, these are just words. A rich and famous author is advising a rich and famous television presenter that he’s got to sacrifice? What sacrifice do we see either of them make? Dad’s got to die and Dave’s got to get divorced, but it’s not something that either of them has chosen. And in Dave’s case, the pill is sugared with a move to New York, national fame, and a million bucks a year.

The only profound insight on offer in this deeply disappointing film is that celebrities want to believe that they are ordinary people as much as we want to believe it of them. But it’s also pretty clear they’re not.

***

What are the odds? You go for years without seeing a movie that offers you a sympathetic portrayal of Islamic suicide bombers and then two come along within a month of each other.

Reviewing “The War Within,” in this space on September 30, I complained that it told an engaging story but refused to take on the psychology of its hero-bomber except in the crudest terms: He had been radicalized by American-sponsored Pakistani torturers.

But “Paradise Now,” directed and co-written by Hany Abu-Assad and opening today, makes “The War Within”look positively Dostoyevskian in its subtlety.

Its two Palestinian heroes, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), offer no reasons at all for what they intend to do on a foray into Israel (whether in fact they will do it is the film’s only real point of interest). Or rather, the only reasons they seem to have are slogans like “a life without dignity is worthless.”

Well, maybe so, but if true, the cultural idea of “dignity” cannot be simply asserted and taken for granted. Those within the Palestinian and Arab cultural context may need no further explanation, but those of us who are outside of that context do.

It’s not quite so easy for us to see where “dignity” is lacking for these people in what remains the only functioning democratic state in the Middle East, or how it is reclaimed by blowing oneself up in order to inflict a horrible and random death on one’s neighbors.

Here’s another of their slogans: “Death is better than inferiority.” Excuse me, but whether or not that’s true, we’re not just talking about the death of the guy who thinks he’s inferior but of people who don’t even know him but whose very existence somehow makes him feel that way. Their deaths are better than his inferiority. Have I got it now? I imagine quite a number of history’s worst murderers would argue likewise.

The odd thing is that there is a better, or at least a more interesting, explanation – of Said’s prospective self-immolation, at any rate. Like the hero of “The War Within,” he suffers from little or no overt mental conflict, but his revolutionary ardor recognizes a threat to itself in the form of an attractive young woman. This is Suha (Lubna Azabal), to whom he confesses that his father was executed collaborator when he, Said, was 10.

So, obviously, his determination to blow up himself and as many Israelis as possible stems from the urge to wipe this stain from the family honor, right? He never says so, nor does the film go out of its way to treat this datum as being of more than incidental interest. To Mr. Abu-Assad, Said is just one of a great many would-be Palestinian suicide bombers all, apparently, exactly alike. We must take him or leave him.

Or rather, they are exactly alike in every important respect but one, which is the sole point of interest about them. Do they, that is, have the resolve to go through with it?

In this as in other ways, the film is as much the prisoner of the Islamic honor culture as its heroes, and it offers us the same simple, binary system they take for granted. Will it be honor or shame, courage or cowardice, dignity or worthlessness, yes or no to bomber glory?

The title may provide a hint, but not a reason for anyone who doesn’t share the assumptions of the director – and the bombers – to care very much.

jbowman@nysun.com