MIRANDA July is the hottest name in independent cinema right now. I know this because a cineaste of my slight acquaintance, whose day job is to decorate cupcakes with ''satirical'' trim, recently told me. ''Miranda July is the hottest name in independent cinema right now,'' she said as she nibbled a pastry shaped to resemble a rat.

If you have not yet viewed Ms July's oeuvre, it would be reckless to amend this mistake. Even if her work is both ''hot'' and ''independent'', it is also entirely slappable and seems chiefly concerned with poor jokes about poop and bad sex. The 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know marked July's first award at Cannes, her directorial debut and the appreciation of anyone who has ever eaten and enjoyed a ''satirical'' cupcake. It's awful and cutesy and undeniably meaningless.

Miranda July in a scene from the film Me And You And Everyone We Know.

July is to cinema as the contemporary cupcake is to carbohydrate. This is to say, she is fantastically decorative and easy to consume but ultimately delivers naught but empty calories in a gaudy blast of sugar. In her non-narrative narratives about mildly depressed shoe salesmen and people who babysit slightly injured cats, she hints at depths that do not exist. This, of course, is not a transgression we could attribute to the cupcake. But July's perplexing popularity, just like the cupcake's, is founded on the overuse of whimsy.

Whimsy. Like iPads and overly bookish spectacles and bacteria, it is everywhere.