Interview:

A hard-news journalist (Steve Buscemi) is assigned to talk to a vapid starlet (Sienna Miller) in the hard-to-buy "Interview." "Interview" is literate, well-paced and played at perfect pitch by Sienna Miller and director Steve Buscemi. I didn't buy it for more than two minutes.

That's because it's about something that I do for a living talking to actors and nothing that happens in the other 84 minutes of this verbal jousting match remotely resembles anything I've ever experienced. So go right ahead and consider this a biased criticism. It's an informed one, but it shouldn't prevent you from enjoying a relatively well-crafted hothouse drama.

Who knows? Maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years and should see the movie again to pick up a few pointers. Though it sometimes comes off like a stage play that hasn't quite thoroughly made the transition to cinema, "Interview" is actually a remake of a Dutch film by Theo van Gogh, the provocative troublemaker who was murdered on the street in Amsterdam for his anti-Islamic short, "Submission: Part 1.

" As opposed to movies that can incite hatred and murder, "Interview," by comparison, seems almost trivial. But at least the American version (haven't seen the Dutch one) does reference current world troubles while concentrating on a truly idiotic reality: celebrity news being regarded as far more important than stuff that actually affects people's lives. Buscemi's Pierre Peders, a hard-news journalist who has suffered his share of war zone traumas and, apparently, made a few facts up, is livid that he's been assigned to interview vapid, one-named starlet Katya (Miller) while a major Washington scandal is breaking.

Worse, for no good reason, she's more than an hour late getting to the restaurant where they're supposed to talk. So far, so believable (I've had my own fun with Lindsay Lohan and her unique take on the concept of time). But the dinner meeting quickly breaks down in mutual recrimination (that rarely happens, at least before the story's published).

A contrivance or two later, Pierre's in Katya's big, funky New York loft, drinking heavily and watching her snort coke, making out and making surrogate father-daughter psychodrama. The pair reveal their most vulnerable secrets to one another and pull elementary Mamet-esque mind games, most of which fool them but an attentive viewer can see coming a mile away. Yeah, reporters and movie babes always get that cozy the first time we meet.

After you get 'em to stop saying what an honor it was to work with the director and insisting that the tabloids make everything up, that is. But by then, the interview's usually over. Dialogue ranges from incisive with a few hearty laughs to cringe-worthy (Her: "If you'd rather have a sandwich, I think I have bologna.

" Him: "It's been working for us so far"). Employing the same kind of three-camera system that van Gogh and his cinematographer Thomas Kist (who also shot the American version) used, Buscemi gets a nice visual flow and real-time rhythm going in the limited apartment setting. I guess you could view the whole thing as a metaphor for how, even against our better judgment, we can't help wanting to know every juicy, inane thing we can about a celebrity these days.

But "Interview" plays more like it's meant to be taken at face value. But I, for one, couldn't keep mine straight watching it. A hard-news journalist (Steve Buscemi) is assigned to talk to a vapid starlet (Sienna Miller) in the hard-to-buy "Interview.