Actors meet cute, flirt cute, say goodbye cute

By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly

	Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet star in "A Lot Like Love."
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(Entertainment Weekly) -- People in the first blush of romance can get a little satisfied with themselves (they develop an "I'm worth it!" glow). That attitude reaches a painful state of insularity in "A Lot Like Love."

Ashton Kutcher, with his studious dearness, and Amanda Peet, with her shark-grinned hauteur, may not set off sparks exactly, but they have the chemistry of star-on-the-rise narcissism. They're a mutual admiration society passing themselves off as lovebirds.

In what may be the world's first zipless meet-cute scene, Emily (Peet), a punkette who treats men like objects, lunges for Oliver (Kutcher), a shaggy sweetheart with an alt-rock wardrobe, by squeezing into an airplane lavatory with him, despite the fact that they've barely spoken.

Over the next seven years, he cuts his hair and starts an Internet company, she knocks the postfeminist chip off her shoulder, and they continue to meet cute, flirt cute and wistfully say goodbye cute.

So what's standing in the way? For one thing, they live in different cities and appear incapable of carrying on the sort of conversation that involves things like phone numbers, frequent-flier miles and, you know ... plans.

They fall into other relationships -- bad ones. Yet each new reunion leads them to a fresh apotheosis of puppy love. There's the tee-hee wordless date in the Asian restaurant, the nude desert photo session, the "Say Anything" climax in which Oliver wails along with his guitar. (No scene has ever made you yearn so much for a boom box.)

"A Lot Like Love" is a lot like a romantic comedy, except that all that's keeping these two kids apart is the trivially insufferable movie they're in.

EW Grade: C

'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

A good scandal can get your blood up; it has villains and victims, the cleansing fury of injustice made public. Yet there was little righteous or cathartic about the collapse of Enron.

To follow the greedy machinations of Kenneth Lay and company was to enter the vortex of a new kind of virtual corruption, with its own universe of fine print. The scandal was a triumph of almost metaphysical obfuscation, which seemed to live on well after the company went bankrupt. The more you learned about Enron, the more it made your head hurt, until your anger shared space with impotence.

The cure for that malaise is Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary (it's like a great "Frontline" episode with hipper music) that turns the vortex inside out, and does it with a thrilling moral clarity.

The film invites us to zero in, for instance, on the moment that Enron seems to take the leap from routine go-go bravado to a fearless new dimension of financial insanity: It's when Jeffrey Skilling, the company's CEO, pushes ''mark-to-market'' accounting -- thus booking potential future profits as if they'd already been realized.

In a single stroke, Skilling, who resembles an angry Peter Jennings with a touch of a Charles Grodin weasel, appears to make it possible for Enron to declare its profit to be whatever the company wants it to be. The income statement therefore becomes a fiction, one that exists to keep the stock price high. The success of the stock acts as the proof of the company's glory, which then fuels the stock -- a cycle of illusion destined to unravel.

Based on the book by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean (who broke the story) and Peter Elkind, "The Smartest Guys in the Room" lays bare, in funny and shocking video clips, the culture of arrogance at Enron, a corporation that exploited deregulation to turn the buying and selling of energy into a kind of private casino. It captures how the company was given favorable treatment by the Bush administration, and the bigger picture of how its fraudulence emerged from -- and depended on -- the speculative mania of the dotcom era.

By the time Enron is shutting down electricity plants, exploiting -- and perpetuating -- the California energy crisis for its own ends (we hear a recording of one trader, during a brush fire, as he says, ''Burn, baby, burn!''), you may be sitting there slack-jawed, wondering how they got away with it for so long. Or when it will happen again.

EW Grade: A

'The Amityville Horror'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

It's remarkable how many of the epochal horror movies of the past half century all tell, in essence, the same story: the unholy crack-up of the American family.

Norman Bates and his dotty slasher mother in "Psycho"; pregnant Rosemary and her soul-selling husband in "Rosemary's Baby"; pea-soup-puking Regan in "The Exorcist" -- the demon child Rosemary might have given birth to; the demented cannibal clan of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"; the crazy daddy on a terror spree in "The Shining"; and on and on.

"The Amityville Horror," that supernaturally dull 1979 haunted-house saga, enjoys a special place among these black sabbaths of domestic breakdown, and it is this: Though marketed as a ''true story'' (to this day, many high schoolers from Amityville, Long Island, make a point of reveling in their homegrown goth cachet), it's a family-horror blockbuster in which the family is so nondescript that you can scarcely rouse yourself to care about whether or not they're haunted to death.

Ditto for the new "The Amityville Horror," a movie that, I say with weary regret, is extraordinarily faithful to the spirit of that creaky, derivative, fly-infested, don't-go-in-the-attic boofest. If you watch the original again (as I did, dear readers -- never say that I don't sacrifice for you), you'll see that it holds the end of the Jimmy Carter era in the tiredness of its terror-schlock bones, and that quality, in its fashion, has been duplicated in the remake.

Nothing gets in the way of the rote staging, the ham-handed predictability, the feeling that you've been to this house, and yawned at these ghosts, once too often.

Ryan Reynolds, as the stepdad gone evil with an ax (the story rips off more than its share from what Stephen King invented in "The Shining"), wears one of those doesn't-this-make-me-look-older collegiate beards, yet Reynolds, a likable card in "Blade: Trinity," is never more harmless than when he's acting menacing. His chest is too fussily buff (at least for 1975, when the movie is set), and when he gets angry he turns into a junior John Lithgow -- a walking snit fit.

Looking at the house, a stately Dutch Colonial, some may feel a ping of nostalgia for those dormer windows, which still make the place look like the face of a jack-o'-lantern. But there's no candle inside.

EW Grade: C-

'The Game of Their Lives'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

In the unabashed little fan-oriented film "The Game of Their Lives" (based, as such movies always are, on a real story), a motley group of athletes find common cause and team pride in representing the U.S. of A. against opponents from the smug country that dominates their sport. And against all odds, on unfamiliar soil, the Americans ... well, guess.

Only this time the sport is soccer, the setting is an immigrant enclave of St. Louis in 1950, the supercilious enemy is England (embodied by Gavin Rossdale) and many of the well-mannered young men are recent GIs who would never use the word ''miracle'' loosely. (The ridiculously good-looking cast of footballers includes Wes Bentley, Gerard Butler and Richard Jenik.)

Coaching from the same playbook with which they made "Rudy" and "Hoosiers," director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo create a reverent fable of such soothing proportions that it would be churlish to ask if America ever really looked like that -- or sounded like that, either: As an old sportswriter, Patrick Stewart tries out an accent left over by the Pepperidge Farm cookie man.

EW Grade: B-

'Madison'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

"Madison," named after the down-at-heel Indiana town on the Ohio River where a famous sports upset took place over three decades ago, happens to be about hydroplane racing, a competition of particular interest to spectators who live near water and enjoy consulting stopwatches.

But the movie might just as well be about hockey or darts: In dramatizing how pilot Jim McCormick and the community-owned race boat called the "Miss Madison" came to beat much fancier, better-funded competitors and take the 1971 Gold Cup while the eyes of ABC's "Wide World of Sports" watched, director and co-writer William Bindley engages every move in the underdog playbook, including, but not limited to, the time the good citizens of Bedford Falls chipped in to make up George Bailey's shortfall in "It's a Wonderful Life."

For emphasis, Jim Caviezel plays McCormick, presaging the beatitude he would later bring to "The Passion of the Christ" ("Madison" has been on the shelf since 2001) by imbuing the fellow with the radiance of a penitent, or at least of a Bruce Springsteen American, true to his hometown.

The story is narrated in flashback by McCormick's kid (Jake Lloyd), who may or may not have time-traveled from the 1930s. An old white geezer and the town's resident old black geezer sit on a bench and kibbitz like Muppets Statler and Waldorf. The music swells on cue with patriotic harmonies. And the head nods, narcotized by uplift.

EW Grade: C-

'Death of a Dynasty'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Sometimes, too much is about the right size.

Case in point: "Death of a Dynasty," an amiably raucous, scorched-earth mockumentary about the Roc-A-Fella hip-hop kingdom under the proprietorship of CEO Damon Dash, who also directed, and rapper Jay-Z. (How mogulicious is Dash? This is his second big-screen release in almost as many weeks, following "State Property 2.")

The "Dynasty" notion introduces Dave Katz (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, driving the picture with his goofy jigga earnestness), a fictional, nerdy, white rock journalist who hitches his own pimped-out career wagon to the fortunes of the Roc-A-Fellas and their mile-long entourage. Dave positions himself in the posse and two-times his own Source-like employer by feeding gossip items around town, enjoying all-area access to the living-large lifestyle. But as he yo-yo-yos his way into parties dressed in Ali G drag, what Dave doesn't know is that he's being punk'd.

Anyhow, the snickering, phooey-on-the-media nose-thumbing with which the movie concludes isn't where its playful heart is at: The main event is the way real players play bigger-than-real versions of their own personas, as if dressing for a Halloween party in playa threads -- and none with more elan and charm than Dash and Jay-Z themselves.

The combined quotient of celebs playing themselves or characters just like themselves is deliriously high (the guest list includes Walt Frazier, Riddick Bowe, Chloe Sevigny, Rashida Jones, Dr. Dre, Duncan Sheik, Run-DMC), and the for-real rappers who go along with the send-up are, to a man, charming naturals at goofing on their own lifestyles. (Sin City's Devon Aoki conjures all skinny, blank-faced pretty rapper molls everywhere.)

"Death of a Dynasty" is one instance in which the blurred line between drama, documentary and Spinal Tap-inflected parody is the movie's best asset. (Is that a real invasion-of-the-Hamptons party -- the neighbors' worst nightmare -- or a mock?)

Only when he tries to make a didactic point about the collusion between art and commerce does Dash violate his own dictum: ''At the end of the day, it's all hip-hop.''

EW Grade: B

'One Missed Call'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

Takashi Miike has the most scandalous imagination of any Japanese director today, but anyone who thinks that the maker of the sick-joke nightmare "Audition" is too dangerous to go Hollywood should see "One Missed Call," a thriller that demonstrates that he's got the facility -- and maybe even the desire -- to do so.

Just consider the clever yet slavishly familiar commercial premise. Sparked by an eerie ringtone that sounds like a Victorian music box, your cell phone records a message from three days into the future. When you play the message back, it's your own voice ... the instant before you die.

The countdown thus begins to that shivery moment of inevitability when you are plunged off a bridge and onto a speeding train, sucked to the bottom of an elevator shaft or what have you. This hybrid of "Scream" and "Ringu" only made me realize how much "Ringu" borrowed from "Scream," and as if that weren't enough, there's a long-haired Kabuki ghost that might have slithered out of the "Ju-On' series.

"One Missed Call" is so unoriginal that the movie could almost be a parody of J-horror tropes, yet Miike, for a while at least, stages it with a dread-soaked visual flair that allows you to enjoy being manipulated.

The best sequence reflects his taste for inspired excess: A tabloid TV show latches on to the latest victim-in-waiting and proceeds to broadcast her final minutes live, right from the studio. What makes the sequence funny, as well as gripping, is that the show is treated as the trivial exploitation scuzz it is, even as the poor girl moans and shrieks and cowers in all-too-realistic terror.

After that bona fide peak of Miikean outrage, however, "One Missed Call" has nowhere to go. There's a great deal of backstory about the ghost; personally, I prefer my one-dimensional scare tactics when they aren't gussied up with naggingly vague psychological profiles.

"One Missed Call" isn't the first J-horror spectacle to drown its spookiness in murk, and it probably won't be the last. An American remake is already in the works, and though Miike isn't scheduled to direct it, you'd have to be more of a pulp purist than I am not to be curious about what he could do with a major Hollywood budget and a studio -- does it exist? -- that would let him go a little bit wild.

EW Grade: C+

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