Utterly stagebound and seldom anything but a small Sundance indie version of Dominick & Eugene, Adrienne Weiss' Love, Ludlow, against all odds, kicks free of its quirk crutches at around the halfway mark--long enough for it to modestly divert, if not especially edify. "Roseanne"'s Alicia "Lecy" Goranson is a tough-talking Queens girl, Myra, charged with the care of her bi-polar, Shakespeare-quoting brother Ludlow (Brendan Sexton III). That she gives the most self-conscious performance in a film about some sort of animalistic social retard/typical painter speaks ill--but all is salved by David Eigenberg as mild-mannered suit Reggie, who is, for whatever reason, interested in the crass, brassy Myra and so suffers all manner of abuse from her and Ludlow in order to engage in whimsical date-centric misadventures, the inevitable break-up, and the inevitable reunion. Eigenberg has the quality of "Kids in the Hall" vet Kevin McDonald--a fetching blend of innocence and resourcefulness--and his struggle to reconcile his own feelings of inadequacy with those engendered by Myra (and what must be some kind of metaphor in the impossible Ludlow) is well-wrought. In her feature debut, director Weiss too often mistakes revolving around two characters having a dialogue for expanding the boundaries of a play--she demonstrates by her indecision a more general cluelessness about how, exactly, to free Love, Ludlow from its roots. But the writing, however thickly mannered, is at least dense enough with nice turns of phrase (and gifted with Eigenberg's excellent turn) to make the exercise an earnest try rather than a misguided disaster.

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Im Sang-soo's transcendently good political satire The President's Last Bang is so far the smartest, chanciest flick of the year--an alchemical brew of balls and technical brilliance that produces tremors of recognition and aftershocks of import. Whether it's DP Kim Woo-heong's rapturous tracking shots or Kim Hong-jib's tango soundtrack, there is something ineffable embedded in the fabric of the piece, making of the assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-hee something like the boxing sequences of Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's appropriate: with Park a puppet of big business (it's rumoured that Samsung launched a campaign to discredit the picture prior to release, in part through the censoring of documentary footage owned by Samsung's sister-company CJ Entertainment) and an officer of the Japanese army occupying Manchuria during WWII, hunting down members of the Korean Independent Army arm-in-arm with Hirohito's wolves. (Park's assassin calls him by his Japanese name before he kills him--not a popular decision.) Im frames his action in short segments, little dances of torture and madness, kidnapping and other florid abuses of power, having at one point a military man deliver his frothing soliloquy in his underwear. With the sly thought that maybe the butler did it, Im encompasses a nation's class, politics, military/industrial infrastructure, and skeletons in the closet with the same elegant outrage. It's one of the best films of the year--more so for how it turns up the heat, ever so slightly, on our own turbid waters. This, not well-intentioned fluff like Good Night, and Good Luck., is how to do righteous indignation.

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David Schwimmer goes the grimy indie route for actor-turned-director Matt Mulhurn's sophomore feature Duane Hopwood, finding himself an alcoholic pit boss in Atlantic City about to lose custody of his two daughters to ex-wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo). Duane (Schwimmer) takes in aspiring stand-up comedian Anthony (Judah Friedlander) as a roommate/sidekick in the mold of Friedlander's previous role as a lovable spaz in American Splendor, their travails building to an unlikely custody hearing and an even unlikelier climax at one of Anthony's gigs as Duane, hopped-up on scotch and mescaline, goes blithely off the edge. Salvaging the rudimentary motions of this broken family drama, however, is a surprising turn by Schwimmer, who blunts his trademark whinging nebbish persona to turn in a human performance, if not necessarily an assured one. His Duane approaches three dimensions (likewise Garofalo, shoehorned into the thankless role of inconstant ex-), struggling against the constraints of what's essentially a formula picture. He's fine, but Duane Hopwood is flat and uninvolving for long stretches, hurt by jokes that fall flat and the over-familiarity of this story as well as a strange kind of desperation/pretension (a shopping cart overturned in the dreary New Jersey surf; a poignant bike escort to punctuate a sad goodbye). It doesn't help that the film culminates in two Thanksgiving dinner tableaux that seem, obliquely, to reward Duane for driving drunk with his daughter in the backseat and threatening mom's new boyfriend with a baseball bat while punishing Linda's reasonable desire to support her spawn with a McDinner in her newly-displaced life with her kids and knucklehead beau (John Krasinski).

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Brick is a cult classic-in-the-making and one for which I harbour a goodly amount of affection. (I should say I admire its chutzpah, if not its ultimate success.) It's an experiment in screenwriting and matching shots, a gimmick stretched to feature-length by first-time hyphenate Rian Johnson that puts Raymond Chandler's hardboiled lexicon into the mouths of disconsolate teens seething at a high school somewhere in the twenty-first century. It would've been a fantastic noir except for that displacement, as its coolness decomposes every time the film contorts into an unnatural posture to honour its trick, nifty as it is. Consider femme fatale Laura (neo-Winnie Cooper Nora Zehetner): when she finally, inevitably, seduces our gumshoe Frye (the always-marvy Joseph Gordon-Levitt), for instance, it's hard to know whether they've slept together or just made out on someone's parents' bed. It matters. There's an inevitable infantilizing that goes hand in hand with the premise, which can be used to either its benefit (as when Kingpin's (Lukas Haas) mother fusses about like Scorsese's mom has a tendency to do in her son's pictures), or, as is more usual, its detriment (see: a ridiculously awkward meeting with the school's Vice Principal (Richard Roundtree)). As straight noir, Brick would be an easy project to get behind: it's post-modern and rejuvenating in the most respectful sense (more Sin City than Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid)--but to set it in a high school milieu, no matter the accomplishments of its cast (uniformly excellent), makes the whole production seem smug and, ultimately, just a little bit silly. A shame I didn't catch this about fifteen years ago.

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Wearing a sleazebag moustache and an ugly print shirt, Pierce Brosnan watches a bartender shake his drink instead of stirring it and the film slows down and blurs accordingly. It's post-modernism as gauzy, lazy hallucination--a swoon that suggests a minor, nearly-imperceptible tremor in reality and the only moment in which hyphenate Richard Shepard acknowledges the irony of the former 007's presence in another licensed-to-kill role as assassin-for-hire Julian Noble. Fond of bottomless tequila and "sucky-fucky" instead of "blushy-blushy," Noble is an unctuous, pathetic character--in any other film, he'd be selling office-furniture and drowning his sorrows in booze and floozies, wondering why nobody's calling on his birthday. On a fateful trip to Mexico, Julian intersects with Danny (Greg Kinnear), a suit-and-tie salesman trying desperately to secure an all-important contract so that his mousy wife (Hope Davis, cast against type as a kind person) doesn't droop into the wallpaper. A lightning-felled tree crashes through Danny's kitchen, no less a harbinger of calamitous change than Julian turning up on his doorstep months later with an offer Danny can't refuse. It's a comedy of murderous Freudian manners in the vogue of Grosse Point Blank or "The Sopranos": there's nothing particularly original about an odd-couple in a thriller nor, even, a thug having an existential crisis while involving Ward Cleaver in his maleficent deeds. The Matador, then, would do well to bring something new to the conversation, but instead, it functions as a workmanlike bit of easy entertainment. Neither challenging nor incompetent, the picture isn't courageous enough to fail and thus not courageous enough to be a masterpiece. It's a studiously inoffensive diversion for an audience of a certain age; for a shot of the real stuff, try Ripley's Game.

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Even without recently-deceased partner-in-crime Ismail Merchant, stalwart period-costume-drama codger James Ivory delivers the slavishly middlebrow, meandering, Anglo-centric goods with The White Countess, the tale of a sightless American ex-diplomat, Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), who falls for refugee Russian countess Sophia (Natasha Richardson) in Shanghai on the eve of Japanese occupation. Packed to the rafters with Redgraves (Lynn and Vanessa also appear) and meticulously airless accents, the picture represents a certain ossified breed of prestige picture of the A Room with a View and Howards End variety, complete with novelist-turned-screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (he of The Remains of the Day) contributing another story of reticence and romance with a lead character who's actually blind this time, rather than just metaphorically so. Jackson dreams of insulating himself from the ugliness of the world within the velvet walls of a "perfect nightclub" he constructs with his savings, with Sophia--exuding that delicate balance between the erotic and the tragic--enlisted as the perfect hostess to minister to his guests. But it all feels dusty--the romantic dreams of old men, tired-out and beaten-up by life and enacted by stuffy actors so great at what they do that it's terrifically boring to watch them do it. It's tempting to hold a mirror under the film's nose for long, tasteful stretches, that sense of un-offended apathy not even quenched by my honest-to-goodness crush on the gracefully-aging Richardson. At the end of it all, The White Countess is as deluded and retreating as its hero, looking to duck the uglier aspects of its tale (prostitution and genocide never looked this chic) without even the early Merchant-Ivory inclination to offer at least a bittersweet ending to counteract the requisite 140 minutes of sickly chamber-room ethic.

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Casanova is a perfectly dreadful Lasse Hallström/Miramax picture that can be claimed, appropriately enough, by Buena Vista now that the Weinsteins have moved on to produce this kind of stuff for their new company. It's "The Merchant of Venice" stripped of any whiff of controversy, going through the motions of its shrivelled little romantic comedy checklist with the miserable meticulousness of the truly unimaginative. For a change, why don't you tell me how it works? Two people meet and hate each other, right, and then the one has a secret that the other discovers just as things are finally going well, yes? And so he has to make some sort of grand gesture to win her back (preferably in a public place)--but don't forget the bit about how no matter the era in which the film is set, she's a progressive thinker, if not a proto-feminist, and he's the tamer and the tamed in turn. See? You've seen it already. Heath Ledger is the boy, Casanova literally this time; Sienna Miller is Venetian Francesca, the girl who needs the love of a suddenly-reformed Casanova to get her panties out of a bunch. The Inquisition (embodied by a vamping Jeremy Irons) and the arrival of a disgusting fat slob of a lard merchant (Oliver Platt, the object of derision--the man deserves better than a role that has his stomach emit "squishy" noises when touched) provide the conflict. There's also a lovely American Pie tribute where Casanova receives a blowjob under the table (from a virgin who orgasms whenever she looks at the guy--feminism, hurray!) while talking to his future in-laws. Toss in a dash of totally unearned sentimentality and a ridiculous action sequence wherein everybody knows how to fence but no one knows how to win and you have Casanova. Enjoy.

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This whole idea of post-modern meta-movies just doesn't thrill me the way it used to. Nonetheless, Brit maverick Michael Winterbottom's once around on the Adaptation. wheel is buoyed by a game cast and an actual purpose: rather than the impossibility of a blocked writer trying to adapt a bad novel, find here a post-modern film about a novel that predicted, in a way, post-modernism itself. Winterbottom addresses the difficulty of translating an 18^th century novel concerning the vast chaos of interiority (and writing a novel within a novel); instead of turning it into a film school exercise (like Marc Forster's Stay, for instance), he allows it to become a manifestation of that insular chaos. It's the story of a tornado told as a tornado. The eye of the storm is Steve Coogan, who plays an actor named Steve Coogan (who is much like Coogan, but different) cast in the title role of Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq., which is directed in the film by an actor (Jeremy Northam) playing a director, with Kelly Macdonald playing his girlfriend. Or is she actually his girlfriend (and is that their kid?), or is the fact of her and their alleged child together merely a pointed echo of the action of the film-within-a-film of Walter Shandy (also Coogan) on the day of the birth of his son, Tristram? Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the conundrum is right there at the front of your head--and that the doubt is deposited with the sense of embarrassed, absurd propriety that's the hallmark of great British humor. Not so much a mindfuck as a mindlovemaking, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is delighted, like the novel, by the incapacity of art to encompass the vast incomprehensibility of life, and so it makes a piece of art that gently reminds us that there's more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in any philosophy.

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Kiwi filmmaker Roger Donaldson follows up his intensely impersonal The Recruit with the intensely personal The World's Fastest Indian, a fictionalization of a documentary he shot some thirty years ago about dotty old coot Burt Munro, who in 1967 set a land speed record for motorcycles under 1000ccs on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Funny how the results of both are sanded down almost beyond recognition: so baptized are they in the scouring attentions of high-grade clichés that they're inhumanly frictionless. See Burt (Anthony Hopkins) dodder around his shack in Invercargill, deliver long, rambling monologues and homey homilies like "if you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable" to whoever will listen, and rebuke that he's no "POME" to repeated Yankee inquiries as to whether or not he's British. (Here I am thinking that "POME" (Prisoners of Mother England) referred to Australians--the one thing I learned over the course of the picture's interminable, 127-minute runtime.) It's the kind of movie where a lovable--maybe even magical--old imp lightens the life of every lost soul he meets, including a transvestite, a crotchety sea captain, a beatific little boy (think "Finding Geezerland"), and a pair of randy old birds. His charm knows no boundaries--and the universal adoration lavished upon him within the film is bound to dupe certain segments of the audience like a spit-soaked laugh-track that can only "awww." The World's Fastest Indian aims to make old people huggable and mythological while Hopkins drones on incessantly to extras trying to look interested, to inanimate objects, and most of all to himself. No mystery why Hopkins climbed on board, the only mystery is why anyone else did.

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In Duck, hale character actor Philip Baker Hall finds himself delivering long, rambling, and likely improvised monologues to a duck that has imprinted itself on him in Los Angeles, 2009. Though it's probably more interesting to talk about why so many science-fiction films are set in Los Angeles, it's more fascinating to try to reconcile all the car-wreck non-sequiturs that comprise the mismatched, miasmic whole of this piece. Hall plays Arthur, freshly widowed and ready to pill himself into oblivion when a duckling fort/da gives him a new lease on life. Soon, though, the last pond in L.A. is drained, and simultaneously--allegorically!--Arthur is evicted, leading our "Boy and His Dog" futuristic odd couple on a whimsical "Travels with Charley" trudge through the social ills of a crazy, neo-conservative, caste-obsessed world to the rejuvenating bosom of the ocean. A scene where the body-of-water-starved fowl finds refuge in an open toilet doesn't carry the tragic weight I think it's meant to (taking a cue from the very sad score for the scene, it's intended to carry a really, really heavy tragic weight), giving Duck the distinction of being at once one of the worst, most insipid "message" films ever made and, on the bright side, one of the most unintentionally hilarious.

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