Wild Nights: Emily Dickinson & Lingerie

Love Romance? Love Poetry? Emily Dickinson might just be the author for you on this day.

A life long romantic who never married, Emily was the eccentric singleton who only wore white and threw scribbled poems down from her upstairs window to the curious towns folk below.

In honor of Emily's pure passion and penchant for wearing white lace, I'm highlighting one of my favorite white lace bras. When I look at this Eberjey India Lace Bralette, it's easy to imagine Emily at her window, peeking through the sheer curtains at her neighbors below, who just wanted a quick look at the unconventional, reclusive poetess.

Whether you're in a relationship or single this Valentine's Day, anyone can appreciate Emily's connection with love and passion.

Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile -- the Winds --
To a Heart in port --
Done with the Compass --
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden --
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor -- Tonight --
in Thee!

~ Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

Stare into my eyes, Vampire

As if the world needed more skulking, brooding teens, here is an entire film of them doing nothing but staring into the abyss of each other’s eyes contemplating being together for the most miserable of eternities. Why they want to brave immortality together is beyond me, especially when they can’t muster a smile for more than about 5 minutes.

Even in the film’s opening moments — usually the parts of a movie full of happy pre-conflict characters — our hero is reciting Romeo & Juliet, and not the romantic verses either, but the suicide parts. Apparently, his soul is tortured, which is why he tortures the screen (and us) with his overplayed teen angst.

I’m going to just unload on New Moon starting right from the top since the core audience of the Twilight franchise doesn’t read this blog because it isn’t delivered as an iPhone app or a Twitter update. And because if they know better they’ll stay away from reviews, most of which are going to devour this petty, minuscule movie and its unnecessarily loud hype.

New Moon is a teen vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest. It made me yearn for better teen movies, better vampire movies and a different story in the Pacific Northwest, a setting far too pretty for these gloomy teens. If you haven’t seen Twilight then there’s no real point in seeing New Moon, which assumes you know every scene from the first film and every word, comma and veiled nuance in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, including the endings to sequels that haven’t been filmed yet.

Apparently even the most average Twilight fans read the books multiple times so they can nod in agreement when the films ace the material, and then shake their fists when they get it all wrong. It’s as if the film isn’t a film, but an appendix to the book. Those same fans will say you have to read the books to enjoy the movies, but let me add this: you can skip the books and the movies so you can free up time in your schedule for charity work, organized sports or treehouses. (To be fair, the same can be said about Star Wars, Harry Potter or any other overhyped franchise.)

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is back and this time she wants to be a vampire. The pros are fashionable clothes, overpriced cars and eternal life with Edward (Robert Pattinson). The cons are twinkling ice-cold skin, pale complexion, chronic boredom and eternal life with Edward. Most women at the screening I attended would love to spend just half an hour with Edward (if it even takes that long for the little imp) even if there’s clearly not a single thought in that vampire brain of his. Honestly now, how long could you really talk about how much you loved each other? This is why Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end of their story — they really had nothing better to talk about anyway.

Sensing Bella’s sudden vampire urge (a blatant sexual metaphor perhaps), Edward ditches her “for her own safety.” Taking advantage of Bella’s new single status is Jacob (pudgy faced Taylor Lautner), the local werewolf who reveals himself to be a werewolf about 90 minutes after the Twilight idiots (like myself) have figured it out for ourselves. The fact that he walked around in cut-off shorts and no shirt in Washington’s winter had something to do with it, though. And then after he’s revealed, cue a stream of horrific wolf/dog puns.

The acting is atrocious on nearly every level. Stewart, who I feel has some talent, is required to have bad dreams and stare into empty spaces like Edward's face, which barely counts as acting in a movie not made for girls with Hello Kitty! backpacks. Edward looks clueless in every scene, and Pattinson doesn't help him with the hazed-over wonderment in his moonface. All the best characters are given only brief parts, like Charley, Bella's dad, who says stupid fatherly things, but is generally a sane character if also a little clueless about his free-wheeling daughter. Vampire matriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the most interesting of the vampires, if only because he's not 17 years old, yet all he does is stitch an arm then fade into the background. Bella's friend Jessica has a terrific little monologue about zombies and clichés that's so poignant it could be a commentary on the film itself. Jessica's played by Anna Kendrick, the star of one of my favorite movies about teens, Rocket Science. She also keeps up with George Clooney in December's superb Up in the Air. See either of those movies and you'll be better using your time.

I’ve explained some of the plot, but I’m not doing the film justice. What is it about? It’s about Bella waiting for Edward to return. That’s it. She toys with Jacob’s feelings, but he clearly never has a shot, the poor wolf-guy, because Edward is destined to return or Bella will just whither from his absence. The film states all this again and again in tortured sequences of dialogue that will test your patience and the strength of your armrest as you claw at it mercilessly. In terms of content, the vacuum of space feels like a conga line compared to the chilly and unpleasant conversations these characters share during many of New Moon’s 130 minutes.

All this weepy drama can’t be good for women, especially young girls, who are brainwashed by opera this soapy. I hate it when a movie makes me feel like a feminist, but this is one of them. Consider: Bella is defined by the men she’s dating. She’s worthless when Edward’s not around. When he disappears she acts suicidal in hopes that he’ll return and pity her. She’s always in need of rescuing. Watch this movie and you’re being told that women are stupid and meaningless until a man completes them. I expect this from a misogynist like Tucker Max, not a woman. And why does a man have to draw attention to this?

If it hates women or loves them, all I ask is that something happens. New Moon just pretends to have things happening: vampires lunge at open wounds, shirtless boys transform into overgrown wolves, stand-offs and chases in the woods, and Italian castles with a vampire tribunal (in which Dakota Fanning has one line, “Pain”). Break all that down, though, and you still only have a frozen tundra of uncomfortable silences, impassioned gazes and lifted eyebrows all directed at Bella, who’s so self-centered that maybe immortality as a narcissist vampire is an appropriate career path.

Obviously, I hated this movie, but — and this has to be said — Twilight fans will love it. They’ll see Bella and Edward’s bland conversations as modern-day Shakespeare, and all the weepy, detached romance as eternal true love. They’ll eat it up in multiple viewings and then write me to say I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t understand anything. Well, here’s one thing I do understand: skulking, brooding teens are no fun to watch. In real life, or in a movie.

Smile already.

Never mind the Bullocks. Or The Proposal.

The Proposal is cliché stacked on top of more cliché. Most romantic comedies are, but this one is shameless.

She is a high-intensity book editor in New York City. She schedules Oprah’s guests with single phone calls. She lives in an apartment that overlooks Central Park. She is so feared at her publishing house that the employees instant message, “It’s here,” to the entire office when she arrives to work. She fires someone in the first scene to show us how heartless she can be.

He is her assistant, which means he fetches cups of coffee, or empty props that resemble Starbucks cups. He is an Alaskan country boy living in NYC to become an author. His first manuscript might be good, but he’s only an office assistant so no one reads it.

So far this collection of rom-com clichés could be describing one of, oh, two dozen films. Clichés I half expected to see, but didn’t, include the Walking Away From an Explosion And Not Turning Around to Look Trick, the Let Me Show My Vulnerability By Apologizing in a Dense Downpour Moment, or He Was Dead the Whole Movie And He Didn’t Even Know It Twist. Maybe if the movie was 10 minutes longer.

She is Margaret (Sandra Bullock) — “Do you prefer Margaret or Satan’s Mistress?” someone asks. He is Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), who’s sold integrity down the river by playing slave boy to Margaret, who calls him to make “midnight Tampax runs.” He tells her, “You’re allergic to the full spectrum of human emotions.”

Margaret’s Canadian, eh, so when an immigration official starts poking around she makes Andrew marry her so she can stay in the country. Of course, an elaborate visit to Andrew’s sleepy Alaskan hometown is in order so Margaret can sell herself to her future in-laws, including Craig T. Nelson and Mary Steenburgen, who’s aged like a million bucks. Some of this might look vaguely familiar because The Proposal is uncannily similar to Bullock’s While You Were Sleeping, but this time the groom is wide awake.

What follows from there includes all the other clichés: a crazy granny (Betty White), a disapproving dad, a sweet ex-girlfriend (Malin Akerman), impromptu party speeches full of ad-libbed lies, a scene of accidental nakedness, bedside tenderness, a sing-a-long (“It Takes Two”), a trite score of string plucks and false crescendos, and, in a prototypical rom-com moment, a shocking wedding confession. I’m convinced the plot was conceived by an automated computer program that simply mixes the variables into different orders — 1-2-3-4-5 might produce The Proposal while 1-2-3-5-4 creates Notting Hill.

When it’s not running on rails, The Proposal goes all batty with scenes so bizarre they’ll make you cringe. One of them has Bullock doing a painful Indian tribal dance. Another has an eagle, an eagle’s talons and a puppy — you do the math. One gag with a homely stripper started out uncomfortable, but turned more hilarious as Ramone (Oscar from The Office) showed up throughout the movie in different roles: he’s a gyrating stripper, waiter, hardware clerk and the town’s clergy.

Bullock plays ice queen most of the movie until she hits that point in all of her roles where you feel real sympathy for her loneliness. She looks at the man, eyes welling up with tears, and spills the beans to everyone. It’s her trademarked gimmick, but she does it well and even 90 minutes of nonsense is kinda worth it — stress kinda. What can I say about Reynolds? He seemed like he was just along for the ride.

What I’m most curious about is how, and why, Bullock keeps accepting these roles. There’s a gifted actress waiting to burst from this menagerie of mediocrity. Yes, these films are popular, but they don’t really push her as an actress. And she can only make the same movie so many times.

I fear how many times that actually might be, though.

Footnote: Watch the scene where Sandra Bullock is supposedly naked. There are some strange digital tricks going on around that cupped crotch shot. It's either a) Sandra Bullock's modesty or b) Sandra Bullock's mutated groin area. My bets on a): she didn't want to really be naked in the scene so she wore panties or a thong and then it was all digitally erased later.

Sex and the City: The Male Kryptonite

I’ve always wondered what movies like Rambo said about men to women: maybe that the act of justified killing/disemboweling/beheading is a mask for our failing macho image. I’m no Freud, but I can picture women validating our fondness for manly movies with that rationale.

On the flipside, what do men think about women when watching Sex and the City: Women live for the next purse, the next pair of shoes, the next shopping trip? They think that clothing and accessories will fill the voids in their lives left by men, the way violence fills the voids in men’s lives left by women? Uh oh, I mentioned shoes — let the letter writing commence.

And there a conundrum emerges: how can a person with a penis appropriately review Sex and the City without incurring the wrath of the people with vaginas who flock to its mesmerizing glow? It’s impossible. It wouldn’t matter anyway, though, because the women who watched the show are going to line up for the movie no matter what critics write about it. And they'll all think it's wonderful, even if it is clearly not. Because not liking it will be an act of betrayal and women hate betrayal, which is why they come down on men so hard when we do it.

So women will love it, but this man thought it was ridiculously tedious and about 45 minutes too long, a little too episodic and jumpy, and just bland enough to be neither interesting nor boring. That’s the bad. Here’s the good: some of the characters are actually worth caring about (they feel real) and the movie gives them reason to shine in a city where people were born to shine — New York City.

Like the hit HBO show, the one that ended four years ago, Sex and the City follows the city-wide adventures of four best friends — Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. Like almost every female movie character in New York City, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a columnist who rants and raves in writing about her friends’ romantic lives. Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the oldest, is a cougar, an over-40 sex addict one pair of stilettos away from being a complete whore — her words, not mine. She’s since relocated to Los Angeles, where she gawks at a Spanish surfer in the next bungalow. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is kinda normal with a husband and also an adopted daughter who derails someone else’s entire year by playfully hiding a cell phone at a key moment. Finally, there’s Miranda, a dedicated professional too busy to wax a forest of pubic hair that's spilling from her swimsuit, and way too busy to have a sex life with her husband. So he cheats, no doubt with someone who owns a razor. These are just broad overviews of the characters; the film expands and collapses their dilemmas several times each, revealing that maybe all the women share the same dilemma — men.

Sex and the City mainly deals with Carrie (played so confidently by Parker), the reluctant star who narrates her own story. She has a man problem, too: She loves Mr. Big (Chris Noth), a suave businessman she’s broken up with several times over. He's rich, although we never learn what he does; if he were smart he'd sell women's shoes and purses to the other characters, who toss $500 at things they don't have room for in their closets. The film toys with their engagement — “I don’t want a ring, just a really big closet,” Carries says, proving my point — and their eventual wedding, which may never happen.

As an ensemble piece, Sex and the City is a little too all-over-the-place, with too many different tones and muted moments. Much of it flies on auto-pilot even when it has something interesting to do or say, like when Charlotte, after years of not being able to have children, gets preggers. Just when it tries to get deeper, it cops out with a joke only owners of a Louis Vuitton bag can appreciate. (Speaking of LV: Women, it's a purse, a vessel in which to put stuff. The vessel should not be more expensive than the stuff.) As a thesis on love, though, the film works surprisingly well; it ponders the whys more than the whats and hows. It’s by no means highbrow — diarrhea plays a significant role at one point — but it attempts to justify its motions with its message, mainly through Carrie’s troubled romance to Big.

This Big guy — the movie apparently, and finally, reveals his full name — is supposed to represent the men of the world. He is kind and gentle, treats the friends with respect, pays for dinners, dresses nice, isn't gay (half the other males in the film are) and he dotes on Carrie, at one point even buying her an apartment so nice she refers to it as heaven. He's so wonderful that he starts to not exist, he just drifts into the background like all the other things that come and go in these womens' lives — pastels, Burberry winterwear, vintage jewelry, martinis, heals with straps. At one point his name is said more than we've actually seen him. I'd love to know his side of the story. Surely, he'd put a cap on the shopping, the incessant bitching and clothes that reveal Carrie's underwear (I almost saw Mrs. Ferris Bueller's boobies!).

Love in New York City looks intoxicating. Something about the city — the verticalness of it all, the close quarters, the narrow streets dense with people — makes romance more potent. Love fills and scents the air and the tall stone and steel buildings keep it lingering above your head. On the horizontal plane of Arizona, love doesn’t go up, it goes out, it dilutes into nothing from here to the next Walgreens or McDonald’s. I never wanted to live in New York City so bad until this movie. Only Woody Allen and Spike Lee have written and directed so fondly around the city.

But this isn’t just about sex and its famous city. Punctuating every second of every scene is fashion. Never has a movie so heavily relied on it before, except maybe in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter, which ended on an anti-fashion note. At one point Carrie and her BFFs participate in Fashion Week and attend a runway show — ironic considering the entire movie is one elongated exhibition of fashion so daring (and often times ugly) that only in New York City could women get away with these outfits. When the credits started rolling I half expected Marc Jacobs to come out and take a bow.

There are three scenes that feature no fashion whatsoever: The first is with Cattrall, who wants to surprise her man with a sushi dinner spread out on her naked body — yes, tuna on her tuna! The second is with Cynthia Nixon as she has makeup-sex with her husband. The scene of Nixon reminded me of what someone once said about Sex and the City: "Everyone gets naked at some point except the one you want to see naked, Sarah Jessica Parker." True. And third, the Spanish surfer showers in the buff revealing his naked penis. Considering how many breasts we see, and that women are the target demographic, I'm thankful it's the only penis that makes an appearance.

It may seem like I've really railed on this movie, and it deserves it, but it's also not nearly as bad as it could have been. Under the right conditions Carrie is an interesting and sympathetic character. I wanted her to find true love. Her happiness was as joyful to me as it was for her. But that doesn't mean Parker is any better of an actress — now that Sex is over she's basically unemployed, as is Ferris. My biggest complaint is that the movie isn't really a movie. It's just an extension of the show. Just because it's on the big screen doesn't qualify it as a film. The characters were already established, the stories already kickstarted, the style and setting already cemented into pop culture. There was nothing really to do except deliver more of what's already been established: that women desire romance but crave new clothes, that women are likely to blame the men just as the men blame the women, that women's lives are complex but they always have room to comfort other women in their time of need. But one more thing …

Funny how the movie will supposedly empower women, yet all these women want are new shoes. Then again, of all the things Rambo could be doing, he chooses to rip out some poor guy’s esophagus. I guess neither sex has room to talk.

***Large portions of this review originally appeared in the West Valley View May 30, 2008.***

Gynocomedy fails in post-Juno world

A movie can’t survive on uterine humor alone. Baby Mama is proof in stirrups.

All it had to do was last 90 minutes. That’s 10 minutes for every month of a character’s pregnancy. It made me wish Baby Mama was about African lions or pot-bellied pigs, whose babies gestate for about three months before birth. That movie would have hit the target jokes, found a nice stride and then, before it had too much umbilical cord to hang itself with, ended. But there I go, reviewing the movie that wasn’t even made.

The movie that was made is one of those One Truth Movies: The entire plot is held together by a lie so monumental that, should it be revealed, the cosmic forces holding the movie together would collapse, leaving us to pick the popcorn off our laps and trudge out to the parking lot.

The liar is surrogate mother Angie (Amy Poehler), a loony-ball redneck carrying the unborn seed of Kate (Tina Fey), who, at 37, is hopelessly single and listening to her biological clock grinding to a halt. Apparently, Kate has a T-shaped uterus, which is no good for babies since they haven’t learned their ABCs yet. And neither, it should be added, has Angie, whose taste in men explains Darwin’s theories in four different dimensions. Angie’s current guy doesn’t work because he’s trying to win arena football tickets in a radio station promotion — he has winner written all over him, but it’s spelled all wrong.

At first Angie lies that she’s pregnant to mooch off Kate’s kindness, and her $10,000 mommy-to-be checks. Then, when Angie actually does get pregnant, another lie swells with her tummy: “Is this Kate’s lab-fertilized baby or is it my deadbeat boyfriend’s?” She plays it fast and loose and Kate learns the truth at the worst possible moment — the baby shower, the only place a baby-comedy this vapid could possibly end.

A better movie would have developed Kate a little better, maybe suggested that she wasn’t as ready for mommyhood as she thought. Tina Fey, a feisty and refreshing force on 30 Rock and a former head writer on Saturday Night Live, is more expressive than Baby Mama gives her credit for. She and her movie could have been very funny, and possibly meaningful. Instead they’re just mildly humorous.

Then there’s the issue with Kate’s single status. You have to wonder what’s inherently wrong, on an emotional level, with a movie character as attractive, smart, sassy, sexy, intelligent and inventive as the one Fey plays who is unable to find a responsible and willing mate to help her produce offspring. Either she’s entirely too picky, or maybe she has a horrible foot odor or questionable, deal-breaking hygiene. Juno, last year’s big pregnancy movie, would have the answers, but Baby Mama just uses its star’s emotional well-being, and her baby, as a vehicle for a series of disposable jokes.

And then there’s Poehler, Mama’s preggo floozy who plays dumb the way Beethoven wrote sonatas. I see crazy in her eyes, and I like it, although she’s required to play dense to such a degree that it becomes distracting — come on, she doesn’t understand how her reproductive system works? In birthing class she asks if Pam, the household cooking spray, could be used to make a baby Slip ’N Slide during delivery. She then holds breast pumps to her eyes like goggles. Her timing and delivery are perfect, but viewed as a piece of the whole, Poehler unbalances an already unbalanced picture. Ditto for Fey. It’s as if the characters would have been better on their own than together.

Joining them in irrelevance is Sigourney Weaver, some kind of birthing expert who works out of an office that has probably been an Oval Office set on dozens of other movies, and Steve Martin, the great comedian who plays a hippie who apparently traded his LSD stash for an organic foods market. The pony-tailed windbag, with his aura-examining nuttiness, rewards staffers with five minutes of unbroken eye contact and expensive Tibetan prayer smoke. In a role not far removed from his dirtball in Bowfinger, Martin is either the best thing about Baby Mama or the worst depending on how you react to cervix gags, call it gynecomedy.

Women might appreciate Baby Mama. Men … not so much.

Meatheads is more like it

Not that there’s anything wrong with Leatherheads — George Clooney’s long and arduous look into pre-NFL football via the screwball comedy — it’s just that there’s nothing really right about it either.

It’s all very bluuuuuuuhhhh.

The laughs are mild and camouflaged amid 1920’s anachronism. The dialogue channels Clark Gable and Cary Grant, but rarely succumbs to their spirits. The antics are whacky and purely madcap — like when George and his girl play Keystone Cops with stolen police uniforms — but they go flat, then sour, when left out of the icebox too long. The costumes were great, but when that’s all there is to say that can’t be a good sign.

It all takes place in 1925. Prohibition is well established. Flappers own the night. The Great Depression is on the horizon. And college football is a beloved sport, while professional football is seen as a joke, a dead-end career path for pathetic old timers who didn’t go to college because they were either too poor or too stupid. Adding to their stupidity, by way of brain-scrambling head injuries, is the unforgiving football uniform: minimal padding, lightweight cotton garments and a leather moccasin that goes on the head, thus making the players leatherheads.

The movie is only half sports, like when the football hero must recruit, and then later play against, a person who becomes his friend. The middle section is barely sports at all as the young friend becomes embroiled in a war scandal invented to keep the action off the field. Neither story is very interesting.

The football hero is Dodge Connelly (Clooney), who runs a rag-tag group of knuckle-crackers in the Midwest. Dodge is the unofficial coach, the star player, playmaker, quarterback and also the team’s press spokesman — after every game he dictates the story to the scotch-soaked reporter sent with the team on road trips. With the league in the lurch, it gets financing from a rich sports agent determined to make football the new American pastime with Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), an ex-college star and a veteran of the Great War. As a soldier, Carter was involved in the capture of a large German force; his heroism creates a scandal when it comes out the whole story may have been fabricated. Carter, an all-American boy with a doughy all-American face, seems innocently caught up in something he’s unable to control.

Krasinski, who plays beloved paper salesman Jim on the American version of The Office, is a likeable enough guy, but, like the movie, he’s very bland. He overacts a tad, but then again, everyone in Leatherheads does. Clooney, who embodies his free-riding debonair with a classical Gable-like swagger, has some good lines that twist and turn on provocative double entendres, but his performance is lost in the period. Or maybe it’s just lost in his directing (yes, Clooney directed Leatherheads).

In trying to imagine his character in a screwball comedy like It Happened One Night, he’s made it incomprehensible. The twitches, the soggy faces, double glances, goofy eye movements … these things might have worked with Cary Grant, but here they’re just outdated and lost in time and space. By referencing other works — mainly It Happened One Night — Clooney has not made an homage, but a series of jokes that now don’t work in two time periods: now and during the screwball period of the 1930s and 40s.

The film does find a nice rhythm with Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), who is a hard-charging reporter sent to unmask Carter Rutherford for her yellowish newspaper. Zellweger, facial contortions and all, is charming enough for me to mention that she’s does very well in roles set in the 1920s — first Chicago and now this. But her character’s war scandal threatens to derail the real story, that of Dodge and Carter’s football teams, which meet in muddy calamity by film’s end.

The football scenes are like every other football movie ever filmed — lame — albeit in period football uniforms, which provides a fun new twist. But if you want to see it done better, please check out Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, a film that uses the same football outfits but not because the costume department had a large budget — The Freshman, one of comedies forgotten gems, was filmed in 1925, the same time period Leatherheads claims to represent.

Leatherheads is not a terrible film, although it is terribly disappointing and terribly plain, and also terribly frustrating to see George Clooney flounder on something that had so much more potential as a modern-day comedy than a throwback to screwball comedies.

Still hope for February

Fool’s Gold is one of the most preposterous movies that will be released this year. The fact that it stars two respectable stars, Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, only hurts it at this point.

This is the second romantic comedy to star the two sex symbols — the first was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days — and still they have no chemistry. Strangers on the street meeting for the first time have more of a love connection. They begin the movie married and the first frame they share together is at their divorce hearing. Turns out they wed because the sex was great; the judge hears this and rolls his eyes, as do we. By the end of Fool’s Gold they’re getting back together for even worse reasons.

He is Finn, a treasure detective who chases clues to sunken ships and buried treasures. So far he’s found nothing … ever. As best we can discern, he’s never even located his car keys or that remote control that’s squished between the cushions. She is Tess, who serves fancy meals on high-end yachts while her idiot husband (her words, not mine) stomps around the Caribbean digging empty pits. Every now and again Tess winks and grins and suggests her bird-brained husband is worth it because he’s dynamite in the bedroom. This is meant as a joke, but it cheapens the character and Hudson’s overall cutesiness.

Amid the divorce, Finn manages to sink his treasure-hunting boat and fall into debt with the boat’s owner, a rapper/crime lord named Bigg Bunny, one of many underdeveloped villains. The way the boat goes under is the film’s only scene worth writing about in a positive tone: Finn and his partner are underwater on a reef vacuuming sand when a fire on the boat above them ignites the entire hull. The ship descends Titanic-style while their backs are turned.

As the boat crashes into the reef it spits out a broken shard of plate, a major clue to a Spanish treasure called the Queen’s Dowry. The plate lights a fire under Finn who eventually joins up with his ex-wife to seek out the 300-year-old chests of gold and emeralds. Why she agrees to come along, especially considering that she wanted the divorce, is puzzling. But alas, the characters are written so poorly that the only motivation they’re given, if any at all, is sex and money.

Much of Fool’s Gold is clue extrication: Finn finds a piece of the puzzle and then he races across an island to find a new one. He goes from the reef to a lagoon to a Spanish church to a blowhole in the rocks. Some of his treasure hunt is spent under the ocean holding his breath for long periods of time. (Here’s a game: hold your breath when Finn does and see how realistic the underwater scenes are.) Always in tow is Tess, who spends much of the movie posing blatantly in bikinis so teeny-weeny they barely cover Hudson, a very teeny-weeny girl.

Fool’s Gold is directed by Andy Tennant, who gave us Hitch, which I enjoyed for its lighthearted charm, and Anna and the King, one of the better photographed movies of the last 10 years. Here he seems completely incoherent, and he stumbles under the weight of the film’s overall badness. One problem, is that there are just too many characters, many I haven’t even mentioned yet: a rich tycoon (Donald Sutherland) with a rich-man accent who agrees to fund the treasure hunt; his spoiled daughter (Alexis Dziena, Broken Flowers), who is probably a Paris Hilton parody; a Ukranian assistant with an apparent speech impediment; and Finn’s teacher (the great Ray Winstone), who could be a bad guy but is written into nothing, a nobody who turns up to send the plot scurrying in a different direction.

All of this is going on amid dialogue and acting so bogus they should be harpooned and hung from the dock. Another candidate for that treatment is George Fenton, who wrote the score as if the film were a silent feature — music cues jokes, kisses, discoveries … everything that our peepers see is prompted by a symphony of unnecessary sound.

Fool’s Gold is a vapid and lifeless adventure movie. Instead of dropping $20 on it this weekend, just rent Romancing the Stone and be thankful you’re not fool enough to venture to this stinker.

And some words about the stars
Matty and Katie, what gives on the movie choices? You both had decent break-out roles — in fact, they are still considered classics — but now your entire careers pretty much blow.

Matt, let’s start with you. It all began with Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, where you played pot-head Wooderson, a guy who just couldn’t progress after high school. The character played a pivotal role in the plot and is still quoted today — “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That was 1993. You went from that to a craptastic Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, John Grisham swill A Time to Kill, homoerotic cowboy flick The Newton Boys, a Truman Show-trumped EdTV, overacted dragon epic Reign of Fire, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, super-flop Sahara, bomb rom-com Failure to Launch and feel-good sports flick We Are Marshall. Amid all this you banged out Contact and Amistad a year apart, and later the rather-ridiculous but still enjoyable U-571 —these represent some of your best work. As for everything else … duds. All of them.

Now for Kate, your career hasn’t been nearly as long, but it began on an even higher note. You played beautiful groupie Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical music movie Almost Famous. To this day that movie — that role specifically, even — rests very high up on several of my great movie lists. You nabbed an Oscar nomination for the role, but you’d never know (or believe) that by examining the movies that came after Almost Famous. Consider the barely distributed Dr. T and the Women, miserable period piece The Four Feathers, the super ludicrous Alex & Emma, absurdist comedy Le Divorce, the big-sister-as-the-new-mom-movie Raising Helen, stinker supernatural thriller (with a killer ending) The Skeleton Key and then You, Me and Dupree, which was kinda funny, but never your part. And now Fool’s Gold, which is somewhat similar to mommy Goldie Hawn’s romantic comedy Overboard. You were on the right track for better projects, but now, because of your willingness to traipse around in skimpy outfits in dull comedies, your entire career as a serious actress seems pretty much derailed.

Matt and Kate, if either of you need a new agent, consider my services now offered.

Langoria lands DOA

Recently married and scraping the bottom of the barrel for movies — yep, Eva Langoria is now officially a desperate housewife.

Oh, and check out the Oompa-Loompa complexion with that Tangerine Dream spray tan. Any oranger and she could be a spokeswoman for Tropicana.

Over Her Dead Body is a tired hunk of film. It starts wheezing and ends wheezing, a dogged journey for this asthmatic stinker. You might be inclined to like it, but don’t forget that February is a notoriously wretched movie month that studios usually shovel with junk unworthy of the other 11 months.

It’s at this point I am required by cinema law to inform anyone who might still be reading that Over Her Dead Body is a romantic comedy, which means that if you’ve ever enjoyed a romantic comedy, or ever found yourself fascinated with the shagginess and shape of Hugh Grant’s hair, you will enjoy this one no matter what I tell you about it. I could say it kicks kittens, or headbutts clergymen, or lights daycare centers on fire and you’ll still line up for tickets. At least you’re loyal, I’ll give you that.

Langoria, who I’ve already mentioned, is a TV star. It shows here as she plays, with the dexterity of a file cabinet, a wedding planner so vile that she assaults the serving staff for the placement of gravy boats and napkin holders. I’m surprised the chefs don’t cheer when she is crushed to death by an ice sculpture in the first five minutes. Langoria, who is much prettier in real life than in this movie, plays Kate, a chirpy bimbo. Correction: a chirpy, dead bimbo.

A year later, her boyfriend, Henry (good-guy Paul Rudd, Knocked Up), falls in love with Ashley (Lake Bell), a psychic who might have made contact with Kate from beyond the grave. Henry and Ashley seem cute together, and they seem to be well on their way to eternal bliss, but then Kate, in the form of a ghost dressed in elegant whites, shows up to distress Ashley in hopes that Henry is lonely and miserable and single forever. Misery may love company, but it says nothing of Kate, who is willing to spend her days in purgatory just to prevent Henry from loving again. Some girlfriend, huh?

Like most romantic comedies, the characters are from a manila file folder marked with “Stock rom-com characters.” Consider the beautiful Ashley, with her exotic profession, cozy pad and penchant for doing cute things in her bra and panties. Then there is the gay roommate, who dispenses sage advice at opportune times. Apparently, gay males have no life until a hot, single woman is sobbing in their arms. Kate is the neurotic, fast-talking tart who needs to be put in her place.

These are stock characters, but Rudd’s Henry threw me. He’s very funny — hilarious even — in every misstep the movie makes. His lines could even be considered classics in a slightly better film. When the girls deflect their rage onto each other, Rudd somehow stays sane and grounded. It helps that he plays it almost entirely straight, even as the script falls back on cheap slapstick and flatulence jokes. At one point, a skit with an obese dog is popped into the script that will make you ponder the profession of veterinarians.

Rudd aside, though, Over Her Dead Body is filled with bland, overacted dialogue and stale formulas. Regarding ghost-movie clichés: I swear here and now I will chuck nacho cheese at the screen the next time a living character has a conversation with an invisible dead character in public. The film also seems poorly made. Notice the dodgy dialogue dubbing of the scene in the supermarket. Apparently, someone forgot to turn the microphones on that day.

This is TV director Jeff Lowell’s first feature film, and it shows, but not as bad as it does for Langoria, who couldn’t act her way out of a spray-tan booth, which probably explains her ghastly color. Rudd, though, really shines considering the material has been done to death … and back again.

Atoned for our sins ... and theirs

By the time Atonement’s two characters are running on the beach, preoccupied with each others’ touch in the foamy water below the Cliffs of Dover, you will be filled with regret and deep longing, a kind that will fill your soul with unquenchable sadness.

And if you’re like me, you will think of those you love and ponder your encounters with them as dreams, white wisps of memory that are scattered by the most delicate of breezes. Not that any part of Atonement is a dream — no spoilers here — but it frames love inside a frail construction, so frail that the slightest disruption will cause an abrupt conclusion and endless heartache.

Atonement, directed by Pride & Prejudice’s Joe Wright and based on Ian McEwan’s bestseller, is quite simply one of the best films of this year. It is also one of the saddest.

The whole movie takes place over about 60 years (we follow one character into old age), but the vast majority of it takes place within a four year period beginning just before Hitler invades his neighbors in Europe. We begin by swooping down on a typewriter and a string of letters churning from it. The typewriter is a motif that appears frequently — once to show us a very dirty word and many more times through the soundtrack, which sounds like an orchestra of clicking keys. The fingers orchestrating these hammering letters belong to 13-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan), kid sister to Cecilia (Keira Knightley), a beautiful socialite who somehow transcends bratiness with elegance.

Despite an apparent vast difference in social class, Cecelia falls in love with her housekeeper’s son, Robbie (James McAvoy), and before they can openly profess their love at a summer party, Briony orchestrates a lie, or maybe just a misunderstanding, that alters everyone’s lives in ways that are first unfortunate and later hopelessly tragic.

Knightley and McAvoy share scenes so tender and honest that we believe their love not because of the scenes they’re placed in, but because each is so carefully tuned to the characters that their actions seem genuine. They share a scene at a fountain (told from two perspectives) that exhibits the spontaneity and goofiness of new romances. When they kiss it’s like worlds colliding. When they are separated it hurts us more than it does them.

And what a fascinating and curious performance Ronan gives as the little girl: her tall lanky presence, those piercing eyes and astonished looks, her manipulated confession … all of it is remarkable acting. Even the way she walks around her house — straight lines, right angles, usually stomping — seems to be a skill in itself. Her performance is strengthened by Romola Garai, who plays Briony as a nurse at 17 years old.

Also a nurse is Cecilia (still Knightley), although four years later she and Briony still aren’t talking after the dinner party that changed their lives. Robbie, we learn, was sent to jail and then later paroled under the condition that he enlist to fight the Nazis. After a brief meeting with Cecilia to re-establish their love, Robbie ships out and eventually finds himself in the mass evacuation of Dunkirk, in which 300,000 French and British soldiers were evacuated from France as German troops marched onto them.

Atonement offers a view of the evacuation through a nearly-five-minute unbroken shot that features what must be about 5,000 extras, carnival rides, a beached ship, horse executions, dialogue, a choir, wide shots, close-ups, and handheld and crane shots. This single shot is one of the greatest ever filmed, right up there with those long tracking shots from Goodfellas and Touch of Evil. Atonement is no one-trick pony either: the entire film is photographed with exquisite detail and many of the shots could be paused to be made into postcards (one actually is).

As great as the photography is, though, Atonement is made masterful through its delicate story. Cecilia and Robbie are one of the great romances of the cinema. That a 13-year-old gets between them and causes such irreparable harm is a tragedy, and it is made all the more tragic by what Briony does to them further, and then to us as an audience.

Atonement reminds me a great deal of The English Patient, which won the best picture Oscar in 1996. Both films were originally novels, both utilize flashbacks and reference an anonymous text within the story, both take place during the outbreak of World War II, and both are about separated lovers torn apart by unfortunate circumstances caused by a third party. Amid the similarities, though, they are still very different movies. I would even argue that they are companion pieces — they require each other — if only because they show how everlasting love is by showing how delicate it can be when it’s true. English Patient’s characters had the luxury of living large portions of their lives; Atonement’s characters are still so young and yet burdened by situations that are beyond their years.

Hollywood buzz is already calling for Oscar nominations for Knightley, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, director Wright and Christopher Hampton’s screenplay interpretation of the McEwan novel. Oh, and best picture. Give’em the nominations. They deserve them. Every one.