What the Flick

Oops, it seems WTF has once again been distracted by the drudgery of daily life -- the dopey new people next door, the tedium of work-related travel, not to mention work itself -- but that doesn't mean we haven't been seeing those movies. One movie that's worth driving to the mall for is THE ILLUSIONIST, a moody, well-acted mystery romance involving a magician (Edward Norton), a dogged detective (Paul Giamatti), a lovely Duchess (Jennifer Biel), and a prince of the Hapsburg empire. The romance here...

By the time you read this, MIAMI VICE will probably be due out on DVD in short order. I'm not sure how to recommend it in that case, as part of what I loved about it was how gorgeous it looked wall-to-wall in the Cinerama Dome. As Sonny Crockett, the character that made Don Johnson a household name, Colin Farrell was...

...could make me like FRIENDS WITH MONEY, which was seriously off key. I just didn't get it. I mean, I get the title, but the movie was mostly nonsensible.

Set in LA, it's the story of 4 friends, 3 married and with money (and now I'm wondering, is that some sort of not so subtle social commentary?) and one without (Jennifer Aniston). The married friends are a clothing designer (Frances McDormand) married to a fey but not gay guy, some sort of family money (Joan Cusack), and half of a husband and wife screenwriting team (Catherine Keener). Each was essentially a selfish bitch in her own right (they were so annoying and interchangeable that I never could get their names straight) who spent most of the ride home from any group event talking about one or all of the other's husbands (or, in the case of single Jennifer, bad life choices). Meanwhile, the one without money deserved to be that way: a pot-smoking underachieving housecleaner who quit her private-school teaching job because the parents were annoying. I hated them all and -- I'll go ahead and say it -- wanted them to die in a wildfire or earthquake or some other California natural disaster, which sounds harsh but in retrospect seems really too good for them.

Remember, oh, last year, when THE SQUID AND THE WHALE came out and you were asking yourself, what is that about? Is it some horror movie about a battle to the death between Orca and some many-tentacled denizen of the deep? Is it some heartwarming animal story like MARCH OF THE PENGUINS? Is it the story of a petit bourgois literary-type family living in Park Slope in 1986 as the marriage falls apart and the kids take it hard? Oh, I bet you were so not asking yourself that last question. And yet, if you had, ...