Jon Hamm with a mustache. (YouTube)

— Mindy Kaling was spotted pleading with John Mayer to give his expert opinion on her love life at Koi in the Trump SoHo. We can only speculate that his answer involved calling her genitals racist.

— Jon Hamm plays Aimee Mann's director in her new music video for Labrador:
http://youtu.be/XA1cX-wgMdM

— A bevy of musical greats made a show last night in memorial of Broadway composer Marvin Hamlisch. Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Aretha Franklin and Itzhak Perlman performed for VIPs including Mike Nichols, Nancy Pelosi, Regis Philbin, Susan Lucci, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alan Cumming, Sheldon Harnick, Mary Rodgers and Paul Shaffer.

— Eva Longoria and Mark Sanchez were spotted holding hands while leaving a romantic dinner at Daniel. You know, if you care about that kind of thing.

— And in chair-related news, Clint Eastwood feels bad about making fun of the president, and calls himself a Libertarian. Also he has no respect for tables.
http://youtu.be/7mIC8Nw7LqI

Adams and Eastwood in Trouble with the Curve.

In the often illustrious career oeuvre of Clint Eastwood, Trouble with the Curve is a minor entry, a cinematic footnote. Worse yet, the screenplay and first-time direction, by Mr. Eastwood’s friend and long-time producing partner Robert Lorenz, seems like a loyalty benefit, a lazy afterthought. After such post-Dirty Harry triumphs as Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, color it disappointing. 

Eastwood plays Gus Lobel, a miserable old codger whose sharp-tongued snarl and cracked Gravel Gertie grumble makes him sound like the same sourball he played in his previous also-ran, Grand Torino. Gus is a grizzled talent scout with the Atlanta Braves with more wrinkles in his face than the gray hairs on his balding head. He’s sick, and he’s seen better days, but even if the apple won’t bite, he’s not giving up and he’s not giving in. Gus may breakfast on tinned Spam, trip over chairs and other simple household obstacles and harrumph his way through the Medicare years, but he can still spot a future baseball star from an airplane. Time is passing him by (he doesn’t even use a computer, which makes him a T. Rex after my own heart), but Gus can still hear the mark of a great pitcher by the crack of a bat. The problem is, his eyesight is failing so fast that he can’t always see what he’s doing, even when he hears it. One of his greatest discoveries was a batter who has lost his stride. Now the Braves are questioning his judgment. They want to draft a hot young rookie batter using new technology (shades of Moneyball), and with only three months to go before his contract expires, Gus wants one last chance to prove his value. If he can’t see what he’s supposed to be appraising, he could be fired. He needs help, and the only person he can call on is his resentful daughter Mickey (Amy Adam). Gus has always been a self-absorbed absentee father with poor parenting skills, and Mickey is now a successful Atlanta lawyer—on the verge of becoming a partner in her firm—who doesn’t want anything to do with him. But in the kind of plot contrivance you find only in the movies, Mickey knows more about baseball than her father. Go figure. Reluctantly, she takes her first weekend off in seven years, showing up on Gus’ scouting trip to North Carolina and straining her credibility with the competitive sharks in line for her promotion in order to save her dad’s reputation. When the hotshot pitcher the Braves want to hire fails to impress him, Gus has to find a way to buck authority that could alter the future of baseball.

Half domestic family drama, half gentle sports saga with the saga part missing, Trouble with the Curve is less riveting than it ought to be. Amy Adams more than makes up for her ill-fated appearance in the abominable The Master,and I must admit I laughed at the sight of macho Marlboro Man Eastwood busting up a chair, kicking it into a corner and calling it “feng shui.” But the hearty moments are rare, and Randy Brown’s screenplay fails to resist sentimentality. (In one scene, Gus visits his wife’s grave and speaks the lyrics to “You Are My Sunshine,” bordering on embarrassment.) A star of this caliber has earned the right to an off-day at the movies, but I guess I have come to expect a whole lot more. Meanwhile, Mickey falls for a former Red Sox pitcher named Johnny “The Flame” Flanagan (a miscast Justin Timberlake), who scouts for a rival team. This is called conflict. The estranged father-daughter relationship, however, just plods along between innings. Against Gus’ objections, the Braves overrule him and pick the pitcher he considered flawed. Now it’s up to Mickey to prove to John Goodman, Robert Patrick, Matthew Lillard and other accomplished cast members playing friends, enemies and assorted cynics on the Braves management staff that their prize catch cannot hit a curve ball. She also presents her own discovery as a replacement, just in time for a corny ending I did not find entirely convincing. If you believe an accomplished, self-made woman gives up a law partnership to manage the career of an unknown, then there’s this lifetime championship trophy with your name on it in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, that I can sell you cheap.

rreed@observer.com

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE

Running Time 111 minutes

Written by Randy Brown

Directed by Robert Lorenz

Starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams and John Goodman

2/4

Why Truman? "He got mad at the people who bum-wrapped his daughter."  But, as for good Presidents: "We haven't seen one for a while." If Barack Obama wants Clint Eastwood's support, he'll have to start Sasha or Malia on a music career, then threaten music critics with physical harm, probably!

DiCaprio as Hoover.

In spite of a fusillade of P.R. overkill about what a brave, risk-taking actor he is, and how he spent five hours a day in a makeup chair squirming, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrait of a balding, sweaty, gristle-chewing, half-mad J. Edgar Hoover is gimmicky play acting. J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s exhausting chronicle of power obsession about the enigmatic, self-serving egomaniac who, as director of the F.B.I., kept America trembling with terror for half a century under the phony guise of patriotism, is a long, tedious and hollow disappointment.

Mr. Eastwood is too old to tackle a personality so complex; he knows nothing about what it takes to turn the character flaws of a cross-dressing mama’s boy into an attention-craving closet queen like Hoover. And how many prosthetics do we have to endure to watch Leonardo DiCaprio fake his way through roles like Howard Hughes and the forthcoming Frank Sinatra and Jay Gatsby—roles for which he is totally unsuited and therefore miscast. For now, we have another miscalculation in a bloodless film about a monster more pathetic than dangerous, with an odd, rambling screenplay by Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk) that meanders all over the place unable to tell a story with any kind of narrative coherence. It’s not that J. Edgar is such a bad movie. (It’s not Melancholia.) But it is boring and ineffectual. There’s no passion behind it.

From his early days in the Justice Department to his death in 1972 at age 77, the movie leans heavily on the Max Factor jar to show boyish, cherubic Mr. DiCaprio in every phase of a controversial life. Some of the facts are a matter of public record. Named by Calvin Coolidge as the sixth director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar rose to glory and in 1935 was appointed by U. S. Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone (Ken Howard) as the first director of the newly organized F.B.I.—a position he assumed was “for life.” For the next 36 years he made all the rules, sodomized the Constitution, declared war on everything he disliked from “Bolshevik radicals” to Martin Luther King, set back the progress of the civil rights movement, used force to root out every suspected communist, and arrested 4,000 people by the time he was only 24 years old. Yes, he initiated a lot of crime-fighting technology, including fingerprints, wire-tapping and forensics labs. But he also used the F.B.I. to intimidate celebrities and public figures, harass political activists, and illegally collect secret files of alleged evidence and hearsay against everyone from mob bosses to Marilyn Monroe. Insanely jealous, he fired staff members with poor educations and cheap wardrobes and ruined the careers of special law-enforcement agents who became heroes in the tabloids, such as Chicago’s Melvin Purvis, the man who actually tracked down and killed John Dillinger while Hoover took all the credit and drove him to suicide in 1960. Soft-soaping his corruption, the movie barely touches on these facts and refuses to take a stand on the many ways he proved himself a major hypocrite. While ranting homophobic prejudices against gays, he was a closet homosexual who carried on a private love affair with assistant deputy F.B.I. director Clyde Tolson (played softly by Armie Hammer, who appeared as Mark Zuckerberg’s handsome twin adversaries in The Social Network). Inseparable, the two men are shown kissing only one time in their 40-year relationship, following a fist fight on the floor when Hoover announced he was going to marry Dorothy Lamour. Despite documented eyewitness accounts of Hoover’s secret passion for cross-dressing, fueled by his strong, dominating mother (Judi Dench, flawless again), he is revealed posing with his mother’s necklace and silk dress against his chest only once, following her death. (F.B.I. employees behind his back called him “J. Edna Hoover”.)

Unable or unwilling to expose the elements that made him really interesting (Mr. Eastwood has ill-advisedly declared Hoover’s private life “none of my business”), the film plods along timidly without the courage of its own convictions. Remaining annoyingly passive about a diabolically conflicted despot while retaining an air of ambivalence is one of the major flaws in a film that compiles a lot of research with no dramatic payoff. Without a clear narrative arc, the script and direction lead us astray in a series of endless distractions. In the form of notes dictated for a memoir that was never published, the different periods in Hoover’s reign are framed in episodes connected with an unwieldy and less-than-unifying precision, giving Mr. DiCaprio myriad chances for double facials, young and old. His beginnings are illustrated by his deportation of liberal Jewish political dissident Emma Goldman (Jessica Hecht). Under the guise of protecting apple pie and the “American way,” his motto was “Knowledge is power,” but after the Depression, when the world changed, he didn’t change with it. Instead, he started spying on his enemies without benefit of search warrants, collecting harmful personal information on people of fame and influence, including Eleanor Roosevelt for being a lesbian, and going so far as to eventually threaten and intimidate Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with rumors of his brother Jack’s Hollywood sexcapades. As early as 1932, before the official organization of the F.B.I., he feasted on personal publicity from the kidnapping of the baby of Charles Lindbergh (Josh Lucas), although he had no jurisdiction over the case, posing for photos kissing Shirley Temple, schmoozing with Ginger Rogers at the Stork Club, and creating a feeding frenzy in the press that led to the execution of immigrant Bruno Hauptmann (whom he falsely claimed to have captured bare-handed) without concrete proof of his guilt. His phony bravura did, to be truthful, result in the eventual passing of the “Lindbergh law,” making kidnapping a federal offense punishable by death. This is one of the persistent contradictions in the life of J. Edgar—every transgression was followed by a triumph. Unfortunately, all of these facts are crudely assembled with the rudimentary casualness of a school play. It is fascinating to learn that Hoover never personally made a single arrest, perjuring himself in Congress by taking credit for all of them. Hooked on amphetamine injections, he ended his career a graying, miserable wreck, still craving the affection of the American people, who instead have now all but forgotten him. Was he ever happy? Even in the end, as two sick, doddering old men, Hoover and Tolson were never able to admit their love. When J. Edgar died, newly inaugurated president Richard Nixon went apoplectic. “Seal off his office, change the locks, do what you have to do—I want those fucking files!” he ordered. But they were gone. The only two people who saw through him were his secret lover Clyde, who inherited his home, job and everything he owned, and his longtime private secretary, Helen Gandy (a wasted Naomi Watts), who stood by him through every trumped-up triumph and every embellished claim to achievement, and is last seen after his death shredding all of his files before Nixon could get to them, thus averting a bigger scandal than Watergate.

As a colorful chapter in American infamy, it’s a story worth telling in a better, more suspenseful film, but J. Edgar does not hang together. Mr. DiCaprio’s King of the G-Men is no new-age, old-school rough guy like Elliot Ness. He’s something of a sawed-off pipsqueak with a mean-spirited and ruthless pursuit of personal glory at everyone else’s expense. I expected more from a movie about the most feared man in America for half a century. Whatever else you think about him, in retrospect, he had balls of brass—an essential quality replaced in J. Edgar by dull indifference.

rreed@observer.com

J. EDGAR

Running Time 137 minutes

Written by Dustin Lance Black

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Naomi Watts

2/4

1. Joaquin Phoenix in the Letterdome Again

Possibly severely-disturbed actor Joaquin Phoenix's last appearance on CBS's Late Show was for the ages: Phoenix rambled and mumbled his way into infamy while the famously unflappable David Letterman actually seemed a little flapped by the experience. Now that Phoenix and brother-in-law Casey Affleck are promoting their (mock?) documentary, I'm Still Here, Phoenix is heading back to the guest's chair. Critics are still divided on the question of whether Affleck and Phoenix pulled off an elaborate hoax or not, so Phoenix's next Late Show appearance could end up being just as festive as his first. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVg-c9P2CKc

2. Matt Damon Sees Dead People, Clint Eastwood Tells Him So

Eastwood and Damon have collaborated on a movie titled Hereafter, which is about Damon seeing the dead. The plot supposedly folds in the 2004 South Asian tsunamis and various wan, sad folks who just want Matt Damon to see the dead for them even though he is grimly clear on not wanting to at all, ever. The movie might be excellent, considering Clint Eastwood's at the helm--whatever the case, the trailer is the talk of the web today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XvJwTYnKww&feature=player_embedded

3. Far Too Close To The Mouth of Hell

We don't usually end this collection of viral samples on a somber note, but sometimes a clip goes viral that's so surreal it seems willfully shortsighted to ignore it. That's the case with Walter McCaffrey's brief bit of footage from moments after a San Bruno, CA neighborhood began to burn from a massive gas pipeline explosion on Thursday, Sept. 9. McCaffrey's footage caught him in a whirlwind of panic as he looked over the side of his balcony to see the rest of the neighborhood in flames. The bleeping on the video's soundtrack only makes it clear McCaffrey reacted to the disaster in the most fundamentally human way imaginable, by swearing in fear and awe and telling other people to stay away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c41OcnacYs

The genealogy of the insult was firmly established in the history of the world. Your tribe-your "people"-guaranteed sameness of experience. You and they shared physical characteristics, language and idiom, customs and culture, geographical place, chains of friends and acquaintances. Purity of context meant consistency of experience. Homogeneity protected you against life's terrible shocks and jolts. Dirt was "out there." Your house rose from the dirt; if you fell behind in life's race, you would fall in the dirt; you yourself came from the dirt and would be buried in it. The "other"-the inexplicable stranger, the blow from outside, the shock from nowhere-was, in his or her inimical alienness, essentially dirt.

Our great blessing is that this fearful mythologizing of the other that hangs around the world's neck has mostly vanished in America. Tribal virulence is still a potent force in this country, but its anathemas are not as visceral. To call anyone "dirty" somehow feels self-conscious and outdated. Even bigots have to see the multicultural world in multicultural colors now, whether they like it or not. We are so beautifully saturated with otherness everywhere we look that dirt itself is unavailable to quavering psyches as a metaphor. In multicultural America, dirt is simply a literal, morally neutral fact.

Well, maybe not so morally neutral at that. Soil is the new dirt, and soil is good. (The old, bad dirt has become germs and bacteria-out of sight, out of mind, until the next scare of terrorism or disease.) The organic movement could well be the sign of a more cosmopolitan society. Rather than feeling surrounded by dirt against which we have to protect ourselves, more and more of us believe that our environment abounds in soil in which we can sow better futures. As we have grown to feel comfortable with all sorts of different-seeming people, we have learned that dirt is the unifying origin of life, not merely its reducing finale. As the "other" has become us, dirt has become soil.

Even the identification of urban areas with dirt, and the suburbs or the country with cleanliness or at least less dirt, is now passé. New York as a "dirty" place is so '70s-so, you know, Kojak. No doubt the city is in better hygienic shape than it was in that depressed, recessionary decade, but Gotham is still as grimy as any bustling capital of the world. Yet no one nowadays would think of applying "dirty" pejoratively to New York. The city is too expensive to live in, for one thing. But the variegated wholeness of the five boroughs has changed in other ways, too. Consider Kojak again. In the recent revival of that old TV series, the egregiously ethnic (read: tribal) Telly Savalas was replaced by the black, "differently" named Ving Rhames. American cities are less and less divided into tribal enclaves. As the idea of aliens inhabiting another neighborhood has dissipated, so has the conception of New York-and any great American city-as a dangerous, "dirty" place.

Of course, along with the negative meaning, the positive connotations of dirt have vanished, too. If the other was repulsively dirty, the other was also deliciously dirty. That's because sex was once publicly held to be dirty, and so sex with the dirty other was exponentially more exciting and fulfilling. Now sex itself has famously lost its thrilling association with dirt. This is too bad because human beings need what the philosopher Jean Wahl once called "transcendence downward." We need to be able to mock death by re-creating its deconstruction of our routine and material lives and then recovering our ordinariness once again. You get "down and dirty," and then it's a shower and clean clothes and back to work again on Monday.

Not anymore. As we've become a "society of the spectacle," to borrow a phrase; as we've grown accustomed to spending most of our time watching our computer screens, and our iPad screens, and our iPhone screens, and our TV screens, and our movie screens, the essence of pornography-watching as the pleasure principle-has become the normal crux of our days. Sex was once the epitome of dirt because sex is the total merging of familiar experience with the alienness of the other. But now, with the routinization of pornography, sex has become the new purity-you spend the weekend with your iThings, and then it's a shower and clean clothes and back to pornography on your computer at work on Monday. Pornography makes sex antiseptic and severs contact with the other. Solipsism is the new tribalism.

Follow the revolutions in the career of dirt and you encounter one "new" reality after another. Here's the final one: Movie violence is the new movie sex. With the normalization of pornography's isolated rituals of sex, sex no longer has a place in the context of story or character. The untitillating boredom of sex as part of a character's life and a plot is certainly why violence has a wider appeal than sex to the teenagers who make up the global market for movies. Who wants to figure out the motivations driving Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct when you can just watch some blonde screwing some guy on one of a zillion Web sites? What used to be called "sex scenes" are being phased out of American movies, even as computer-generated images are making American violence as aesthetically refined as Japanese violence. Indeed, ever since John Malkovich put Clint Eastwood's gun in his mouth in In the Line of Fire, movie violence has acquired the stylistics of movie sex.

But then, unlike sex, violence has never been considered dirty. Rather, violence has always been how you "clean" up the "dirt." Dirty Harry was culturally immaculate, remember? Now he's Pixelated Harry, and that violence in which he specialized has almost banned sex from film. Maybe we haven't come so far after all.

editorial@observer.com

Following in the worn avenger footprints of early gut-riddled Clint Eastwood crime melodramas, Charles Bronson in Death Wish and even Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Mr. Caine plays the title role—an elderly pensioner who lives in a crumbling old London housing project minding his own business, dividing his time between hospital visits to see his ailing wife and chess games at the pub with his only friend, a fellow veteran named Leonard. Life is uneventful until his wife dies and Leonard falls prey to the warring drug gangs that hang out in a nearby underpass, shooting heroin and harassing seniors. They leave excrement in mail boxes, spit on defenseless invalids and kill women and children just for sport. Distraught when the police offer no solution and enraged when they release the thugs who stabbed Leonard, Harry takes the law into his own hands. This is one old geezer whom it’s better not to mess with. Like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, Harry also happens to be an ex-Marine—no stranger to guns and knives, he spent years battling the IRA in Ulster. When this rheumy-eyed, stumbling old war veteran goes on a rampage, look out. Or, better still, look the other way. This is not Noël Coward’s London, but a bleak toilet hole overrun with youthful zombies, snarling at authority and collecting lethal weapons in the way some kids collect video games.

The cops (Ian Glen and a miscast Emily Mortimer, giving her first dull screen performance) are either helpless, complacent or smug. So Harry goes underground to buy an automatic, into a dark subterranean midnight world of predatory human vermin so vile they seem to have been dreamed up by Hieronymus Bosch. Bones shatter, heads are blown away and the population trembles. The film goes to great lengths to make Harry a hero (“He’s doing us a favor,” says the police inspector), and it ultimately becomes a celebration of a vigilante aesthetic. Praise the octogenarian mavericks, it preaches. They’re our only salvation.

It makes for a repellent but not uninteresting panorama of bloody carnage in which Harry, with pistols blazing, rids society of the rats and snakes before they multiply. But encouraging criminal chaos seems morally dubious to me. When the police finally try to crack down, the underworld retaliates, burning down the neighborhood, driving everyone in uniform away in terror and intimidation, and the movie turns surreal. Freshman director Daniel Barber and writer Gary Young insist everything is true—that today’s England is, in fact, worse than anything shown here. But Harry Brown is so deliberately sick and twisted that many scenes fail the credibility test and pessimism reigns throughout. It must be said that even when it moves from social realism to grotesque sensationalism, the film makes the most of a great actor’s resources. Mr. Caine is impeccable in a fastidious performance of contrast and compassion—lonely and subdued at first, ashen-faced with his world in ruins; then hot as a branding iron in the flush of revenge. The ugly stuff in this movie is so over the top that sometimes you are forced to stifle a laugh, but the star always comes through. So good that he even makes you feel sorry for him, he is the driving force that keeps an otherwise despicable movie alive, and saves the audience from hysterics.

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 97 minutes
Written by: Gary Young
Directed by: Daniel Barber
Starring:  Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Ian Glen

2 Eyeballs out of 4

If I went to Clint Eastwood’s rousing, rah-rah Invictus with less enthusiasm than some of my colleagues, it’s because I am weary of all these worthy filmmakers churning out movies about South Africa nobody wants to see, and I dreaded one more exposure to starving babies and racial violence. I am happy to report that Invictus has none of this. It’s about sports and politics, and how South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, combined both to close the gap between opposing black and white factions and lead his country to the 1995 Rugby World Cup title. The film is flawed, rambling and much too long, but in the end it leaves the audience cheering.

Invictus begins when Mandela (Morgan Freeman) is freed, after 27 years in prison, to govern a free South Africa. Twenty-three million people went to the polls and voted side by side, black and white, in a united effort to restore peace and world respect after decades of the hell known as apartheid. Mandela inherits a new country riddled with crime, unemployment, resentment, rage and fear. Tension reigns between the once-oppressed blacks and the hated white “Afrikaners” who are now a minority but are still in control of the police, the military and the economy. Desperate to build a “rainbow nation” based on compassion, restraint and generosity, the newly sworn-in Mandela’s first bold move is to restore the national passion for rugby signified by South Africa’s almost totally white team, the Springboks, defying his own cabinet in the process, and then enlisting the team captain, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help him heal the wounds of both the blacks and the whites who used to beat and torture them. The two men discover a lot in common: leading by example, meeting challenges with patriotic songs, and feeding each other the mutual inspiration to achieve racial harmony with a peace that is colorblind. Mr. Eastwood catalogs every strategy, game by game, and the last 40 minutes detail the day of the big match. Persuading Mr. Freeman to tackle the role of Mandela didn’t require much arm-twisting. He craved it from inception, bought the movie rights to Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by journalist John Carlin, the book with the long-winded title on which Invictus is based, hired a transported South African now living in California named Anthony Peckham to write the screenplay and talked his friend Clint Eastwood into directing. So Mr. Freeman as Mandela is no accident. The casting seemed preordained. You could say the movie would never have happened without him. Although hardly accidental, the casting paid off. From everything I have seen of Mr. Mandela, and from the memories I have of meeting him personally on several occasions, Mr. Freeman gets everything right: the walk, the cadences in the voice, the out-front and straight-ahead posture and the inner radiance that connect his thoughts and his words with visible facial computations—many of the qualities that make Mr. Mandela an inspiring leader. You’ve heard about wearing your heart on your sleeve; Mr. Freeman’s is reflected in his eyes. With American presidents, actors do caricatures. With Mandela, Mr. Freeman doesn’t bother with impersonation. He merely activates the elegance and dignity within himself. The best thing about the movie is that he does it all without genuflecting or sanctifying a world leader who has always been, first and foremost, a man with a strong sense of humanity. The script makes it clear that Mr. Mandela is no saint. While he devoted himself to uniting a polarized nation, he neglected his family. His children resented him bitterly, two wives divorced him and there is evidence that he was no stranger to loneliness.

Matt Damon is more hobbled with accents than Mr. Freeman, and they don’t all come together at the same time. Not exactly dream casting as the captain and star of the controversial Springboks, Mr. Damon first sounds French, then like a ratchety-voiced Afrikaner in a patois that is hard to understand, and almost always out of place. Unrecognizable in his little green and gold silk shorts with peroxided hair, bulging thighs and a white-bread weight gain, he’s a big, blond, beefed-up Muscle McGurk. Having said all of that, I admit he is also sincere, dedicated and very worth watching. He must have spent the past two years locked in a gym.

The overuse of the South African national anthem gets boring; the movie needs a pair of scissors; and the use of obvious symbolism is often unsettling. Naming the movie after a corny poem Mandela reads aloud in a flashback to his prison cell is a stretch. O.K., we get the symbol of a changing society. But the scene of cops in a white patrol car parked outside the stadium who chase away a black street urchin and then share their radio with the kid as the Springboks head for victory, all of them screaming and hugging each other, suddenly oblivious to skin color, followed by a close-up of a white hand and a black hand clutching the World Cup together? Subtlety is not a strength here, but pandering to heart-tugging cliches in a Clint Eastwood film is downright embarrassing.

rreed@observer.com

Tuesday: Three Amigos
Our favorite comeback story of 2009? Try Chevy Chase. Having spent the last twenty years starring in projects with titles like The Karate Dog, Bad Meat and, well, not a whole lot else, the prickly star returned with a bang thanks to NBC. After a successful guest stint on Chuck, Mr. Chase has been knocking it out of the park on Community (are you still not watching that show?), where he has recaptured that perfect blend of snarky know-it-all and bemused dullard that made him famous. The bemused dullard is on full display in Three Amigos, where, among other things, Mr. Chase's Dusty Bottoms mistakenly kills the "invisible swordsman" out of sheer laziness. Fun fact: this is the only feature film that Lorne Michaels has a writing credit on! [HBO Comedy, 12:50 p.m.]

Wednesday: Gran Torino
With Clint Eastwood's yearly December offering hitting theaters on Friday (this time in the form of Invictus), it seems like the perfect time to revisit Gran Torino. Released last December, the film is a typical Eastwood directorial affair: economical, brisk, gruff and obvious. But what separates it out from his recent spate of awards-bait is that he's also the star. As a cross between Harry Callahan, Shane and Archie Bunker, Mr. Eastwood owns the screen to such a degree, that we're still kind of shocked he didn't get an Oscar nomination for his work. [Cinemax, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: Fringe
File this under: duh! Last Thursday's perfectly adequate episode of Fringe was the highest rated of the season... on a night when both Grey's Anatomy and CSI were in reruns. One of the more boneheaded decisions we've seen in quite some time was Fox's choice to put its sophomore science-fiction serial on Thursday nights at 9; Fringe has consistently run fourth, meaning its been stuck on the bubble of cancelation. The series still isn't quite there just yet—Fringe needs to focus more on the mythology and the characters and less on the stand alone whodunits—but it's always consistently entertaining and, at times, downright scary. One complaint: not enough Joshua Jackson (Pacey for life!), whose character could become a cocky jerk on the level of Matthew Fox if given the chance. [Fox, 9 p.m.]

Friday: Obsessed
Why you should watch Obsessed—a surprise B-movie hit last spring—can be summed up in just three words: Beyonce kicks ass. Any other reasons seem totally extraneous. [Starz, 8:10 p.m.]

Tuesday: Gremlins
Gremlins is a Christmas movie, if you like Christmas movies where little green monsters terrorize and gruesomely kill many inhabitants of a Capra-esque town. Despite being written by noted saccharinist Chris Columbus (Home Alone) and executive-produced by Steven Spielberg (himself no stranger to shmaltz), Gremlins is pretty harsh stuff for children. In fact, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it helped herald in the era of PG-13 ratings. If it weren't for that adorable Gizmo, we don't think we could have watched this when we were kids without having a panic attack. [AMC, 3 p.m.]

Wednesday: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
We affectionately call Cristian Mungiu's 2007 Romanian film the "Children of Men of abortion movies". His harrowing tale of two students trying to procure an illegal abortion in 1987 Romania is a brutal (brutal!) viewing experience, thanks in large part to Mr. Mungiu's love of long takes. Honestly, it feels like there are only 10 cuts in the entire film. In one particular stretch, the camera stays locked on star Anamaria Marinca for nearly eight minutes and the young actress, trapped in the frame like a prisoner, doesn't disappoint; she conveys more emotion with strained and worried glances than most Hollywood stars can with full soliloquies. [Sundance, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: L.A. Confidential
Looking back at the movies we liked in college is sometimes as embarrassing as seeing old photos of ourselves. (Did we really love American Beauty? And are we really wearing Adidas pants? Ugh!) Thankfully, L.A. Confidential doesn't fall into that trap. It's hard to believe Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland helped create one of the best movies from the last decade, but thanks to an extraordinary cast and James Ellroy's source novel, it would have been pretty hard for them to screw this up. L.A. Confidential might not be Chinatown, but it's damn close. [Starz, 4:15 a.m.]

Friday: Greatest Holiday Movies: TV & Film Countdown
If you're like us, you haven't been able to keep up with all the holiday movies airing on cable during the last couple of weeks. There just isn't enough time! Thankfully NBC has people like us covered. This countdown show might be more suited to VH1, but since many of our favorites are represented, who cares? It's a lot easier to watch the end of It's a Wonderful Life than to sit through the entire thing for the 60th time. [NBC, 8 p.m.]