Even Bill Hader kind of looks like Dylan/Dermot

Thank God. That's all we have to say about this weekend's Saturday Night Live game show, "Dylan McDermott or Dermot Mulroney?" While almost every other scene from the Jamie Foxx-hosted show congealed in a murky mess around some stale ’90s racial humor (Tyler Perry! How Black Is That! Tree Pimps! Ding Dongs! Bitch, What's the Answer?), there was one joke that transcended its original premise, that all white guys look the same to black people. Totally on-point, they managed to get the two actors that no one (not even us) can tell the difference between ... not even the actors themselves.

Trying to explain the humor of this sketch to a friend, we ended up getting confused ourselves and saying Dylan Mulroney was the gay guy in My Best Friend's Wedding.

And hot tip: the "Swarovski Crystals" bit maybe had the best jokes-per-minute ratio of any Saturday Night Live sketch ... ever.

Dermot Mulroney will be Mike Markkula (Getty Images)

Dermot Mulroney--the actor from My Best Friend's Wedding and The New Girl who is often confused for Party Monsters and American Horror Story's Dylan McDermott--has taken a role in the non-Aaron Sorkin-related Steve Jobs biopic.

Is that the one with Ashton Kutcher? We're so confused!

Vulture explains:

Mulroney will portray Mike Markkula, an early investor and eventual CEO. The New York Times in 1997 said of Markkula that Apple's "quixotic nature, and thus its strengths and its weaknesses, has much to do with Mr. Markkula's personality and his passions."

And here is Mr. Markkula, talking about the early Apple days. Can you spot a resemblance?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6LlTikerBs

Mr. Mulrooney will be playing against Mr. Kutcher, which unfortunately means that this movie's success will be riding on the strength of Mr. Mulrooney's personality and his passions (as well as that of his costars, Matthew Modine and Josh Gad). Can someone just hire Anthony Michael Hall and Noah Wyle back for one of these productions?

Neeson.

Prepare to be devastated. Films of hair-raising terror about people doing unspeakable things to each other are a dime a dozen, usually with a built-in hole in their armor (people can always outsmart people). But movies about helpless humans versus uncontrollable nature are rare. A new one called The Grey, about the survivors of an airplane crash in the frozen wastes of Alaska at the mercy of carnivorous wolves, is the movie equivalent of a wet finger in a hot socket.

This is the scariest wilderness survival movie about men stalked by animals since Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins landed on the menu of a bloodthirsty, 10-ton grizzly in Lee Tamahori’s 1997 thriller The Edge, written by David Mamet. Liam Neeson stars as a decent man doing a tour of duty in an isolated oil refinery in the Alaskan wilds with a crew of ex-cons, drifters and other rejects from society with whom he has nothing in common. Haunted by memories of better times, a woman who left him and a small ray of hope that when he gets back to civilization he’ll play a better hand of poker, he boards a plane home that crashes in an explosion of flames with only six survivors. Cut off from cell phone signals and every other form of communication, the men are wounded, suffering from frostbite, understandably pessimistic, pondering suicide and surrounded by howling wolves. As the men crawl away from the wreckage to search for a sign of life, the sound of a helicopter overhead or the curl of smoke from a remote cabin chimney, the wolves get closer. I’ve read that wolves get a bad rap; they’re not aggressive and run from people. These wolves are different. They’re ravenous, territorial timber wolves—carnivorous, bloodthirsty, hungry for meat. While the dwindling handful of survivors search for a way to defend themselves, scenes filled with nerve-frying suspense build steadily, paralyzing you with anxiety. If possible, wear gloves or your nails could get chewed to the quick.

With a lack of oxygen to the brain in the altitude, the men suffer from hallucinations and wander away from the fire into harm’s way. Without weapons and unable to run because they’re up to their knees in snow, they’re tough alpha males, but before they can even formalize their strategy they get picked off, one by one, torn limb from limb and devoured by killers with molars like fangs. There’s graphic gore, but miraculously, the writers also find humor in the men’s natural coarseness. When they cook one wolf to stay alive, the gruffest man says, “I’m more of a cat person myself.” The word harrowing doesn’t begin to cover it. You can’t avoid wondering, “What would I do if this happened to me?” One last rant at the sky, one final plea for help, one more challenge to the Almighty to prove His existence, and escape remains impossible. All the more reason for men with nothing in common to turn their conflicted tensions into a sustained interdependence to stay alive.
Alaska is played by the wilds of Canada. The men who support leader Liam Neeson are played by actors with more brawn than beauty, including Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Frank Grillo and Dermot Mulroney, unrecognizable with long, matted hair and a white beard, as one of the more pragmatic survivors. Written and directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team), it’s basically a one-note narrative with nowhere to go except straight into the jaws of tragedy, but the film manages to give each man enough room for character development to make you feel like you’re living through this white-knuckle experience with them. It’s one of the most captivating studies of shared peril. The Grey avoids smug clichés, takes you to places you least expect and settles for no comfortable solutions, while it explores the dark shadows of the male psyche and finds more emotional fragility there than you find in the usual phony macho myths from Hollywood.

rreed@observer.com

THE GREY

Running Time 117 minutes

Written by Joe Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Starring Liam Neeson, Dermot Mulroney and Frank Grillo

3/4

rreed [at] observer.com

Every Day
Running time 93 minutes
Written and directed by Richard Levine
Starring Liev Schreiber,
Helen Hunt, Brian Dennehy

2/4

The dynamic Mr. Mulroney and Diane Kruger play a New Mexico district attorney and his wife whose daughter is diagnosed with a progressive lung disease that only a double lung transplant can cure. Swallowing his principles like castor oil, this tough, by-the-books prosecutor finds himself bending the law himself when faced with the life-or-death decision of buying an organ on the black market. Aided by a kind pediatrician (Rosanna Arquette) and a powerful politician (Sam Shepard), he heads for the Texas border in El Paso and crosses over into Juarez with only one name in his wallet, one that turns out to be phony. With the demand for transplants 10 times the supply, and lists growing longer daily, desperate people losing hope are investigating new ways to buy organs illegally. Mexico is apparently a source for this kind of dangerous criminal harvesting, and this is a man with enough money to give it a try. Cursed with unalterable morality, he nevertheless ventures deeper into the Mexican underworld, risking his own life. Helped along by an unscrupulous street urchin, his search leads him through a warren of male prostitutes, child murders, gang beatings and even a ward full of children awaiting death sentences. One by one, the clues unravel with the tempo of a hair-frying thriller.

In Mexico, the death rate from violence and drug wars is three times that in the U.S. So the removal of organs from dead bodies goes unchecked. You'll find yourself asking a lot of ethical questions, and you might be surprised at the answers you find. Shattered by his own conscience and growing lack of integrity, a noble character begins to lose his grip on reality. Should he break the law and win his family's everlasting love and gratitude? Or reject the corruption and lose his own child? I won't tell you how it turns out, but the dilemma builds a special brand of suspense that is wrenching. The subject matter was handled with more originality and Grand Guignol in Stephen Frears' memorable film Dirty Pretty Things. Baltasar Kormakur, an acclaimed festival-circuit favorite from Iceland, does not have enough grip to furnish Inhale with the same kind of arc, so the characters seem like papier-mâche symbols instead of fully fleshed-out human beings, but Mr. Mulroney is an exception, giving an honest, committed and deeply moving performance of tortured sincerity. He's better-looking and more virile and versatile than either, so why isn't he a superstar on the same plane as Brad Pitt and Matt Damon?

rreed@observer.com

INHALE
Running time 83 minutes
Written by Walter A. Doty and John Claflin
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
Starring Dermot Mulroney, Diane Kruger, Rosanna Arquette, Sam Shepherd

3/4

Equally sincere but without much entertainment value, Flash of Genius is another of those movies about honest, ordinary citizens fighting the powerful system of corporate corruption. This time little David is Dr. Robert Kearns, a professor of mechanical engineering in Detroit who invented the “intermittent” windshield wiper. The corporate Goliaths who stole and marketed his invention, cheated him out of his patents and falsely claimed the credit for his ideas were the Ford Motor Co. and the Chrysler Corporation. Kearns spent 12 years relentlessly pursuing these ruthless tyrants for using their money, technology and power to screw him out of his rightful profits while simultaneously installing his invention in their new cars without seeing him or taking his phone calls, and the decades of disappointments, insults to his integrity, setbacks and litigation (chronicled in a lengthy New Yorker article that provided the basis for Philip Railsback’s screenplay) make for interesting viewing up to a point. But too much technical information about circuit boards, Motorola transistors and U.S. patent laws eventually takes up more screen time than Kearns’ sympathetic story, leaving the viewer restless and bored.

Worse still, it’s a movie that needs a big, charismatic star who can hold attention in the center ring for two hours, and Greg Kinnear does not exactly spell box office allure. It’s a good time for a story that attacks American big-business institutions, but corporate wrongdoing plays second fiddle to the obsession of the man himself. Kearns devotes so much effort into protecting his reputation, to the point of utter paranoia—turning down every offer for out-of-court settlements, risking his family’s future, destroying his marriage and ending up in a mental institution—that you begin to lose patience. By the time he turns into a broken man, jobless, estranged from the people who loved him and living on government assistance, he’s no longer much of a hero. Salvation arrives briefly in the form of a gutsy lawyer (Alan Alda) fearless enough to drag every automotive corporation through the halls of justice. But even after Ford returns Kearns’ five patents and offers to pay him a fat figure that could send his six children to college, the attorney is defeated by his own client, who arrogantly refuses to bargain unless Ford publicly admits stealing his invention in print. When Kearns turns down the money, even his wife loses faith in the case, and Kearns loses his lawyer and his family. Following another decade of stress, research and commitment, the man finally gets his day in court, acting as his own attorney, with his six kids as his legal assistants. He triumphs, but the huge emotional price is obvious in his exhaustion. He died in 2007, before this film was completed.

Quirky and likable, Mr. Kinnear gets his best role since sex-addicted murder victim Bob Crane in the disturbing Auto Focus, and plays it like Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra vehicle. He is ably supported by Alda as the lawyer, Dermot Mulroney as the business partner who turns coward, and Lauren Graham as the long-suffering wife. Mark Abraham’s earnest direction does a commendable job of compiling tons of legal documents into a chronological narrative that is easy to follow, replete with the obligatory courtroom duel saved for the big finale. Having said all that, why does this movie fail to involve? It’s got good actors, period ambience and the right elements. But it remains a wan subject unlikely to interest a wide audience; it’s a well-made movie nobody will ever see. I will say this, though. Not since The Insider locked horns with the tobacco industry has a mainstream movie savaged unscrupulous corporate chicanery with such vengeance or named names so frequently. As one wag observed last month in Toronto, when the film had its world premiere, “Ford, in this movie, is anything but a product placement.” And I loved the query in Variety, questioning why, even after years of fighting the company, did Kearns still drive a Ford?

rreed@observer.com

Mr. Kiarostami varies his visual strategy, sometimes focusing only on his driver-protagonist, sometimes cutting back and forth between her and a passenger, and only very rarely allowing the camera to move outside the car to sneak in a bit of street atmosphere. The level of discourse never sinks to conventional small talk or ceremonial politeness. As each articulate conversation concludes so the next one can begin, a portrait emerges of the driver as a defiant feminist determined to lend support to other women, particularly those who've been abandoned and mistreated by men.

She herself has displayed courage in allowing her son to leave her and move in with his father. She's amused when he tells her that his dad watches a porn channel on television at night, but has a lock on the channel to keep his son from seeing the same images. It's a curious moment in the relationship between mother and son, in that the boy conveys a feeling of uncertainty and betrayal when he accidentally arms his mother with evidence of her ex-husband's "weakness" for pornography. After an initially scene-stealing (and even picture-stealing) performance in the first episode, the child actor playing Amin begins to seem craftier and more calculating in his reactions and responses-and less sympathetic.

In separate episodes, the driver's sister and one of her best friends are both tearfully inconsolable because they've been abandoned by their male lovers. In both situations, the driver functions as a one-woman support group as she preaches both resignation and defiant independence. The driver's sister has gone so far as to cut off her hair-an action the driver supports with all the praise she can muster for her sister's new "look." As for the totally bereft best friend, the driver takes her out to dinner and parks the car, with defiant symbolism, in a no-parking zone.

Perhaps the driver's oddest encounter is with a young prostitute who gets into the car under the mistaken impression that the driver is a man-and therefore a potential client. Here, the camera stays on the driver. We never see the face of this prostitute, who has a great deal to say about the differences and similarities between her profession and that of married women. According to this professional dispenser of sexual services, she sells sex wholesale, and married women sell it retail. The driver asks very naïvely about love as an incentive for sex, and begins to seem a bit of a busybody with her well-meaning but hopelessly superficial rhetoric. Her benevolence is dwarfed by the element of chance-the luck of the draw in human lives, as it plays across vast differences in economic and social opportunity. Having avoided the prostitute's face in the car, the camera follows her from behind after she sets out to find a client in another vehicle.

One could imagine that a film consisting of nonstop dialogue punctuated by short stretches of silent driving would be too talky, too inevitably didactic, to serve as adequate movie entertainment. What makes Ten paradoxically compelling, however, is the eloquent choice of faces for the camera to contemplate. The women come vibrantly alive when they project what they're thinking and feeling before they speak. They stare silently into the infinite distances of their circumscribed lives, and one feels a tremendous pathos.

Strange Days

Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects , from her own screenplay, based on the book of stories by A.M. Homes, juggles the neuroses of four relentlessly dysfunctional families in the overworked movie hell of much-abused suburbia-a concept that has now degenerated in the public mind into the twin hells of Sprawlovia and Spillovia.

Ms. Troche's previous films, Go Fish (1994) and Bedrooms and Hallways (1998), brought a welcome light touch to the new narrative forays into polymorphous perversity that developed once the screen evolved a more nuanced view of sexual choice. Both Ms. Troche's earlier films were genuinely funny without being snide or self-righteous. The Safety of Objects , by contrast, is not funny at all. Its eccentricities are unending, and there's no touchstone, no contrasting normality, to set off the bizarre behavior of its characters as something one can laugh at with impunity.

Ms. Troche made two major miscalculations in adapting the dramatically anemic tales of Ms. Homes. First, she combined separate stories, cramming them all into a single neighborhood and a single narrative strand. (She's also transposed incidents involving different characters and combined some of the characters as well.) Second, she fragments the case histories of four separate families almost as if she were editing the choreography for Chicago .

Yet another problem involves the casting of variably familiar actors in the goulash of quick cutting, starting with the ultra-identifiable Glenn Close as Esther Gold, wife and mother in the Gold family, and Dermot Mulroney as Jim Train, husband and father in the Train family, then sliding down the scale in recognizability a bit to Mary Kay Place, the nervously aging wife and mother in the Christianson family, and the omnipresent Patricia Clarkson, divorced mother in the Jennings ménage. Their respective mates in each instance-Howard Gold (Robert Klein), Susan Train (Moira Kelly), Wayne Christianson (C. David Johnson) and Bruce Jennings (Andrew Airlie)-are more or less shunted to the sidelines, while their mostly indistinguishable children drift aimlessly from one joyless venue to another.

I had a hard time keeping track of the members of each family from one jagged scene to the next, especially since no one says or does anything particularly interesting. (Suburbia-in the movies, at least-doesn't seem to tolerate intelligent conversation.) To make matters more confusing, the film is full of no-warning flashbacks that reconstitute entire families and relationships before the disastrous accidents have taken their toll.

Ms. Close's Esther devotes herself to her comatose teenage son, Paul (Joshua Jackson), with a dedication that alienates both her husband and their daughter, Julie (Jessica Campbell). Paul has been gravely injured in an automobile accident; before that, he'd displayed talent as a musician, and also had been the teenage lover of Annette Jennings (Ms. Clarkson), who now gazes mournfully at his unconscious body from the next-door bedroom window.

Mr. Mulroney's Jim Train has suffered a setback at his law firm. After years of neglecting his family for the sake of his work, he's been passed over for a partnership-and so he pops up unexpectedly at home with a made-up story about a bomb threat closing down the office.

Jim's efficient wife, Susan, has never made him feel needed around the house. Nor is he able to get closer to his teenage son, Jake (Alex House), who has formed a psychotic attachment to a 12-inch plastic doll belonging to his little sister, Emily (Carly Chalorn). When the slinkily dressed doll begins to talk back to Jake and flirt with him in provocative ways, I wanted to crawl under my seat with my own Barbie doll-anything to keep from watching Jake beat up his sister over custody of the brazen hussy doll.

To round out the dysfunctionality, next-door neighbor Helen Christianson is a fitness freak fighting off the aging process with a ferocity that alienates her husband and children. Elsewhere, there's a somewhat anticlimactic pseudo-menacing mini-kidnapping with pedophiliac overtones, a bewildering radio-sponsored endurance contest to win an S.U.V. that enlists the combined energies of Esther and Jim, a non-fatal shooting and an apparent mercy killing-until the movie finally peters out at an ironically idyllic lawn party that reaffirms the almost total lack of emotional energy throughout. So much contrivance, so little conviction.

Topsy-Turvy

Gasper Noé's Irreversible , from his own convoluted screenplay, convinces me as nothing else so far that I have reached the point of diminishing returns with movies that pretend to be profound by having their pulpy, banal stories told backwards and sideways and upside-down. By now, you've probably heard of the film's eight- or 10-minute rape scene, which sent a few susceptible viewers at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival screaming into the lobby and restrooms over the horror, the horror, of this particular heart of darkness.

Forget about the rape scenes in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and Lamont Johnson's Lipstick (1976). They were mere cakewalks, with just a tantalizing trace of the victim's complicity in the assault. There's no complicity here, no fancy editing, no visual foreplay. There's simply pure, nasty, viciously misogynistic hatred, photographed from a single, voyeuristically ugly angle-as if one were some sort of rodent camped in this sordid setting.

And I couldn't buy it, despite all the rigamarole of out-of-sequence storytelling. We first see two men, later identified as Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel), being hauled into a police wagon. Going back in time, we find them bent on some sort of mysterious revenge against a lowlife named "Le Ténia" (the Tapeworm), who has brutally assaulted someone called Alex (whom we later learn is the beautiful woman married to Marcus, played by Monica Bellucci.) Then we go back to a violent search by Marcus and Pierre in a gay hellhole known as the Rectum. In the murky darkness, the wrong man is battered to death with a fire extinguisher.

After this session in hell, Alex makes her first appearance. It's late at night, and she's walking alone in a skimpy but stylish party dress and a light overcoat. She's advised by a prostitute standing on a noisy, crowded street corner that with all the traffic, it's safer to use the underpass to reach the Metro across the street. The underpass itself is the scene of the rape, and it's so forlorn and deserted that it defies belief. We learn later that Alex has been involved with both of her would-be avengers, and also that she's pregnant. Despite these attempts at poignancy, I never got over my disbelief, and found all the characters lacking substance and flavor-before, after and during all the brutishness.