Colin Firth and Emily Blunt in Arthur Newman.

Two lost souls on the highway of life—that’s what a well-acted but benign little trifle called Arthur Newman is about. Wallace Avery (Colin Firth) is a meek, unhappy man who decides to fake his own death, leaving his wallet and passport behind on a Florida beach, and starts over again with a new identity as a golf pro named Arthur Newman. Before he can erase the past and escape his old self, he crosses paths with a Goth vagrant named “Mike” (Emily Blunt), who is lolling around a motel pool in a daze, having just stolen an automobile and overdosed on cough syrup. For reasons that do not entirely convince, they hit the road together. It’s 35 minutes into the film before she gets around to asking “Who are you?”—a question everyone else has been wondering since the opening credits. It takes the entire film to find out.

Wallace was a sad sack wasting away in a dull management job at American Express who left behind a spiteful ex-wife, a young son who won’t even speak to him and a new girlfriend (Anne Heche as another defeated character) who is already tiring of his restless anomie and sullen indifference. As Arthur Newman, he’s on his way to a new job as a golf instructor at a swank country club in Terre Haute, Indiana. Similarly dysfunctional, Mike has her own secrets, namely a mother and a twin sister who both suffer from schizophrenia. Showing signs of becoming a chip off the old block, she evades emotional needs with sarcasm, is terrified of relationships and incidentally has no place else to go. Despite their age difference, she tags along for the ride.

On their cross-country journey, Arthur/Wallace and Mike, trying to ward off death by loneliness, break into empty houses, helping themselves to the clothes, food and beds of total strangers. It’s an outrageous game of role playing and a pathetic stab at lovemaking within the safety of other people’s identities, the danger of getting caught only heightening the adventure. How long can they keep it up? First-time director Dante Ariola shows an admirable aptitude for observing the small, sweet quirky things people do and say, and the script by Becky Johnston (The Prince of Tides) provides quiet, reflective moments of dialogue. The film is sometimes touching but more often episodic, an odyssey that becomes part road movie and part metaphor for American ennui. Unfortunately, each episode grows more disheartening, and neither character is developed enough to sustain audience interest for 101 minutes of playing time. The movie goes nowhere.

Since winning the Academy Award for The King’s Speech, Colin Firth’s film career has hit a few speed bumps. A farce called Gambit (a remake of an old Shirley MacLaine-Michael Caine turkey) has been on the shelf for more than a year, and Main Street, filmed three years ago in Durham, N.C., has never been released at all. Arthur Newman won’t do much to buck this trend, but Firth is always charming, polished and agreeable to watch. With heart and soul, he and Emily Blunt bounce off each other in a pair of beautifully modulated performances that personify understatement (and in perfect American accents). But the resolution for both characters, in a finale that turns disappointingly conventional, is so sad that it left me depressed beyond hope. Their road trip becomes a tiresome journey of self-discovery that is more about self-avoidance, negating the fun along the way.

rreed@observer.com

ARTHUR NEWMAN

Written by Becky Johnston

Directed by Dante Ariola

Starring Emily Blunt, Colin Firth and Anne Heche

Running time: 96 mins.

2/4 Stars

Quvenzhané Wallis gives her director Behn Zeitlin a big hug.

The red carpet was aglow with the incandescent twinkle of Hollywood’s stars on Monday night at the 22nd annual Independent Film Project Gotham Awards. With Oscar winners Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard amongst the evening’s honorees and the likes of Jack Black, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and so many more blazing a trail through the double doors of Wall St.’s Cipriani’s, it was no wonder that the less glamorous side of the velvet rope was a veritable press feeding frenzy. Lucky for us, then, that we had sharpened our claws.

As the guests took their seats for the ceremony, The Observer was whisked upstairs to a private viewing room, lest we cavort too rambunctiously with the delicate A-List crowd. There we watched over the evening’s events like demi-gods looking down from the heavens upon the cherubs pecking away at their meals, with eight year old nominee Quvenzhané Williams and 13 year old Jared Gilman leading the underage coterie.

The awards soon got underway, much to the delight of the recipients. Honoring their intentions as champions of independent cinema, the jury not only rewarded the biggest Hollywood names but the industry’s up-and-comers for their contribution to film. Beasts of the Southern Wild writer and director Benh Zeitlin was undoubtedly the big winner of the night, scooping statuettes – well, glass cuboids - for Breakthrough Director alongside the Bingham Ray Award, dedicated to the late film executive.

Mr. Zeitlin was so swept up with his first victory, however, that he scarcely noticed he had procured a second, pausing in his role as the obliging interviewee only to dash back downstairs to claim his newest prize.

“The fact that the film has gotten out into the world has been overwhelming,” he told The Observer, “And I never imagined this many people would not only see it but champion it, and make it their business to help the film get out there. It has completely changed my life.” A spate of critical successes at Cannes, Sundance, the LA Film Festival and the International Film Festival has seen Louisiana-based Mr. Zeitlin’s awards cabinet go from empty to engorged in a matter of months.

Another director honored for his work during the event was David O. Russell, whose work on the likes of The Fighter and new release Silver Linings Playbook secured his status as a deserving IFP Gotham Award recipient. "With an independent film you are with your little family and you work together all day every day, and that’s the real difference," he explained. "You’re all there for the passion, and I prefer that because projects have to come from the heart. You have to dig deep."

Academy Award-winners and Gotham honorees Mr. Damon and Ms. Cotillard are certainly no strangers to widespread acclaim, but both seemed similarly touched by their newest prestigious accolade. Ms. Cotillard was every inch the elegant belle of the ball, dazzling in an array of Chopard jewelry and a stunning Christian Dior couture gown.

Clearly her nationality influences not only her wardrobe but her passion for various projects, telling The Observer: “I really cherish the fact that I’m able to share my French movies worldwide, because we have amazing creativity in France.” The softly spoken actress, who stars in the recently released Rust and Bone, seemed quite overcome with emotion, before continuing: “With this film I had one of the greatest journeys ever, and to share this very unconventional love story outside of my country is something that I enjoy more than anything. I never choose a movie because of whether it’s independent or not, it’s just a story that’s got to take me. But independent movies have the freedom of telling stories that nobody except a special director would tell.”

Mr. Damon echoed the Parisian sweetheart’s sentiments, divulging, “I’ve never set goals for my career. Each movie is just story-telling, and I never wanted to not do a bunch of good movies because I was waiting to make a great one.”

The evening was particularly poignant for the actor, who recalled his first attendance at the Gotham Awards some 15 years earlier in the year Good Will Hunting was released. The best-buddy-Ben-Affleck spot was filled not by his usual partner in crime, but by Mr. Krasinski, who became fast friends with the honoree after meeting on the set of The Adjustment Bureau, in which Mr. Damon and Mr. Krasinski’s wife Ms. Blunt, starred. The Observer did contemplate asking whether Mr. Damon’s onscreen dalliance with his friend’s spouse ever induced some awkward glances around the dinner table, but we opted to forgo stirring the salacious pot on this occasion.

Back to the matter at hand, Mr. Damon said he enjoyed the ubiquitous montage of his roles over the years, but revealed, “It’s always a little cringe inducing – if you have a bad or mediocre day at work, it’s alive forever, so that part [of working in film] is always a little weird.”

But Mr. Damon, who plays the lead in upcoming indie flick Promised Land, needn’t worry about bad days at the office, given that his most recent prize was for Lifetime Achievement – at the grand old age of 42. “I hope this is like a buoy marker – a half time thing,” he laughed. “I want to do this for another 50 years!”

And with that, our time with Mr. Damon was up, and he was briskly shepherded to the after party with the rest of his showbiz pals. Alas, we did not get the opportunity to put on our dancing shoes and join in the film festivities, but the evening was quite the show itself.

Blunt and Duplass in Your Sister's Sister.

Lynn Shelton, writer-director of the titillating but underwhelming male psyche exam Humpday, about two straight guys who test their macho friendship by making a gay porn film about having sex with each other on camera before fizzling out at the last minute, has come up with another actionless talkathon called Your Sister’s Sister. What is it with this talented low-budget indie filmmaker whose gabfests take on brave ideas and then talk themselves to death, gasping for breath between monologues? I’ve seen Your Sister’s Sister twice, and fallen asleep in the same place both times. It’s a credit to the actors that it ended up winning me over in spite of myself.

Eulogizing his dead brother a year after his death at an impromptu cocktail-party memorial, Jack (the annoying but charmingly naturalistic mumblecore actor Mark Duplass, who played one of the endlessly overly analytical potential screw-ees in Humpday), not only takes issue with the loving remarks expressed by the dearly departed’s friends but ends up making a scene by insulting them in the bargain. Jack’s best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt), also his late brother’s ex-girlfriend who dumped him, sends Jack off to her father’s remote cabin on an island off the coast of Seattle. No TV. No Internet. Just a place to think, rest and get some alone time. When Jack arrives on his bicycle, understandably exhausted, he finds the isolated retreat already occupied by Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), an unhappy lesbian who is nursing her own wounds after breaking up with her longtime lover. Hannah is not happy to have her space invaded, but they sip tequila, munch dehydrated bananas and mutter nonstop dialogue, mostly inconsequential and largely improvised. “I’m not good for small talk,” says Jack, “so I apologize if I’m barging through the doors of our privacy or anything.” But that doesn’t stop anyone in Lynn Shelton movies. After a meaningless drunken monologue about the appeal of her butt, Jack adds, “Let me tell you another thing which is inappropriate but super-safe because you’re a lesbian—if I were differently equipped or if you were differently inclined, this night might go a very different way. I’m just saying I would be super-open to that in a whole other universe.” Not the least of the resulting implausibilities as they go to bed together is the fact that it’s the lesbian who provides the condom.

Iris shows up unexpectedly the next morning with a bag of groceries and then it’s three people instead of two, going yadda yadda yadda about everything from pubic hair to how a dollop of butter in vegan Hannah’s mashed potatoes is the inhuman equivalent of five pounds of fear. When’s the last time you watched an entire scene about the preparation of flaxseed pancakes?

The jabber is maddening, but with all due respect, the actors are wonderful, the performances as natural as inhaling. Still, in Emily Blunt’s case, there is such a thing as too natural. She mumbles, whispers and makes inaudible words with her tongue. There’s one entire scene in bed where she is totally incomprehensible. Nothing ever happens of any consequence, but everybody talks about it. When she discovers Hannah broke up with her girlfriend because she wanted children, Iris blurts out advice that seems so practical (“You can go online. There’s sperm donors. There’s sperm in the air. Just grab a dude and preg yourself up!”) you tend to forget that nobody you know ever talks like that. It’s bad enough when Iris, who secretly knows her feelings for Jack have passed the platonic stage, finds out Hannah got into his underwear first. But then Iris and Jack both discover Hannah poked holes in the condom—and all hell breaks loose. Can Jack marry Iris and father her sister’s baby at the same time? Does anybody care?

Like all Lynn Shelton films, the characters develop big intimacies in small doses, with humor that swings from understated to raunchy. It takes a while for them to break through the roadblocks of rhetoric and reach your heart. But thanks to the sweet goofiness of Mark Duplass (how refreshing to encounter a leading man who appears to have never seen the inside of a gym), the pragmatism of Emily Blunt and the conflicted self-control of Rosemarie DeWitt (best remembered as the unhinged bride in Rachel Getting Married), this three-hander has an honesty and a momentum that I found grudgingly rewarding.

rreed@observer.com

YOUR SISTER’S SISTER

Running Time 90 minutes

Written and Directed by Lynn Shelton

Starring Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt

2/4

'Battleship' star Rihanna (Getty Images)

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) March 23

Your children have been refreshing Fandango daily to see if tickets are available yet for the movie based on Suzanne Collins’ kiddie novels—think of them as Twilight, except with actual murder instead of benign vampirism. Games promises a chaste love triangle and lots of angst for the tween set, but what’s in it for adults? Potentially, some solid acting. Jennifer Lawrence, last widely seen in her Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone role, hopefully turns in another subtle and edgy performance as a young woman fighting to survive, and she’s accompanied by some tried-and-true character actors, like Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and Donald Sutherland.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) March 30

The long-absent Terence Davies returns with an adaptation of a play by another Terence—the late Rattigan, who wrote about the subtle emotionality of the British upper crust. This work is no exception, featuring as it does Rachel Weisz (and where has she been?) as the wife of a judge who is engaging in a dangerous liaison with a pilot. The cast also includes Tom Hiddleston, who was in just about every movie last year, of brows high and low (War Horse, Midnight in Paris, and Thor), but we’re more excited about the return of Mr. Davies, whose last narrative film, the moody The House of Mirth, came out way back in 2000.

Titanic 3D (James Cameron) April 4

To paraphrase Céline Dion, “It’s here—there’s nothing we fear.” Just in time for the centenary anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic comes the rerelease of the multiple Oscar winner. It’s been converted into 3D, too—so it’ll feel like Kate Winslet is throwing her diamond necklace right at you! Surely director James Cameron hopes he’ll break his own record by getting this film back to the #1 all-time box-office spot, but we suspect that, nearly 15 years after Titanic’s release, we’ll be among the rather limited number of Kate-and-Jack die-hards who simply can’t ever let go.

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) April 6

Whit Stillman, who was hiding out with Terence Davies, is back too, with a drama that proves he’s still interested in what the kids are up to. The director who blew the lid off deb parties and disco dancing now examines a suicide-prevention mission undertaken by a WASPy queen bee whose idea of “It Gets Better” is introducing her classmates to tap dance. Sure, the notion of frolicsome young beauties put in “distress” by the men in their lives seems a bit fainting-couch-y, but, given that his previous films were all more or less period pieces, one exactly doesn’t go to Mr. Stillman for insights on the way we live now.

Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan) April 20

Every one of our favorites unites in a project that might be the Avengers of 1980s Oscar-ceremony attendees. Diane Keaton tries on a new Chico’s scarf-and-blazer combo as a woman who loves her dog a bit too much, and Kevin Kline is the husband who misplaces that dog. Throw Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard into the mix, and you have a winner. We’re not sure why there’s so much hue and cry—it’s not like the dog is played by Uggie—but if there was ever an actress who seems like she’d be a little too into animals, it’d be Annie Hall herself!

The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller) April 27

Jason Segel, tired of speaking to Muppets, has returned to romantic comedies about human beings. His Forgetting Sarah Marshall follow-up  costars Emily Blunt as a fiancée who has taken her sweet time making it to the altar—hey, it’s hard to plan a wedding! Between choosing a venue and bridesmaids’ dresses … Also featured are NBC Thursday-night comedians Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, the inescapable Mindy Kaling, and, for some reason, Oscar-nominated Aussie spitfire Jacki Weaver. We’re not sure why Mr. Segel keeps getting cast as a romantic lead—perhaps because he writes the parts for himself? (Aspiring actors who don’t resemble Channing Tatum, take note.)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden) May 4

An all-star cast of Britain’s actors most likely to cluck “Well, I never!” trade their manor houses and cozy flats for India in this tale of white people encountering brown people. Characters played by Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Maggie Smith, among others, decide to retire to the subcontinent before realizing that “exotic” is an unalloyed positive only when applied to the term “dancer.” It is likely, though, that they will all learn, like, three lessons before dying—perhaps some of them taught by Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel!

The Avengers (Joss Whedon) May 4

The most anticipated film of the year among circles too young or too cool to remember Titanic unites Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and a bunch of less popular and less charismatic superheroes in a quest to save the world from threats of an unclear nature. Scarlett Johansson is the lady who kicks and punches, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are the slabby studs, and moody blue Mark Ruffalo is the Incredible Hulk. (You wouldn’t like to see Mark Ruffalo when he’s angry—he brews some Kombucha to cool down then talks passionately about hydrofracking!). Unlike this summer’s noirish Dark Knight reprise, this promises to be big and bright and dopey—just what we want as rainy winter changes to overheated spring.

The Dictator (Larry Charles) May 11

Sacha Baron Cohen is back in character; apparently Bruno didn’t sate his appetite for foisting upon audiences a goulash of an accent and nightmarishly draggy scenes of his imposing himself upon unsuspecting people. The Dictator has him playing the Qaddafi-esque ruler of the fictitious nation Wadiya, one who gets to do fun things like shoot his subjects onscreen and seduce Megan Fox. We’re pretty sure that for all the Americans who were unaware of the Arab Spring, this will be a bit too insider-y, but who knows—everyone loves to laugh at Mr. Cohen when he impersonates an ethnic.

Battleship (Peter Berg) May 18

Rihanna makes her acting debut in a film about robotic aliens sent to destroy Earth—and despite her singing voice, she plays one of the humans defending us! This adaptation of the numbered-grid board game promises to be anything but B-9, with a cast that also includes the ever-more-grizzled Liam Neeson, Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch, and Brooklyn Decker, who just finished playing Ophelia at the Old Vic (just kidding, she’s a bikini model!). We hope this one is successful—not due to partisanship for any of its stars, but because the deadline headlines about “sunken Battleship” are just too predictable.

The premise is wickedly, delightfully preposterous: An amiable billionaire sheik (Amr Waked), who has a passion for salmon fishing whenever he visits his estate in the ruggedly gorgeous highlands of Scotland, is convinced the sport creates a spiritual connection between people and nature. Determined to introduce it to his subjects in the parched desert of Yemen as a beneficial gesture of peace, he hires a beautiful, stuffy business representative and investment consultant in London named Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) to implement his crazy scheme. First, she goes to an uptight, anal-retentive academic buffoon from the Royal Department of Fisheries who walks into glass walls, Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) and declares Yemen too hot to accommodate salmon, dismissing the project as a waste of time. But Harriet is a determined little crumpet who appeals to the British prime minister’s PR adviser, Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas, in a ballsy, scene-stealing performance as a chain-smoking harridan who makes grown men shake and regimes collapse). Ever the apple-polishing opportunist on the lookout for front-page news to make the British government look heroic, Maxwell sees salmon fishing as a coup to soften Arab-Euro relations, and endorses the idea enthusiastically. With Harriet’s sexy charisma and the sheik’s offer of $80 million, Dr. Jones gives in, outlining a plan to construct a dam and export 10,000 British salmon to the desert from the North Sea to establish hatcheries. The big tension is getting farm salmon to swim upstream and create a new fishing industry in what was once a dry river bed. The salmon offer massive resistance, and so do the sheik’s military opponents, a gang of Muslim terrorists who threaten him with treason for insulting their ancient customs with new-fangled Western ways. As the obstacles increase and tensions multiply, so do the feelings of Dr. Jones and Miss Chetwode-Talbot, two lonely, unfulfilled Brits who are forced to rethink their positions on fishing and reconsider the possibility of romance. Her soldier boyfriend has been reported missing in action. His wife has deserted him and their stagnant marriage for a job in Geneva. Together they gain a new priority for life and love as he changes from a dull, humorless government puppet into a forceful lover and she overcomes her bureaucratic rigidity to find her inner beauty as a desirable woman. Mr. McGregor may seem miscast in his Henry Higgins cardigan sweaters and preppie haircut, even wearing pajamas during sex (nothing short of revolutionary for him)—but he has never looked healthier and handsomer, or acted with more appealing comic looseness. Ms. Blunt is funny, adorable and endearing. Their chemistry as costars is so obvious that their eventual move from business to bedroom is as welcome as it is inevitable. And the always estimable Ms. Scott Thomas—cold, marble-hard and hilarious—steals every scene, even when she’s offscreen, sending scorched emails with sarcastic instant-cartoon messages.

Initially, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, based on a book by Paul Torday that viciously parodied the lunacy of British foreign policies in the Middle East, ended with the British prime minister buried at the bottom of the Red Sea. Mr. Hallström, a director who favors happy endings, diplomatically softened the book’s political comic bluntness, but the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire, keeps the barbs sharp enough to sustain interest. The question persists: Who wants to see a movie about salmon fishing? But it’s a spirited, eloquent film—delightfully offbeat, deliciously different and well worth investigating.

rreed@observer.com

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

Running Time 112 minutes

Written by Simon Beaufoy (screenplay) and Paul Torday (novel)

Directed by Lasse Hallström

Starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and Amr Waked

Emily Blunt (Getty Images)

This year's Tribeca Film Festival is to open with the Universal Pictures comedy The Five-Year Engagement, which is to star Jason Segel and Emily blunt as a long-affianced couple. (The increasingly busy Mr. Segel wrote the film, as well.) The full slate--which per tradition and mission is to consist, largely, of independent films--is to be announced beginning March 6.

Since it is loosely based by writer George Nolfi (Ocean's Twelve, The Bourne Ultimatum) on a short story by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, you would be right to expect another cookie-cutter Bourne thriller with sci-fi overtones. But Mr. Nolfi, who is also making his debut as a director, is another unfortunate Christopher Nolan wannabe, so the movie is a preposterous muddle that borrows heavily from Inception, without a single original idea. More accessible and less pretentious, The Adjustment Bureau is still the same kind of self-indulgent, alternate-reality riddle I never intend to see again.

You could write the plot on the head of a carpet tack. Matt Damon is David Norris, a bad-boy New York politician running for the U.S. Senate with his own mug shot from a barroom brawl. "What they say about me is I'm too young to run for this office," he says. He is also too young to play this part. Never mind--the voters don't care. He's ahead in the polls. Then, on election night, a scandal hits the tabloids when a front-page photo splashes across the New York Post (natch) that shows him mooning his friends at a college reunion. With his ambitions dashed, his depression is lifted by meeting Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a ballet dancer hiding out in the men's room of the Waldorf-Astoria (don't ask). The sexual attraction is instantaneous, fueled by contrived snappy dialogue. But every time the potential lovers meet, some mysterious force inexplicably drives them apart. Here's the rub: David and Elise are being forcibly separated by a dark team of angels in banker suits called "Agents of Fate," played by John Slattery (TV's Mad Men) and Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker). The "adjustment bureau" is an organization of ruthless G-men--from a long line of the kind of laughable lunatics James Bond used to beat the crap out of before he turned the job over to Liam Neeson. Their job is to control the fate of every man, woman and child as set forth in a master notebook known only by God and Satan. If you fight your own preordained destiny, they have the power to expunge your memory, recalibrate your thoughts and destroy your dreams. If you try to expose them, they will erase your brain. David and Elyse defy the master plan by falling in love. To save her from the adjustment bureau, David deserts her. For awhile, his ratings rise again in the polls, and her career flourishes as she plans to marry her choreographer. But true love has a greater power than fate, and when they finally get their priorities straight, it's up to the bureau's top "fixer" (a wasted Terence Stamp) to reprogram them both. The special-effects team is always one step ahead of them. They open one door, and they're in the middle of Yankee Stadium. Open another door, and they're on top of the Empire State Building or riding the Staten Island Ferry. Guest appearances are made by Jon Stewart, Chuck Scarborough, James Carville and Mary Matalin. Mayor Michael Bloomberg also shows up, which explains what he's doing when he isn't shoveling snow. Free will is apparently the only thing that can defeat the adjustment bureau. The point of the movie is that it doesn't matter what door you open, as long as you open it with someone you love. 

Ms. Blunt works overtime, but she's never surpassed her popularity in The Devil Wears Prada. This one is less embarrassing than The Wolfman, but nothing to write home about. Mr. Damon is an all-American boy in a world of dark screen personalities who always end up with better roles. He has fiber, but his soccer-team-mascot face and gumdrop eyes are too round and smooth and unchallenging, without an edge. He makes all the right moves, but there is just so much life you can breathe into a script that is dead on arrival.

rreed@observer.com

The Adjustment Bureau

Running time 106 minutes

Written and directed by George Nolfi

Starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery, Anthony Mackie

2/4

Running time 125 minutes
Written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self
Directed by Joe Johnston
Starring  Benicio Del Toro,
Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt

Rating: Two and a Half Eyeballs out of Four

Old monsters never die. They just keep coming back, in an endless series of unnecessary remakes. So get ready to hear once again legendary screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s famous line: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright.” The Wolf Man is back—and he’s not just another pretty face.

Based on the classic 1941 horror film The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence (Larry) Talbot, a soft-spoken British-born nobleman who returns from America to run the country manor of his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), and has the rotten luck to get bitten by a werewolf (Bela Lugosi), the 2010 retelling, for no logical reason, changes the spelling to The Wolfman. A lot of other things change, too, and not always in ways you could call improvements. The tense prewar setting is now an ornate and overproduced Victorian England in 1891. Larry, now a hopelessly adrift Benicio Del Toro, is no longer a California astronomy student but a New York actor playing Hamlet in London. (Don’t ask.) Sir John, his father, is now a weird, disappointing Anthony Hopkins. Chaney was a soft, fleshy actor with a wimpy voice and clammy skin, but he brought a sympathetic sweetness to the role of the ill-fated Lawrence Talbot. Mr. Del Toro may be a stronger screen presence than Chaney, but he mumbles and scratches so much that nobody in his right mind would ever believe him as Hamlet, and he looks so baggy-eyed and ravaged before the wolf ever appears that there’s nothing to build his character on. Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt) no longer runs the village antique shop, but is a mixed-up girl who was betrothed to Larry’s dead brother, and who has a sick penchant for wandering around in the fog, and makes the dumb mistake of thinking she can cure lycanthropy. As the titular head of one of England’s finest families, Mr. Hopkins displays a spectrum of curious accents that wander from Southern trailer trash to Irish brogue to Hannibal Lecter, sometimes all three in the same scene. With all due respect, he is no Claude Rains.

After the werewolf rampages through a gypsy campsite, attacking everyone who ignores the warnings of ancient fortune teller Geraldine Chaplin (where is Maria Ouspenskaya, now that we finally need her?), the movie makes a number of tactical errors from which it never recovers. The folks at the local tavern still wisely melt their silver into bullets and keep plenty of wolfbane handy, full moons still rise like white pumpkins and snarling creatures still pop out of the swamp with teeth that need a dentist, but any resemblance to Curt Siodmak’s 1941 script ends there. Siodmak was a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis and retained a lifelong hatred of the Germans; many symbols of horror in The Wolf Man were references to Nazi persecution, and the pentagram that appeared in the palms of the werewolf’s next victims was an obvious substitute for the Star of David. This time, there are no pentagrams to make your blood run cold. Elegant Talbot Hall is no longer a safe refuge from a world gone mad but a mausoleum full of cobwebs, candlelight and underground crypts; it looks less like one of England’s fanciest estates and more like the House of Dracula.

The monster is now a computer-enhanced behemoth in Rick Baker makeup that drools noisily, severs heads with a single claw and makes an awful mess on the carpet. Larry is hounded by a Scotland Yard inspector played by Hugo Weaving, one of the three drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and dragged away in chains to a gothic madhouse where a primitive brain doctor (the great English stage actor Anthony Sher) tortures his patients with horrors of his own—dunking Larry screaming into vats of ice and jamming footlong hypodermic needles into his jugular vein. (Think Fogg’s Asylum in Sweeney Todd.) While these lunatics treat lycanthropy as a self-induced delusion, you can hardly wait for them to experience their first full moon. In the resulting carnage, the Wolf Man rips out human kidneys and spleens with bare teeth in a bloodbath that is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, followed by a leapfrog across the roofs of London that looks like outtakes from Godzilla, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young.

The film’s biggest departure from the 1941 classic—and its silliest mistake—is making Sir John a werewolf, too. Yes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he killed his whole family and applied the fatal bite that turned his own son into a savage beast forever—a disease from poison fangs for which there is no cure. In an explosion of mayhem that leaves Talbot Hall looking like a slaughter house, everything leads up to the big showdown between father and son that gives you two wolf men for the price of one. There’s more, and some of it is effective enough to turn your hair gray overnight. But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script, by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters.” “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”

In 1941, the Wolf Man was so popular he was revived in four more Universal horror classics, two with Abbott and Costello. He’s still entertaining enough to rise several notches above the dumb remakes of The Mummy and Dracula, but can history repeat itself? How scary is the Wolf Man in 2010, when half the people in the New York subway look like werewolves already?

rreed@observer.com

In the otherwise somber The Young Victoria, vivacious Emily Blunt, who did so much for stiletto heels in The Devil Wears Prada, puts a modern spin on the famously poised and longest-reigning monarch in British history. This is a lavish and lovingly detailed period piece that attempts to re-create England’s last golden age, but the enchanting Ms. Blunt is the whole movie, and it wouldn’t register even a small bleep on the Richter scale without her. She puts the Vicki in the young Victoria.

Born in 1819, she is crowned almost by accident, and never wanted the job. Between her uncle, the mad King William IV, and his three brothers, they’ve produced only one heir to the throne who lived beyond puberty, so Victoria has no choice but to find herself crowned at a tender age, knowing nothing of the world swirling outside the walls of Kensington Palace. For a spirited child, it is a prison, replete with food tasters to protect her from assassins and endless lectures on protocol from her stern, social-climbing mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), and her villainous, politically ambitious adviser, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). Denied even the briefest privacy, she is used as a pawn in the animosity between her uncles, the loony William (Jim Broadbent), and Leopold, the King of the Belgians (Thomas Kretschmann), which results in an arranged marriage with Prince Albert of Germany (Rupert Friend). The communion takes—gradually at first, through their love of Bellini operas and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and then grows with trust and a shared understanding of loneliness in the public eye. Once they are together under the same roof, the movie is over, but not the running time. The second half is a romance novel brought to life, with glittering balls, another scheming palace puppet master (Paul Bettany) working hard to destroy Prince Albert in Victoria’s eyes, and a coronation ceremony in a computer-generated Westminster Abbey. Despite the odds, the royal couple establishes a bond, clashing with Parliament over their views on welfare, housing and education. The movie is not only about a liberal, headstrong princess who would not be controlled, rising above her youth and inexperience to win the heart of the man she loves and eventually the people she rules, but also about how Prince Albert learns to find his own place of importance in the court. The movie should really be called Victoria and Albert. They reigned together 20 years, until Albert died at the age of 42. Queen Victoria died at 81, in 1901.

Moving the action from dreary old Windsor Castle, with its tapestries and mahogany staircases, to a newly constructed Buckingham Palace, flooded with sunlight and gold-leaf crown moldings, French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée gets the pomp and pageantry right, but reveals little insight into the qualities that turned Victoria into the beloved and enduring monarch she later became. What a shame the movie is only about her youth. The most intriguing part of her rule was after Albert’s death, when his widow guided England through the Industrial Revolution in the 1880s—a colorful time of teeming Whitechapel slums, factory-smoke fog, Dickensian derelicts, Oscar Wilde decadence, the Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper (who, according to one popular theory, was suspected to be Queen Victoria’s own grandson, the Duke of Clarence). Julian Fellowes’ script doesn’t get to the good stuff, and reveals nothing about her personal or family life. It’s hard to sift through the numerous palace intrigues. Some of the actors speak with accents thick as gravy. The music is intrusive, overpowering every scene, and there’s even a soapy song by Sinead O’Connor under the end credits called “Only You—Love Theme from The Young Victoria”; it sounds like an audition for one of those Oscar night horrors staged in a cloud of smoke with costumed dancers in white wigs waving candelabras.

At times like these, I was doubly grateful for Emily Blunt. From the coins, stamps and cameos sold in London curio shops, the impression of Queen Victoria has always been starchy and dour. Ms. Blunt provides the charm and charisma to give an old-fashioned profile a welcome contemporary appeal.

rreed@observer.com

In The Great Buck Howard, John Malkovich finally plays one of his most accessible roles in one of his least pretentious films. I don’t even like movies about young mentalists, mediums, magicians and flim-flams, much less aging ones. But the mystery career of Mr. Malkovich gets a welcome boost here, as he plays a genial but temperamental has-been mind reader who has plummeted from Vegas headliner and 61 appearances on Johnny Carson in the good old days to occasional gigs at community centers in Stockton and Bakersfield, signing off by speaking the words to his theme song, “What the World Needs Now.” He should have retired years ago.

But like the Amazing Kreskin, on whom the film is obviously based, Buck’s spirit refuses to waft into the mist of ’60s talk shows and county fairs. He needs fresh energy to promote his handshakes and trademark “I love this town!” audience greetings, and jump-start his faded celebrity status. So he hires a recent law school dropout and wannabe writer named Troy (played with fresh, sweet-faced naïveté by promising newcomer Colin Hanks), who signs up as a combination road manager and personal assistant with the aid of a tough, brassy publicist (Emily Blunt). Together, they mastermind a scheme to get Buck an appearance on Jay Leno, but as rotten luck would have it, another guest (Tom Arnold, of all people) takes up too much time and Buck gets bumped. Undaunted, Troy propels Buck toward renewed success, and despite the objections of his dad (a guest appearance by the actor’s real-life father, Tom Hanks), he eventually helps Buck back into the spotlight and learns, on the ride, a few unforgettable lessons in life that will impact his own future. But fate has more tricks up its raveled sleeve than a magician has rabbits, and Buck’s new star-attraction spot in Vegas collapses when, for the first time in 40 years, his most famous trick (finding his salary hidden in the showroom) fails.

There’s nothing special about The Great Buck Howard, and I kept asking myself, if it is actually based on the life and career of the Amazing Kreskin, why not just make a movie about Kreskin himself? Still, the elements that form the balance between the pompous vaudevillian and his long-suffering assistant are neatly collated by writer-director Sean McGinly; I predict a big-time career for Colin Hanks (who is currently co-starring with Jane Fonda in the Broadway play 33 Variations); and the stew is seasoned with enough appealing peripheral show business nuts  (Steve Zahn and Debra Monk as an idiotic brother-sister team who drive Buck around in Cincinnati are especially winning) to keep you amused. Mr. Malkovich is more animated than usual.  Wearing a blond-tinted wig, he even looks better, and his voice sound less like a dial tone. Maybe he’s been taking B-12 shots.

rreed@observer.com