Lindsay Lohan, a victim, for once. (Patrick McMullan)

- This weekend's big story was Lindsay Lohan's stalker (or just a guy she was partying with at Double Seven), who allegedly followed her up to her hotel room at the W after they got into a fight about cell phone photos. She escaped him, but then came back to the room so he could physically assault her; it's hard to pick the most batshit part of this whole ordeal. It's a toss-up between the part where the guy was a congressional staffer who has posed for photos with Paul Ryan, and the part where someone let Lindsay Lohan run around a hotel unsupervised.

- Justin Bieber puke-sang his way through a recent concert, and then followed it up with an Anchorman tweet about how "Milk was a bad choice."

- Classy lady Anne Hathaway married a nice Jewish boy. And that's all there is to say about that, because after that Raffaello Follieri creep, she deserves a nice, quiet life. If not with Bruce Wayne, then this guy.

- Did you guys know Kyle Maclachlan has a wine company, and it's called Pursued by Bear? Fine, maybe you knew that. But did you know he has been having tastings in Williamsburg?

- Spotted: The Master’s Paul Dano in a sparkly karate suit, playing basketball with a giant pea pod, a ninja turtle, a goth guy and a lady in a tutu yesterday afternoon in Carroll Gardens. It wasn't for a movie or anything, and it was a little too early for Halloween. But sometimes you just gotta be zany and shake off those milkshake blues, you know?

Kazan and Dano in Ruby Sparks.

If you’re an actor looking for work, it helps to have a girlfriend who is a writer. So Paul Dano, whose dour, limburger face is matched only by a charisma that is the screen equivalent of road kill, is a lucky fellow. His roommate and offscreen squeeze, Zoe Kazan, has provided them both with the screenplay to Ruby Sparks, an engaging if lightweight romcom directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team that hit pay dirt with Little Miss Sunshine. This one passes the time pleasantly enough, but history isn’t likely to repeat itself. The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film—separately or together. I kept wondering, while glancing at my watch, what it would have been like with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, or James Wolk and anybody.

The morose Mr. Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a shy novelist in horn-rimmed glasses who wrote a best-seller at 19 but now suffers painfully from writer’s block. Well, naturally; it’s ten years later, and he doesn’t even own a computer. So emotionally underdeveloped that his shrink (welcome back, Elliot Gould) gives him a fuzzy stuffed toy to cuddle with on the couch while he’s being analyzed, Calvin is awkward, socially inept and unable to get laid. So along comes a girl he calls Ruby Sparks, who falls in love with him faster than he can speed-dial his own cell phone. There’s just one snag. She exists only in his imagination. What happens next comes from the filing cabinet reserved for discarded Twilight Zone episodes. She moves into his house, his bed and his kitchen, invading every space. The only person he can confide in is his sympathetic brother, Harry (handsome Chris Messina, who looks nothing like Paul Dano). “She’s like Harvey, except she’s not a giant rabbit!” Ruby (played by the wide-eyed Ms. Kazan, who neglected to write herself the best part) can eat, sleep, walk, talk, make love and stage domestic arguments, and Calvin adjusts to his first affair with adoring acceptance. But after a corny, contrived falling-in-love montage of zombie movies, penny arcades and video games, Ruby starts materializing. Other people start seeing her, too, including the doubting Harry. But instead of fulfillment, she starts challenging Calvin’s well-ordered male supremacy. On a weekend in Big Sur with his bohemian mother (a criminally wasted Annette Bening) and her younger lover (ditto Antonio Banderas), Ruby wins everyone over and becomes the opinionated, fun-loving life of the party. Back in Los Angeles, she gets bored, begins spending the night at her old apartment, partying with a new group of friends and seeking her own independence. This is not what Calvin had in mind, so he starts re-writing his character. Ruby is transformed, according to the sentence he just typed, and returns, clinging to him more than ever. Her actions, thoughts, opinions and moods are all controlled. When she feels sad, he writes her happy. If Ruby starts to leave, he writes her needy and dependent. All of which gives Ms. Kazan a wide spectrum of moods to play. Who wouldn’t crave a relationship you can modify just by writing a new paragraph? But alas, what happens when your creation develops a mind of its own?

Ms. Kazan, granddaughter of the great Elia Kazan, oddly shows little cinematic technique as an actress, but as a writer she has penned a whimsical view of male self-absorption and obsessive egotism as droll as it is shrewd. It’s still a movie with no payoff (even the epilogue smacks of refried Rod Serling), and the fanciful conceit goes nowhere fast. Ruby is like Ryan Gosling’s inflated sex toy in Lars and the Real Girl. The difference is that she can walk the dog, wax the floor and scramble eggs. But she eventually grows just as tiresome as the puppet who wants to be Pinocchio. The movie is sweet, but it’s a lollipop of whimsy. Lick it and it’s gone.

rreed@observer.com

RUBY SPARKS

Running Time 104 minutes

Written by Zoe Kazan

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Starring Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan and Annette Bening

1/4

Dano's off-screen stare was as sour as his on-screen presence.

Paul Weitz is a writer-director (About a Boy) with talent and imagination. I can’t imagine what lured him to Being Flynn, a depressing and downbeat rendering of a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the offbeat, commercially challenging 2004 memoir by writer Nick Flynn about his fractured relationship with his creepy father, Jonathan, a failed writer himself, but mostly a Bowery bum and bona fide loser, played by Robert De Niro. Too small and dark to appeal to a large audience, it’s not a movie to cherish.

Nick is played in the film by overrated, pickle-faced Paul Dano, who put the sour in the stagnant, sourpuss opus There Will Be Blood. He hardly knew his father, a nut case who abandoned his loving, hardscrabble mother (Julianne Moore) early to pursue his dream of living up to his self-anointed label of “living genius” (“Everything I write is a masterpiece,” he babbles, after everything he writes is rejected by everybody in publishing). Great legacy. After Dad deserted, he ended up in prison for cashing forged checks while Mom committed suicide. Released with his great novel under his arm, Flynn then became a cab driver, alcoholic and charter member of the unemployed homeless, living in a condemned building above a strip joint that was closed down by the FBI until he lost his license for falling asleep at the wheel and hitting a pedestrian. Except for an occasional phony letter professing true love, Nick hasn’t seen him for 19 years. He calls him “a nonperson, a face without a body.” “What I am,” says Flynn, “is an artist.” There’s no evidence anywhere, even though Mr. De Niro wears rotten teeth and picks lice off his body with convincing Actors Studio naturalism. Imagine the horror when a grown son, unfocused and without enough ambition to get a job outside of cleaning toilets in a homeless shelter, comes face to face with his missing father as a semipermanent “guest,” seeking a bug-free bed. It’s the stuff of stained, Gorky-influenced fiction, but not exactly what I’d call pleasant, memorable cinema.

I saw Being Flynn at 10 a.m. with no time for breakfast. I don’t recommend making the same mistake. How about watching a filthy bum, covered with scabs, mashing lice between his fingers? Mr. De Niro works hard to welcome redemption with the levity of sarcastic wit without groveling for sympathy, but there is just so much you can do with the role of a racist, homophobe, lawless reprobate and pathological liar. For the past few years, he’s snored his way through his own movies like a Valium addict. This time he gives it all he’s got, which is a lot, but not enough to make you care. I didn’t care what happened to the son, either. This is entirely the fault of the numbing Mr. Dano, a surly actor with the personality of road kill. The son is a worker, the father a resident, in a cesspool of misfortune, but what makes the old man a survivor is his sense of humor. He even regards a row of fellow tramps tied to their shoelaces to prevent their shoes from being stolen as “gathering material” for his next novel. Instead of a loafer and a bounder knocking on doors for a place to spend the night, Jonathan Flynn refers to himself as a “sought-after house guest.”  When he turns from a hapless hobo into a howling madman wrapped in a sheet, he makes us care about his downfall. The movie is also supposed make us care about how the son escapes his dead-end life and puts to good use what he learned from the father without repeating his mistakes. We know the real Nick Flynn wrote the book Paul Weitz spent seven years adapting for the screen, and I guess that’s the point of this whole father-son confessional. But Mr. De Niro is the only thing worth the effort. He wipes the floor with his costar so many times that I felt the movie would have been better balanced with a different cast. I found Mr. Dano so weak, lachrymose and emotionally blunted that I lost interest fast. By the time the father ends up sleeping on garbage cans in a vacant alley and the son lands in drug rehab, I was too zoned out to care. Being Flynn is the kind of Dante nightmare actors find fun to play, but it’s hell for an audience to watch.

rreed@observer.com

BEING FLYNN

Running Time 102 minutes

Written by Paul Weitz (screenplay) and Nick Flynn (book)

Directed by Paul Weitz

Starring Paul Dano, Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore

2/4

Ford and Craig.

Cowboys & Aliens is one of the silliest movies ever made, but so many otherwise serious people have attached their names to it that, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid. Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard are among the tangle of producers whose credits stretch from here to the next millennium, the idiotic screenplay boasts no fewer than five writers, and although I cannot imagine this farcical fusion of two separate film genres (science fiction and the Western) appealing to anyone over the age of 12, the two marquee lures at the top of the cast list are not exactly part of the bubble gum brigade. So with all the elements in place, another in a long line of cinematic comic books could be a surprise hit as it reaches its target audience, right up there next to the abysmal Captain America. Never underestimate the desperation of summer moviegoers to escape reality no matter how much they trash their I.Q.’s. They’ll do anything to get out of a heat wave.

Too bad Mr. Spielberg didn’t also direct, instead of Jon Favreau, a terrible TV actor (Robot Chicken) who has somehow morphed into helming third-rate movies (Iron Man). He doesn’t show a single shred of originality as he piles on the clichés in a parody of everything from The Big Country to It Came from Outer Space, but the one Cowboys & Aliens owes the most to is the low-budget and forgotten The Dead and the Damned, in which a meteor lands in the middle of the California Gold Rush and turns everyone into zombies. The result here is equally hilarious, but Cowboys & Aliens works best when it plays it straight (an idea of Harrison Ford’s) instead of campy. And so, from time to time, it actually holds one’s attention between the episodes of violence and carnage.

One morning in the 1870s, Daniel Craig wakes up with amnesia in the desert near Absolution, Ariz. (played by New Mexico), wearing a strange metal bracelet attached to his wrist that looks like unisex jewelry at the Newport Beach art show. He has no memory of who he is or where he came from. He’s filthy, splattered with blood and barefoot, but with a great haircut. Riding alone into town like Shane, he quickly attracts the attention of a vicious, ruthless cattle baron named Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), his maniacal son (hysterically overacted by the pickle-faced Paul Dano), a comely barfly named Ella (Olivia Wilde), an honest but outnumbered sheriff (Keith Carradine), a well-meaning preacher (Clancy Brown), a nervous, nerdy saloon keeper who needs a Valium (Sam Rockwell) and an Indian cowhand (Adam Beach).

When the Unknown Man is suddenly recognized as the face on the wanted poster in the local jail—a feared stagecoach robber named Jake Lonergan—the sheriff makes plans to cart him off to the federal marshal. But this is a Western, see, so Shane doesn’t die. Thirty minutes into what looks like a routine sagebrush saga, the shackle on Mr. Craig’s arm lights up, a space ship blows up the town, and a monster from another planet abducts half the citizens, including the colonel’s rabid son, Percy. (A homicidal maniac named Percy? These are the laughs, kids.) Mr. Ford and Mr. Craig have no choice but to pool their two-fisted talents in a rescue mission, form a posse and track the monster to a canyon of death. The rest of the movie is John Ford meets The Twilight Zone. Oh, did I forget to mention the Apaches? It wouldn’t be a Western without the Indians. They join the fray too—but what good is a tomahawk against $50 million of computer-generated special effects designed by George Lucas? The penultimate showdown, between the alien invaders and the Roy Rogers boots, spurs, arrows and six-guns, is noisy but less thrilling than expected. Still, the movie aims for nothing but entertainment, and I must admit it’s fun watching two grizzled roughnecks go at it like they were doing something meaningful and important.

What, in the final analysis, is it all about? It seems the extraterrestrial creatures, who seem to know a lot about the stock market, are looking for gold. In the funniest line in the picture, Harrison Ford wrinkles his face of solid granite and snarls: “Well, that is ridiculous! What are they going to do—buy something?”

rreed@observer.com

COWBOYS & ALIENS

Running time 118 minutes

Written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby

Directed by Jon Favreau

Starring Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, Paul Dano and Olivia Wilde

2/4

Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan

THE SUN HAD NOT GONE DOWN outside the Gramercy Park Hotel when Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan started talking about their leather.

“It’s the fucking leather,” Ms. Mulligan said, touching Ms. Kazan’s slit-laden Valentino dress.

Ms. Kazan made a deep purring noise and knocked her pointed heels at the ground.

“You’ve never done that,” said her boyfriend, actor Paul Dano. “I like that…”

“You could do some serious damage with those shoes,” The Observer pointed out.

The actress flung a mischievous look back.

“Don’t you think I’m not thinking about it.”

“She’s so spiky when she’s wearing leather!” Ms. Mulligan, also in Valentino, said. “I’m wearing demure leather.”

“I’m demure with my—”

“There’s nothing demure about that dress.”

Ms. Kazan and Ms. Mulligan had come to the hotel for the Lincoln Center Institute’s Junior Spring Benefit, which they were hosting with Rightor Doyle, Mamie Gummer and Lily Rabe, other regally cumbersome names that catch eyes when they pop up in playbills and film credits.

As the rest of the committee found their seats among the faux-botanical terrace above the penthouse, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan, along with extra man Mr. Dano, had happened to walk outside as The Observer made a late arrival.

“Is that a prop?” Ms. Kazan asked us, grabbing at the magazine in our jacket pocket.

The Observer explained that we were enjoying an article on Arthur Rimbaud.

“That’s pretty gay,” Ms. Kazan said.

“Carey,” The Observer redirected, “aren’t you in a book adaptation coming up?”

“What book adaptation?” Ms. Kazan gasped.

“Oh, I’m doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby.”

“Oh my god that’s amazing!” she said. “Are you playing Gatsby?”

“Yes,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I’m playing Jay Gatsby. It’s a really big role for me, I’m gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything.”

The future Daisy Buchanan said filming would start in September, in director Baz Lurhmann’s home country of Australia.

“In Australia, that’s where the book is set, right?” Ms. Kazan said.

Ms. Mulligan nodded.

“It’s a great Australian novel.”

Eventually, the crowd of women grew, all of them seemingly in Valentino. (Was that a photographer in Valentino? A server in Valentino?) They greeted their fellow league board members, hugged, pecked on the cheek. Lunch plans were made.

“Do you want to go to the Colony Club?” said a young woman to a few other women, over cigarettes. “We’ll have the best table. Considering you’re my only friends who are members, we should probably go.”

And later, The Observer found a piece of jewelry.

“That was my grandmother’s!” Ms. Kazan informed The Observer, as we plucked a silver and opal bracelet from the ground and fastened it to her wrist.

It was time for dinner, but before they could sit down, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan had to have one more talk about their Valentino dresses.

“You’re not allowed to wear anything but leather,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I really like leather, Zoe.”

She again started grinding and smacking her heels.

“Yeah, yeah, lean over,” Ms. Kazan said to Ms. Mulligan.

“I think it’s bend over,” said Mr. Dano, suggesting the more common parlance.

“Lean over!” Ms. Kazan repeated. “Lean over!”

“Bless you!” Ms. Mulligan said, in a high-pitched English church-girl voice. “Lean over, please.”

“Arch your back in the convex position!” Ms. Kazan said.

Mr. Dano, who had not yet addressed The Observer, bent near our recorder.

“Print all that,” he said, smiling.

The Extra Man is a hapless fiasco about Louis Ives, a nerdy Princeton meathead with a penchant for wearing women's lingerie who travels to Manhattan looking for adventure, answers a roommate-wanted ad, and moves into a rabbit warren decorated with Christmas tree ornaments occupied by Harry Harrison, a fading gigolo and a penniless, eccentric playwright whose masterpiece was stolen by a hunchback. Louis is played by Paul Dano, a catatonic young actor with all the charisma of road kill. Henry is played by the limber, libidinous Kevin Kline, whose considerable talents are criminally wasted throughout. The film knocks itself unconscious trying to be whimsical and offbeat, but is so contrived that it is as embarrassing as it is unfunny.

Taking the young man under his wing, Henry tries to show him the ropes and advance him socially, squiring him around in a battered Buick with one door and teaching him how to sneak into the opera at intermission. But his awkward, shy protégé, devoid of self-confidence and ugly as a wooden spoon, is a bipolar misfit who prefers to enroll in a course titled "Spanking and Cross-Dressing at Recession Prices." Occasionally, Mr. Kline earns a chuckle, painting his ankles black to look like he's wearing new socks or barking instructions like "Never answer the door-it might be the I.R.S." But serving cocktails of vermouth and codeine, storing his mail in the refrigerator and dancing on the beach to "Lara's Theme" from Dr. Zhivago, he's mostly just marking time until he can fire his agent.

John C. Reilly also makes an unwise appearance as Mr. Kline's best friend, a subway mechanic who looks like the Cowardly Lion and squeaks annoyingly in a high falsetto that sounds like a braying jackass. Mr. Kline is too good for this junk. He works himself into a fit trying to milk The Extra Man for laughs, but no movie that devotes so much screen time to a vapid milksop like Paul Dano can survive the charge of head-scratching incompetence. The last words in the film are "So. There we are." Pause. "Where are we?" The prosecution rests.

rreed@observer.com 

THE EXTRA MAN
Running time 108 minutes
Written by Robert Pulcini and Jonathan Ames
Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
Starring Paul Dano, Kevin Kline, Katie Holmes, John C. Reilly

1 Eyeball out of 4

On Monday night, the New York premiere of The Extra Man began with a man standing in front of the audience and letting out a rolling, throaty yodel that sounded like a cross between a sea otter and an exotic bird. 

This happened shortly after Shari Springer Berman, the co-director of the film, welcomed actors Kevin Kline and Paul Dano to the front of the theater on Second Avenue in the East Village. Katie Holmes was there, too, but didn't come up to the stage. Then Ms. Springer Berman introduced Jonathan Ames, the author on whose 1998 novel the film is based. "Jonathan, would you like to do your ritual?" she asked. Mr. Ames took the mike.

"To clear the air before the film is shown, I'm just going to make a sound for you," he said. "I always make it at the end of my readings or performances. It's a sound my friends and I would make on the playground when being attacked by more normal children, known as the Hair Call. I won't use the mike."

Mr. Ames, dressed in a black blazer, blue tie and a gray newspaper-boy cap, put down the mike and extended his arms into an opera stance-left arm reaching into the air, the right close to the chest-and opened his mouth wide. "Eeeeeeeeeee!"

Stephanie Pratt, a star of MTV's The Hills, looked confused but smiled. Sean Lennon did not.

"Eeeeeeeeee!"

Fashion writer Derek Blasberg looked up from his BlackBerry.

"EEEEEEEEEE!"

At the after-party, Mr. Dano described Mr. Ames: "He's a unique fellow. He's incredibly funny. At times strange. Lovely guy, though."

The Extra Man is the story of a young man (Mr. Dano) who moves to New York to be a writer and rents a room from an "Extra Man" (Mr. Kline), an escort for the wealthy widows of New York society. Mr. Dano and Mr. Ames live within one block of each other in Brooklyn and were able to meet up and talk about the script as Mr. Dano prepared for the character-a sensitive, bumbling young man who experiments with cross-dressing.

"The character is not actually Jonathan; it's a fictionalized version of stuff he went through, so I just wanted to do what I felt the writing inspired me to do," said Mr. Dano. "But I was definitely able to take things away from hanging out with him"-such as the gray cap that Mr. Dano wears throughout the film.

"They're all perfect," Mr. Ames said of the actors chosen to play the characters he invented. Ms. Holmes skipped the after-party but told reporters earlier that the role was "fun" and "interesting." Mr. Ames called Ms. Holmes "very pleasant." "We met a few times. She was very sweet to me," he said. "All of my life is confusing, so all these experiences are odd to me." 

In the movie, Mr. Ames has a cameo. "In the way that Charles Bukowski could briefly be seen in Barfly, I'm seen in a tranny bar," he said. 

Mr. Ames, who has been primarily a writer and performer (in Oedipussy, his one-man show, and as a boxer), has more recently become an HBO program creator and writer (Bored to Death) and one of those lucky authors whose books have begun to garner interest in Hollywood. (Two more of his books are currently in production or being adapted.)

Does he still have time to write novels?

"Working on the TV show is like writing a novel. It's like chapters, so I do a lot of writing that way," he said. "But I'm not doing much prose writing at the moment. Someday, again, maybe."

The Transom asked if he was still dating singer Fiona Apple. 

"Uh, probably, yes," he said.   

Probably?

"No, no, don't put probably. Just say yes." 

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Hugh Hefner's Playboy buyback. [NYT]

Nina Garcia is now Target's fashion expert. [WWD]

Fabulous Fab denies fraud. [NYT]

Loud Dobbs' daughter wins a substantial riding prize. [NYP]

The city has 8,000 unused desks, which is apparently a lot. [NYP]

UES townhouses may take a hit, following one dramatically low sale. [WSJ]

Bloomberg defends his staff's right to mock Sarah Palin. [NYDN]

Natasha VC in WWD. [WWD]

Possible Ken Starr victim puts $30 million home on the market. [WSJ]

Slate does some debunking. [Slate]

Yale Repertory Theater receives $950,000. [NYT]

There Will Be Blood earned Paul Dano a lifetime of free milkshakes. [NYDN]

Facebook employees take loud late night shuttles! This bothers their neighbors! [AllThingsD]

The state's standardized tests will become harder. [NYT]

Abetted by a thin story line and episodic screenplay, The Good Heart never goes anywhere important, but director Dagur Kári creates a spellbinding ambience. The seedy bar is so grim that even the dirt seems picturesque. The light from the wet street shining through the filthy windows, the awful music from the roll-top piano, the gritty clubhouse camaraderie among the drunks—it’s so artfully composed that you can smell the stale beer on the mahogany bar stools. Unfortunately, the film is an uneasy meld of TV sitcom and Eugene O’Neill. Jacques parks his new housemate in a room only one cut above a prison cell, with a bed so uncomfortable that Lucas sleeps on the wood floor. Cursing and ranting, the old man teaches him to make coffee, which Lucas gives away to the homeless. They bring home a white duck for Christmas dinner, which the kid names Estragon and keeps as a pet. Jacques scolds him for being friendly to the customers, and encourages hostility and arrogance. It’s basically a two-hander, with an assortment of drunks, lunatics and deadbeats who frequent the bar with their own individual quirks. The odd couple share their meager existence without much trajectory, until the arrival of a lost, distraught girl named April. When the naïve Lucas insists on marrying her, Jacques throws a tantrum and smashes up the bar, throwing all of his customers into the alley. Lucas displays all the animation of an oyster. April looks like a bagel. They make a perfect matched set. But this movie does not end there. Jacques gets placed on the waiting list for a heart transplant. April freshens up the dismal saloon with flowers and votives, which drives Jacques into another tantrum. “We’re not here to help people,” he says. “We’re here to destroy them.” It moves on, and so will you.

Waiting for something more than a scene from Cheers, we are treated to the goddamnedest parade of choke-provoking philosophical wisdom I’ve overheard in years. It goes like this: “Think of life as a coconut. It’s hard on the outside and if you don’t have the proper tools or the know-how, it can seem totally useless and futile. But if you know how to open it, there’s sweet juice inside. The key is not to keep the coconut to yourself once you learn how to open the coconut, but share the coconut with someone who has no coconut, and then you understand what happiness is.” Who could make up this stuff? Mr. Dano has two expressions—blank and clueless. I think he’s a terrible actor, but listening to dialogue like that and trying not to laugh out loud, who can blame him?

Through a buckled twist of cinematic fate, Jacques finds an organ donor (yes, we are forced to watch close-ups of a detailed heart transplant, oy vay) and becomes a changed man, totally (but not entirely convincingly) rejuvenated. It all ends on the island of Martinique, for reasons I will not reveal. This arcane experience is worth it only for the burnished lemon-wax polish of the cinematography and the fascinating work of Brian Cox. It’s a treat to watch him break up sentences, ending statements with a question mark, washing down homilies with his soup. One of the least likable characters in recent memory—irascible, but with moments of real tenderness—he’s the reason this strange movie takes on a perverse charm that is uniquely its own.

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 95 minutes
Written and Directed by: Dagur Kári
Starring: Brian Cox, Paul Dano, Isild Le Besco

2 Eyeballs out of 4

Halloween might be over, but that doesn't mean the scares have to stop. We wouldn't go so far as to call Vertigo a "horror movie," but Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock ratchets the tension to such unbearable levels that parts of it are more terrifying than anything you'd see in whatever torture porn is defiling theaters in a given week. Of course you've watched Vertigo before, so we aren't going to tell you anything new—Bernard Hermann's score is fantastic, Jimmy Stewart is perfectly obsessive, Kim Novak is the epitome of cold, blah, blah, blah—but did you know that Turner Classic Movies is now available in HD for Time Warner subscribers? It's true! If you thought Vertigo looked great before, wait until you see it now. [TCM, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: By the People
Because what you need is more opportunities to watch Barack Obama on television, here comes By the People, a new HBO documentary produced by Edward Norton (who presumably took time out his busy schedule of Modern Family watching and New York City marathon preparation to do so.) By the People is a behind the scenes look at the 2008 presidential campaign, which should be fun, if only to remind us that just a year ago we were so much more optimistic than we are now about the future of America. It'll be nice to see now-president Obama once again telling us that yes, we can. [HBO, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: The Girl Next Door
If a movie came out today starring Emile Hirsch and Paul Dano, chances are you would expect it to be some serious indie drama directed by Sean Penn. But back in 2004, the movie they co-starred in was a teen sex comedy about a high school senior dating a porn star, and it did so poorly at the box office, you probably forgot it even existed. Not us though! You can write off The Girl Next Door as trite and silly, but Luke Greenfield's film is kinda brilliant—funny, smart, poignant and raucous. And if nothing else, you can just watch for the music cues. Does anything go better with coming of age angst than "Baba O'Riley" and "Under Pressure?" We didn't think so. [FX, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Community
And now we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a weekly plea to watch Community. For reasons that we cannot figure out, this show hasn't caught on the way it should. The ratings are poor (despite a full season order from NBC, Community averages just under 6 million viewers per episode) and, worse, there seems to be quite the negative stigma attached to the series. People don't want to like! When we tell friends it's funny, they get a look on their face like we're telling them to watch Family Guy. Wake up, everyone! Whether or not Community makes it longer than one season remains to be seen, but what we have on our hands is the quickest and snarkiest show on network television since Arrested Development. Seriously, the jokes fly out at a clip that would make even 30 Rock jealous. That you aren't watching this on a weekly basis is borderline criminal. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Friday: The Darjeeling Limited
Wes Anderson made quite a stink in the blog world last week when he (facetiously?) wondered to the New Yorker why Slumdog Millionaire was the India-based movie that hit with the populace and not his 2007 travelogue of ennui, drugs and broken familial bonds. And as you read that description, perhaps you can figure out the answer. In the oeuvre of Mr. Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited sits somewhere towards the bottom, but it's never terrible thanks almost totally to Adrian Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman who play the least believable-looking set of brothers we've ever seen. Whenever the three are allowed to riff off each other, The Darjeeling Limited is quite fun; when it bogs down with sentimentality and spirituality, it's not. Still, the real problem is that unlike Slumdog Millionaire, there isn't a dance number during the credits. Next time, Wes. Next time. [More Max, 4:15 a.m.]