Star Command: TICKET TO PARADISE

There’s a scene late in Ticket to Paradise when stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney, playing a divorced couple who have heretofore been bickering and bantering, finally stop for a quiet moment together. They’re on the top of a mountain on a tropical island and the sun is low in the sky, casting soft orange light all around them. They speak softly and openly to each other and, as their eyes start to sparkle, for the first time from beneath the needling chemistry that’s been sending sparks, we can see the real glow of affection they still have for each other. As they kindle this reconnection, I found myself thinking: I hope they kiss right now. And if that’s not a sign a romantic comedy has its hooks in you, I don’t know what is. The movie is a welcome example of a mode of moviemaking that’s all-but extinct—the glossy Hollywood rom-com—generously containing a further throwback—the comedy-of-remarriage. It finds in this comforting return to sturdy formula yet more resuscitation: a studio movie driven solely by Movie Star power. Roberts and Clooney, in particular, are at this point underutilized old pros, performers totally at ease with effortless charm. The movies these days afford them too few opportunities to appear at all, let alone uncork the full extent of their appeal. And so here we care about this couple because their actors are so good at embodying even the flimsiest formula with depth of personality, and projecting a charismatic likability in every angle and with each line reading. Because they’re pros, we can feel comfortable they can take this journey to its destination and find enough fun along the way.

Writer-director Ol Parker’s previous film was the fizzy lifting drink of a musical: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. That one, far and away his best work, and as feel-good a movie as any released in the last decade or two, must’ve unlocked something in his filmmaker toolkit. Here he continues capably marshaling the charms of stars swanning about gorgeous island locales enacting slightly silly but earnestly felt family dramas that bubble and sparkle with clever dialogue and float toward some convincing sentiment in the end. Clooney and Roberts reluctantly reunite en route to their daughter’s impromptu destination wedding. She (Kaitlyn Dever) has only known the guy for a few weeks, so the parents plan to talk her out of it. Even with just those two sentences, I’m sure you can start to piece together the plot. Yes, it has the miscommunications and mishaps and mistakes and moments of genuine connection and affection. But the joy isn’t in the story per se, thought it is sturdy, but its telling. The proceedings are kept agreeably light and amusing, photographed with brightly-lit scenic views, and build to those moments where, yes, you really do want to see the couple get together in the end. Paradise? Perhaps not exactly, but, when all the stars align, it’s in the neighborhood.

Cash Out: MONEY MONSTER

Money Monster goes to dramatic lengths to find what it’ll take to make a cable news show do some actual reporting. It starts when a smooth-talking business news host (George Clooney) – think an even more buffoonish Jim Cramer – starts his daily stock tip program. He usually offers up some buzzword advice and hyperbolic recommendations to buy and sell. But not today. An angry young man (Jack O’Connell) sneaks on set with a gun and demands the man behind the anchor’s desk strap on a homemade explosive vest. He wants time on the air to demand answers. He’s furious about Wall Street greed, the rigged system of a casino economy legalizing fraud – he’s definitely a Bernie bro – and despondent over a glitch in a certain stock’s price that wiped out his life’s savings.

The once-cocky host sweats with a gun to his head. The director (Julia Roberts) is trapped in the control room capably keeping crew running like usual. Lights, cameras, mics, and the rest must continue moving without a hitch, the better to keep the dangerous intruder calm while police (led by Giancarlo Esposito) gather outside, debating how to get in without setting off the bomb. With little setup, the screenplay quickly launches into this tense scenario. Writers Jim Kouf (Rush Hour), Alen DiFiore (The Bridge), and Jamie Linden (Dear John) build a convincing cable news environment, a hectic and frivolous place that falls silent when real danger enters the frame. As the man with the gun shouts and threatens violence, the crew scrambles to find him his answers.

An engaging effort of slick competence, Money Monster is the sort of meat-and-potatoes topical movie star thriller that used to be a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. Now, outside Oscar season, it’s mostly found on tiny VOD budgets or on TV, so it’s nice to see this old fashioned form of glossy, well intentioned, reasonably involving drama play out on the big summer screen. Here we have the likes of Clooney and Roberts playing perfectly to type in a plot that’s tautly structured and built on sturdy genre foundations while engaging with some interesting ideas floating around the news these days. It’s about Wall Street corruption and the news media industrial complex, and somehow makes it into the stuff of entertainment without going too obvious or too hypocritical. This is a diverting movie that works out genuine and legitimate class frustrations in the guise of a ticking bomb plot.

Roberts deploys producers and reporters to discover the secrets behind the man’s grievances, while on camera two very different men – poor and out of options, controlling what little he can through intimidation; rich and out of touch trying to talk his way out of the worst situation of his life – come to a cautious understanding. They’re stuck in one place, while in the world beyond the studio people are watching the events unfold with rapt attention. Some are amused, others angered. Still others are getting a little nervous, like a slimy C.E.O. (Dominic West) whose dastardly company IBIS (a fitting name for a bad corporation, like BS, IBS, and ISIS rolled into one acronym) was, through mysterious and sketchy business practices, responsible for the market fluctuation that left the hostage-taker with nothing.

There are clearly delineated good guys and bad guys here, but there are some welcome moments where expectations are upended in small ways. A scene where negotiators bring in the hostage-taker’s tearful girlfriend goes in a surprising direction, and the movie’s not unwilling to see the situation from a variety of angles. Someone seemingly in the wrong can come over to the other side, and vice versa. Directed with a steady hand by Jodie Foster, the events unfold with clarity, cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera finding snappy simple frames as the studio simmers with tension and many outside – techs, journalists, cops, PR people, hackers, bankers, and so on – scramble to figure out how to bring the danger to an end. The plot is involving on a surface level, while the simmering ideas underneath are just broad enough to be crowd pleasing and just specific enough to avoid feeling too condescending.

In the end it succeeds on the strength of its lead trio of performers, who bring a capable sense of weight and believability to their characters actions and decisions. Clooney could play a perfect wealthy dope in his sleep, here bringing unctuous charm covering repressed decency as a market mouthpiece who slowly grows a conscience at gunpoint. Roberts is security and stability under pressure as an expert manager trying to maintain some semblance of order and safety, speaking carefully and soothingly through her boss’s earpiece, helping him see the bigger picture. And O’Connell is a fine vessel of frustrated millennial economic angst, jumpy and tense, wound up with hopeless rage, smart but treading water in a dead end minimum wage job just to make ends meet. This story, with sensationalistic elements and vigorous political points, is too conventional and interested in small humane shadings to be a trashier satire or a sharper indictment. Instead it relaxes into thriller mechanics, looking at its characters with compassion and condemnation while finding its way to a logical conclusion.

Family Matters: AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

In adapting his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play August: Osage County to screenplay form, Tracy Letts, who has also adapted his Bug and Killer Joe into movies, trimmed the runtime by an hour but kept a great deal of its rich selection of meaty dialogues and monologues. The resulting film gathers a hugely talented ensemble and sets them before this all-you-can-act buffet and lets them chew. It’s theatrical, obviously finely written and overacted to the rafters. The story kicks off with the disappearance of the old patriarch of a large Oklahoman family. We glimpse him, played by Sam Shephard, in a brief introductory scene during which he reads us some T.S. Eliot in voice over. But now he’s gone, and his pill-popping cancer-patient wife (Meryl Streep) calls her grown daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, and Juliette Lewis) home to wait and worry. Showing off its stagebound roots by trapping the ensemble in a stuffy house – you can almost feel the dusty stillness of the oppressive late-summer air – the film is eager to show us these great actors delivering great dialogue.

The screen is crowded with characters and none escape emotionally unscathed. Streep’s matriarch has cancer of the mouth and early on shouts that the pain has her feeling like he tongue is on fire. Hoo boy, is it ever. She spits unfiltered invective at everyone and everything, screwing up her face as if sucking on a lemon before the acid bubbles out of her, eating away at her family members. She feels neglected. She feels unappreciated. She feels abandoned. She’s shockingly mean and caustic under the mistaken belief that she’s simply telling the truth. You can feel sorry for her while completely understanding why two of her three daughters would want to move so far away. Roberts, who flies in with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and daughter (Abigail Breslin), is anxious and depressed. Lewis, the flightiest daughter, arrives with a stranger (Dermot Mulroney) she introduces, to her family’s surprise, as her fiancé. Nicholson, the most reserved and quietly dutiful of the daughters, has been helping her mother’s caretaker (Misty Upham), to what many characters assume is the detriment of her personal life. Streep’s sister (Margo Martindale), brother-in-law (Chris Cooper), and nephew (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrive as well, casserole in tow.

The centerpiece of the film is a lengthy disastrous dinner scene in which everyone gets to masticate over their lines with great delight as they start slow and build to a great roaring cacophony of spitting, wailing, teasing, lamenting, hollering, accusing, reminiscing, and snapping. In this scene, and many that approach its intensity of character and feeling, the acting is energetic, enthusiastic, and convincing in a beautifully theatrical way. It wouldn’t work if the ensemble was not so nicely balanced, some (Streep, Roberts, Martindale, Lewis) going so big, teeth tearing at every bit of scenery that crosses their paths, that others (Cooper, Nicholson, Breslin) can lean back and go low-key and small. There’s a sense of generosity, the actors pitching their performances at just the right levels to blend wonderfully without a sense that anyone is trying to out act their castmates. It’s gloriously hammy in the best sense of theatricality and the film is wise to step back and let them roar.

That’s precisely what the film is best at giving us: a talented ensemble chewing its way through delicious writing. It’s not much in the way of visually interesting, but that’s hardly an attempt on my part to pin the movie’s faults on staginess. On the contrary, I found the film’s theatrical roots to be better the more clearly and simply shown. This is only the second film from director John Wells, a longtime TV writer, director, and showrunner most famous for NBC’s E.R. and currently of Showtime’s Shameless. He shoots the film only functionally, with little personality. He stays out of the way of the crackling chaos in the familial war of words as old resentments erupt, spilling over into freshly growing fissure vents.

Even after slightly over two hours, there’s not much clarity in the geography of our surroundings or the house’s architecture. And the few attempts to open up past the proscenium – just a couple of car trips, really – seem too desperate an attempt to make it play at some imagined ideal of cinematic interpretation. Wells’s inexpressive direction dutifully captures the performances and allows for appreciation of Letts’s writing, but more imagination in the visual staging, and maybe even a better sense of claustrophobia by heightening the theatrical roots, would’ve brought the whole endeavor up to the same level as the material and the performances. He traffic-cops the cast capably, coaxing a fine-tuned sense of energy and a great underlying tension in the straining relationships. But in the end, I found myself appreciating the performances and the writing more than being moved by the whole.

On Beauty: MIRROR MIRROR

It’s funny that the films through which general audiences would most likely know director Tarsem, his highest grossing pictures thus far, are hyper-violent, stylized films like 2000’s serial-killer mind-bender The Cell and last fall’s blood-splattered Greek myth Immortals. It’s funny not because those are bad films, but because when Tarsem gets into the realm of fairy-tale fantasy, his dazzling, idiosyncratic visual sense is at its most enveloping and engrossing. He’s a filmmaker with an overwhelmingly beautiful sense of color and composition and a striking attention to the details of eye-catching flourishes of set design and costuming (in some ways he’s a multicultural, postmodern heir to Vincente Minnelli). There’s a reason his greatest work at this point in his career is The Fall, a film at least partially about the power, the wonder, and the vividness of stories told to children.

His latest film – his fourth feature – is the completely family-friendly Mirror Mirror, a retelling of Snow White that takes a colorful and warmly winking approach to the material. This time around, the Evil Queen (Julia Roberts) isn’t just jealous of stepdaughter Snow White (Lily Collins) for being the fairest of them all. The not-too-sad widow wants the girl out of the way so that the Queen herself may marry a rich, square-jawed prince (Armie Hammer) in order to extend her rein and swell the kingdom’s coffers. This sets in motion a plot of miscommunications and misunderstood identity that eventually involves seven dwarves, though you might be surprised to find that they’re roving bandits and their names are Napoleon (Jordan Prentice), Half Pint (Mark Povinelli), Grub (Joe Gnoffo), Grimm (Danny Woodburn), Wolf (Sebastian Saraceno), Butcher (Martin Klebba), and Chuckles (Ronald Lee Clark). After one of their robberies, one of them cheerfully remarks, “it’s better than working in a mine!”

Those aren’t the only differences between Melissa Wallack and Jason Keller’s screenplay and the story as traditionally told, or at least the even more familiar way Disney told it once upon a time ago. Here, Snow White is no passive damsel. Not at all. Snow has guts and gumption, plotting with the baker (Mare Winningham) and other loyal servants to overthrow her stepmother and avenger her late father (Sean Bean, who specializes in doomed characters) by taking back the throne. She even asks the prince for help after she sneaks into an introductory ball thrown in his honor. It’s just too bad the mean Queen overhears her and orders her manservant (Nathan Lane) to take Snow out in the forest and kill her. Last minute sympathy causes the servant to instead encourage Snow to flee into the woods. (That’s the most familiar plot point retained).

This is no movie in which Snow White’s just going to sit back, clean a house, whistle while she works, and fall into a coma awaiting Prince Charming. She’s thinking and acting for herself, standing up for herself, asserting her own personhood, and creating a plan of attack. Collins has a wonderfully placid paleness. She’s an easily believable personification of a character referred to as both “the fairest one of all” and “the most beautiful girl in the world.” She looks like a Disney princess. But she has a face with a fiery determination, a beauty that can sharpen with purposeful intensity. Her softness can become her strength. This damsel’s out to save the distressed, the townspeople ground down underneath the Evil Queen’s capricious rule, the poor subjugated so the decadent can ignore them and sit in the palace amidst delightfully disgusting decadence.

Here’s where Tarsem’s long-time collaborator the late, great Eiko Ishioka’s costumes really shine. The palace is a bewigged menagerie of curious aristocrats who wear elaborate costumes and strut about dripping privilege. When we first enter the throne room, for instance, a pompous Duke (Michael Lerner) plays chess with the Queen, a version of the game in which the pieces are servants wearing sailing-ship-shaped hats. Later all at the ball are dressed as animals in ways both beautiful – Snow’s a lovely swan – and hideous, like a man with what appears to be walrus jowls draped about his shoulders. (The Queen’s sniveling servant is, of course, wearing a hat with wiggling insectoid feelers).

This critique of upper-class vanity is most sharply felt in a scene in which the Queen prepares herself for the ball by having, among other great gross-out gags, bird droppings spread on her face, bees sting her lips, grubs placed in her ears, and tiny fish nibble at her cuticles. Roberts’s performance itself is a great portrayal of an aging narcissist. We can see the charmer she once was and still can be. But the desperation to her scheming to retain her beauty, her power, and the power she believes her beauty gives her, is a deranged driver of her evil plots. Of course, we come to realize she’s been totally evil all along, even in her younger days. Her Dorian Gray relationship with the woman in the mirror is only her latest excuse for bad behavior.

I love all these little tweaks to the Snow White fairy tale, but the fact of the matter is that the whole thing still could have been a jangle of clashing tones climbing up, up, and way over-the-top. That it doesn’t go there is a credit to Tarsem, whose vision for the film is a stirring, stunning, candy-colored one resplendent in eye-popping, mind-boggling design of good humor and a great eye. It’s a film I’d be content just to admire for the visuals, but because it has such genuine wit, fun characters, and lively performances to go along with its endlessly delightful look, it’s more than pretty surfaces. Like its Snow White, the film is beautiful inside and out and filled to the brim with invention. From a lovely animated prologue all the way through a Bollywood-inspired production number epilogue, Tarsem directs with a light touch and a sharp eye. I smiled the whole way through. 

Special Education: LARRY CROWNE

The most dispiriting aspect of Larry Crowne, a dismal new comedy co-written and directed by Tom Hanks, who also takes the titular role, is the way it strides forward, places its finger on the pulse of modern America and then scurries away, never to contemplate such resonance again. This one well-pitched moment comes, fittingly enough, right at the film’s opening that introduces us to Larry Crowne. He’s a nine-time employee-of-the-month at U-Mart, a fitting string of commendations for a man who spent twenty years as a Navy cook. Called into the break room by his boss, fully expecting to be awarded yet again, Larry is dismayed to find that, due to his lack of a college education, he has been deemed insufficiently upwardly mobile within the corporation and therefore must be fired.

In a time of high unemployment, rampant corporate malfeasance, and an identity crisis within a certain section of the lower middle class demographic that has found well-paying jobs increasingly unavailable without college, the premise of Larry Crowne could not be timelier. Unable to find a new job Crowne sets off for the local community college, at the suggestion of his neighbors played by Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson, and settles down, like so many of his real-life counterparts, to try to learn his way back into the job force.

Unlike the wild, experimental, and unexpectedly moving sitcom Community, one of my favorite current TV shows, which often achieves its impact ironically or through surprising detours, Larry Crowne is poised to use the terrain of community college for simple good old fashioned Capra-esque uplift. There’s the sad teacher (Julia Roberts) who just needs to pull her messy personal life together to, doggone it, inspire her students. There’s the strict teacher (George Takai) who has his students’ best interests at heart. There’s the hip gang of scooter commuters (led by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wilmer Valderrama) who are all too ready to embrace a middle-aged doofus like Larry and selflessly help him turn his life around and get back on his feet. This is the kind of cast that could be airlifted out and placed in a great movie. Instead, they’re stuck here.

The movie is awfully cutesy and wispy, to the point where each and every scene feels like a digression, scenes that start nowhere and in their flat, unremarkable visual style, work backwards to irrelevance. The characters are so simply, clumsily drawn by Hanks and his co-writer, the one-hit-wonder behind 2002’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos, that it feels hard to find any reason to care about these people or even believe that they would interact in the ways that they do. Friendship, respect, and romance all seem to be forced upon them by the screenplay. It’s as if Hanks and Vardalos came up with a great idea, sketched out a rough first draft and then decided to film it without further development. This is a loose and flabby picture that, despite being so earnest, is utterly devoid of backbone.

Julia's World: EAT PRAY LOVE

Under the direction of Ryan Murphy, most recently notable for creating the TV show Glee, the popular Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love has become a star turn for Julia Roberts who holds the screen with movie star style as she poses in exotic locations. This is a pretty travelogue with gorgeous scenery and well-dressed costars. What other leading lady in recent memory gets to be romanced by James Franco and Javier Bardem in the same picture? What other leading lady gets to indulge in lovingly prepared meals, walk through lush jungles and beautiful ruins, and look consistently endearing? This is a movie of wish fulfillment, allowing an audience to trek to Italy, India, and Indonesia with a beautiful travelling companion who lets us meet beautiful people.

It’s also a movie dripping in syrupy schmaltz, a gooey, sloppy mess that results in a movie that practically slides off the screen. This isn’t a chick flick; its a woman’s picture, but one portentous in the deep meaning it thinks it’s passing down to us. Roberts plays Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer who leaves her husband (Billy Crudup), has a fling with a struggling actor (Franco), and is all around unsettled. She tells her close friend (Viola Davis) that she feels disconnected from life, unsure of whom she really is. What she decides she needs is some time to get in touch with her appetites, her spirituality, and herself. Thus the eating, praying and loving that happens on her yearlong trek across three exotic locales.

Through her travels, Julia Roberts remains remarkably well put-together. She devours tempting plates of pasta that are sumptuously photographed. After many of those meals she mentions her need for wider pants, but when we get the shot of her struggling to button her jeans, she still looked skinny to me. She also stays remarkably clean, even when she tumbles off of a bike into a muddy ditch.

Figure and cleanliness aside, Roberts brings some small nuance to a role that, as scripted, has very little nuance inherent. She stands before breathtaking vistas, bikes through dripping, green rainforests, and meditates at an ashram in the heart of bustling India. She’s a great surrogate traveler for the audience, experiencing great beauty at every turn.

At each location, she meets people who help her along on her journey of self-discovery. The most intriguing is the sixtyish man from Texas whom she meets in India and is played by the always welcome, always excellent, Richard Jenkins. He has a moving background and a warm screen presence. Later, in Indonesia, Javier Bardem enters the picture and nearly steals the whole thing away with his effortless charm.

Yet, for all its amazing sights and charming cast, the film is frustrating in its lack of introspection. This is a story about a woman’s self-discovery, a woman coming to terms with whom she is, mentally and spiritually, finding a perfect balance and a sense of completeness. And yet, this is a film that gives us almost no sense of her interior thoughts. Sure, we get a few passages of on-the-nose narration, but we are otherwise left stranded with only occasional quivering lips, moody flashbacks, pensive eyes, and, maybe, a single tear rolling down Robert’s cheek. It’s a film that goes out of its way to convince an audience that this woman has learned Big Lessons on her journey, lessons that will change her life, change her outlook, for the better. And yet, as the credits rolled, I remained unconvinced.

Still, I found Eat Pray Love to be an agreeable experience. I liked the scenery and I liked the actors that I had to share it with. As the movie started, I found myself resisting it. I found it too maudlin, too episodic, and too full of polished imagery covering up its hollowness, it’s hodgepodge spirituality, it’s reductive view of foreign culture and it’s navel-gazing dullness. But the film outlasted my will to resist. While my early complaints still stand, by the film’s end I found myself lulled into a sense of small pleasure. It’s a shiny, big-budget, continent-spanning film with fine actors and a nice look, pleasant and undemanding. Robert Richardson’s sun-soaked cinematography is consistently lovely and the cast is enjoyable company. The film is far worse than it thinks it is, but much better than I was expecting, hardly necessary, but certainly watchable.

Duplicity (2009)

I would never have guessed that behind the bland ads and a blander poster, that Duplicity could actually be very good. I’m so happy that it’s more than very good: this is a smart, stylish, and witty movie that is a total frothy delight from beginning to end, the best froth I’ve seen in a while and the most satisfyingly twist-filled plot since, well, writer-director Tony Gilroy’s last movie (one of my favorites of 2007), Michael Clayton.

Duplicity is like that film in a major key, lighter, bouncier, sunnier, a comedy thriller about corporate espionage without a gun fight or car chase in sight. It’s an endlessly entertaining heist film (yes, that tired genre) as it continually backs up to fill us in on the con while moving forward to reveal how the con is more complicated than we think. The filmmakers delight in revealing their secrets to us, and I took delight in it as well, as the frame literally breaks apart and slides into the past then slowly shrinks back into the future to send us into even more twists. These are the kind of genuinely surprising twists that make me alternately gasp and chuckle, not the kind that appear simply because the gears of the plot require it of them.

The dialogue spits and flips out of the actor’s mouths so effortlessly, so wittily, I’ll bet it could often work just as well as a radio play. But that would rob the film of its beautiful imagery, its fun split-screen moments, and the great visages of its stars. Julia Roberts’s face is harsher now than it once was but she’s settling into a more mature look, still a star up there, comfortable in her own skin, larger than life, and she’s having a blast. So is Clive Owen, pitch-perfect as always, but its startling after so many years of grim and grimmer stories to see him crack a smile. He’s having fun too. These are capital-S stars, the kind that help guide a smart, stylish movie to an even better place by their sheer luminosity. They play ex-spies, ex-maybe lovers, and maybe also examining the start of a beautiful friendship. They’re running a con game, and that’s all I should say. Are they running one con in tandem or two at once? Are they conning each other or just corporate America? What’s the difference between a hand cream and a lotion? Why does the last question matter (as it so obviously does)? I won’t say. There's too much fun to be had finding out.

And then there’s a great supporting cast, the best of which is Paul Giamatti. Boy, it’s good to see him again, and in such a fun and funny role, twisting his face up in all-too-recognizable displays of corporate arrogance. Tom Wilkinson’s here too, in a mostly one-note role as an also recognizable corporate type: the self-satisfied windbag, although he gets a great monologue about ancient fire and also gets to explain one of the movie’s best twists. Together the two great men square off over the opening credits in an extremely slow-mo corporate fisticuffs that brings the house down.

What a pure entertainment; it’s sleek and shiny, a beautiful pristine bliss machine. I loved every minute of it as it sizzles with a love of storytelling. And why shouldn’t it, when Gilroy has such a fun, satisfying story to tell. This is a classy and classical film that, with a few changes, – they’d have to be secretly married, their relations would be more implied, the tech much lower – could pass for a film of the forties or fifties, it’s so cleanly charming with effortless expert craftsmanship (who’d play the leads? I’m thinking Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell).

A film that could have stepped wrong so often didn’t and by the end, when I realized Gilroy pulled it off, I was pleasantly surprised, no, pleasantly overjoyed. This is an effortlessly delightful movie, the best excuse for an ear-to-ear grin in these troubled times of pre-summer multiplex famine and economic drought. This is a roof-raising crowd-pleaser in the best sense. The kind of movie with generous humor and a complicated but comprehensible script that flies forward trusting the audience to keep pace. As Gilroy holds the last shot longer than expected (not unlike in Clayton) he allows the plot to settle in along with the full satisfaction of having seen a movie.