In search of the money shot: Rogen and Banks

Big Score. The mark will be an orphaned heiress (Rachel Weisz)—a lonely eccentric who goes through Lamborghinis like coffee filters—and if you don’t think Brody’s oddball falls for the screwball dame, then you’ve never been to the movies. Director Rian Johnson was bursting with promise after the high-school noir Brick, which was handsomely mannered where this caper is dangerously cute. Like a fashion-victim mind-meld of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Darjeeling Limited, The Brothers Bloom sets its costume department trafficking in ascots, capes, and vintage goggles, while the characters travel in steamships and sleeper cars and the narration dares to rhyme. Weisz nonetheless manages to lure us suckers in with her unaffected charm.

Just Can’t Get It Up

Kevin Smith goes limp with smutty romantic comedy

Zack and Miri Make a Porno H Seth rogen, elizaBeth BanKS THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY, R

to discuss Kevin Smith’s latest film on its own terms, you might begin by renaming it. how’s When Harry Mouth-Fucked Sally sound? unshocking and anti-funny, the dialogue hammers the ear in the way of a young dork striving to impress a lunch table with forced filth. yet the romcom clichés and prefab slabs of lovers’ business still come tumbling off the screen on a turbulent river of sap, giving Zack and Miri the feel of a date movie for guys who can’t get dates.

zack (rogen) and miri (Banks), ten years out of high school, are slackers—or at least that’s what we used to call them back in the ’90s, when Smith launched the more heartfelt (and, for that matter, ballsfelt) raunch of Clerks and the archetype still had subcultural relevance. Platonic romancers since their playground days, they share a slovenly apartment in Pittsburgh and a talent for ignoring utilities bills. in an early, falsely encouraging moment of hilarity, zack meets a Vader-voiced porn star (Justin long) who inspires the pair to make some quick money by mounting a film with a lot of mounting in it. Soon, after selecting a crew of bimbos and swordsmen to serve as their

costars, the two are all-too-predictably at it with wooden line-reading and the mechanical pledges: “let’s just promise that it’s not gonna change anything between us, okay?”

okay: there’s no thing to change, actually; such is the absence of onscreen chemistry. Banks— seemingly as embarrassed about the material as the audience—has not so much created a

Synecdoche,
New York HH½
PhiliP Seymour hoffman,
Catherine Keener
SONY PIC TURES CLASSICS, R
a theater director’s midlife
crisis becomes a metadrama
In his directorial debut, Charlie
Kaufman—scripter of the
writer’s-block-busted Adaptation
and the blissfully brain-fried
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind—indulges himself in a
drab trip up his own cerebral
cortex. Hoffman plays a theater
director so floridly phobic
that there’s no distinguishing
between his hypochondria and
his actual illnesses, between
paranoid fantasies and exis-
tential pain. After his cackling
wife (Keener) bolts with their
daughter, he embarks on an
autobiographical stage project
that mutates into a city-size
imitation of life. The movie in
turn grows frantically fractal,
moving around a lot while
going nowhere. Costarring
Michelle Williams as an insecure
actress, Samantha Morton as an
anxious box-office girl, and
Emily Watson as a doomed
actress playing an anxious box-
office girl in the play-within-
the-film, Synecdoche thinks too
hard to feel much beyond its
infinitely regressive neuroses.

The dialogue hammers the ear like
a young dork striving to impress
a lunch table with forced filth.

character as fulfilled the terms of her contract, while rogen merely coasts along, frittering away a fraction of the goodwill he’s been banking since Knocked Up. those Judd apatow lads, invariably possessed of inner sweetness, get by on boyish magnetism, and the poorly sketched humanoids in Zack and Miri are, in their way, just as magnetic. Joylessly juvenile—too immature to engage with adult movies in any sense of the phrase—they repel.

The Brothers
Bloom HHH
adrien Brody, marK ruffalo
SUMMIT, PG- 13
Sibling rivalry leads to wacky
hijinks in this stylish caper
Brody and Ruffalo scamper from
Prague to Mexico as a team of
gentleman thieves, con artists
dedicated to elaborately artsy
contrivances. When the moony
eyes of the soulful one (Brody,
duh) declare that he longs to
assume his own identity, the
brothers gear up for One Last

Fear(s) of the
Dark HHH½
VoiCeS of aure atiKa, arthur h
IFC, NOT RATED
these scary tales may have
you running for some ambien
Each of the six animated films in
this omnibus (black-and-white
shorts that range from stylishly
spooky to pleasingly weird) is
supposedly a rendering of its
creators’ primal nightmares, or
at least their abiding obsessions.
The graphic novelist Charles
Burns contributes a Cronen-
bergian creep-out—the tale of
a boy, a bug, and a girl who
won’t take noooo! for an
answer—that echoes the themes
of his classic series Black Hole.
A short by Marie Caillou features
a Japanese schoolgirl possessed
by the spirit of a killer—a
deranged samurai in pigtails.
Being French, the movie is
too thick with philosophie for
its own good. Its brightest dark
ideas are simple triumphs of
stark design.

SPO TLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF Synecdoche, New York there are a few hints of beauty in Synecdoche, New York’s metatextual riffs on decay, many found in the graceful score. Songwriter and producer Jon Brion (who provided music for I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and was nominated for a grammy for Magnolia) lets some air into Charlie Kaufman’s hermetic affair with poignant strumming, delicate picking, and livid violins. the power of the movie’s final scenes owes to the ethereal swell he designed, the eerie sound of grief.

Jon Brion

Lights out in Fear(s)

CLOCK WISE FROM TOP: DARREN MICHAELS/THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY 2008; LORENZO MAT TOT TI/PRIMA LINEA PRODUC TIONS/IFC; AVIV SMALL/ZUMA PRESS