Take it from Sherman

War, Inc.

Crit

Golly!

As a wise woman told me recently, something has to be the worst thing I see all year; I believe we have a front-runner.

But let me talk about the good stuff first: the music, Strummer-heavy as always in a Cusack project (though I would exempt from praise, the original stuff, which tries to be funny-bad à la American Dreamz but is in fact only obvious-bad), and . . . uh, well I laughed 3 or 4 times. Oh, and Marisa Tomei is always nice to look at, though she's not given anything like an character to portray.

The story has John C., as professional killer Brand Hauser, haunted by flashbacks to when he played a professional killer in a much better film, and presumably to when he had an actual career. I'm guessing sis Joan had some flashbacks, too, to when her brief including acting, not just autoparody. Let's not even talk about Sir Ben.

Trailer

• Fugitive Pieces--Funny, I'd seen the poster for this and thought, "That title sounds awfully familiar--what do I know about that?" but it never dawned on me until I saw the trailer that years ago I read the Anne Michaels novel on which the film is based, but (perhaps because it was recommended by a woman I was sort of involved with at the time, and I didn't love the book), I had completely erased it from my mind. Well, not completely obviously. But that's interesting because that's what the book and film are about: subconscious (and incomplete) memory erasure.