The point at which you break

Fair Game

Crit

Greetings, and welcome to Those Bastards! weekend. But first, the obligatory shoutout to Tom McCarthy: OK, dude, you've pocketed a paycheck for one of those brief, unmemorable character roles that anyone could do; now get your ass back behind the camera, where you're damn near brilliant.

OK, today's bastards are Karl Rove and Scooter Libby (a deliciously nasty--no doubt unfairly so, but who cares?--performance by David Andrews) and their bosses in a film that wants very much to be this generation's All the President's Men. It falls a long way short of that--the filmmaking is rote this-happened-then-this-happened--but Naomi Watts and especially Sean Penn give it their best, as the surprisingly (without a doubt intentionally) unappealing Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. What's good about the film is that, as little as we may like the power couple, as much as we see that Joe is working mostly from ego and never-wrong syndrome and Valerie is calling "no fair" in a game that she has been playing unfairly for 13 years, we still want them to beat the bastards. Badly.

Then again, how hard is it to stir up sentiment against that crew? And the tested couple's reconciliation scene fairly swells with schmaltz--sorta like the "traffic was a bitch" scene in the movie-within-the-movie of The Player--you kinda wonder whether the real folks can watch with a straight face.

Trailer

• The Tourist--Yes, your recollection is correct: I have mentioned this before. That's sort of my point. I've seen this, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 times now (though I never tire of "You look ravenous!" "Do you mean 'ravishing'?" "I do"), and not until this time did I realize: it's North by Northwest in Venice! Depp is even trying to do Grant (though Jolie is much harder-edged than Saint). It's really obvious, but it took me that long.