Movie Review: "To Rome With Love"

"To Rome With Love": B.  I usually prefer Woody Allen movies in which he does not appear as an actor (e.g., Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and Midnight In Paris (2011)), but relegates himself to directing only.  However, I decided to take a chance on To Rome With Love for two reasons. First, Momma Cuandito and I will be in the Eternal City next week. Second, Woody only plays a supporting role in this picture, although as the script writer he does manage to reserve some of the best one-liners for his own character, Jerry.

Jerry and his wife Phyllis (Judy Davis) are the parents of a twenty-something year old daughter, Hayley (Alison Pil), who meets Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti, a native of Rome) when she asks him for directions to the Trevi Fountain. By the time they reach their destination on foot, they have become an item. They are but one of four twosomes whose stories are rotated in and out throughout this entertaining movie.

We also have Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) and Sally (Greta Gerwig), an engaged American couple living together in Trastevere, the Greenwich Village of Rome. Things get complicated in ways you might expect when Sally invites her friend Monica (Ellen Page) to stay with them for awhile. Before Monica's arrival, Sally describes her friend to Jack as someone who exudes a sexual vibe, yet Sally thinks nothing of leaving the two of them alone. Alec Baldwin shows up on a regular basis as a detached third party who functions as Jack's conscience. Sometimes it seems only Jack can see and hear him, but in other scenes Monica converses with him as well.

Then there's a newly married couple, Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Allesandra Mastronardi), two country kids who've decided to make their way to the big city. Milly is nervous about meeting her man's parents for the first time, and scoots off from their hotel room to find a hair salon. In between the time Milly leaves the hotel and the arrival of the parents, a hooker, Anna (the voluptuous Penelope Cruz), arrives at the room, offering her pre-paid services to Antonio. It seems Antonio's friends have made the arrangements. Of course before he can get rid of her, his relatives show up, so he has to pretend that Anna is Milly. The fact that Anna's dress is short, low-cut, and appears to have been painted on her makes the pretense a hard sell. Meanwhile, the real Milly is having her own over-the-top adventure on her way to the salon.

Finally there is Leopoldo (the ever funny Roberto Benigni), a married father of two little kids. He is a middle aged office worker who, for reasons unexplained to himself and the viewers, becomes an overnight celebrity. He is dogged by the paparazzi and scandal mongers who follow him wherever he goes. The instant fame is fun at first, but soon he longs for the days when he was a mere functionary.

Some mini-stories are better than others, but director Allen does not dwell with any one of them for long before hopping off to the next. Some dialogue is spoken in English, with periodic Italian accompanied by subtitles, which I did not mind at all. Woody's character reminded me of Alvy Singer, the role Allen played in his 1977 film, Annie Hall. He is neurotic in a funny way, but begrudgingly relies on his stable wife to keep him in check. He does not hit it off with his daughter's new boyfriend, and is too persistent in coaxing the boyfriend's father to pursue a career as an opera singer. By the way, the actor cast in the role of the singing father is Fabio Armiliato, an internationally famous tenor. The few scenes including him are among the movie's best.

This film was shot entirely in Rome, although it could have taken place almost anywhere. I am not rating it as highly as Vicky Christina or Midnight, but I can now understand why it lasted so long in the first run theaters. If you are not a Woody Allen fan, this movie just might convert you.

Quarterly Cinema Scan - Volume IX

Here are the movies I've watched on the boob tube during the third quarter of 2012.  I know Citizen Kane has been at the top of a number of Best Movie lists, but I can't jump on board that train. The two movies below which I've graded "A" (Bonnie & Clyde and The Sting) I have seen before, and still found them worthy, whereas Dark Passage and The Great Escape did not quite strike me as being as good as I recall from viewings long ago. 

1. Bonnie & Clyde (1967 drama; Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway go on a bank robbing crime spree in the 1930s, becoming folk heroes even though they are murderers) A 

2. Citizen Kane (1941 drama; Orson Welles is a multi-millionaire narcissist who owns an empire of newspapers) B

3. Dark Passage (1947 drama; Convicted killer Humphrey Bogart escapes from San Quentin, evades the cops with Lauren Bacall's help, undergoes facial plastic surgery, and works to find the real killer) B-

4. The Days Of Wine And Roses (1962 drama; Jack Lemon and Lee Remick can't lay off the booze, and that spells trouble) A-

5. The Great Escape (1963 war drama; Richard Attenborough masterminds an escape plan for dozens of Allied prisoners, including Steve McQueen and James Garner, from a POW camp in Germany) B

6. Lolita (1962 drama; college professor James Mason can't take his eyes off Sue Lyon, the daughter of his landlady, Shelly Winters) B-

7. The Magnificent Seven (1960 western; besieged Mexican villagers hire Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and five other gunmen to help them thwart the band of cutthroat marauders led by Eli Wallach) B

8. The Sting (1973 drama; Paul Newman and Robert Redford, two con artists extraordinaire, seek to avenge the loss of a good friend by pulling The Big Con on the gangster who killed him, Robert Blake) A

9. The Thomas Crown Affair (1968 drama; insurance investigator Faye Dunaway figures out that Steve McQueen is the head of a gang that stole $4 million in a bank heist, but will she let her heart get in the way of doing her job?) B+

10. Three Coins In The Fountain (1954 drama; Dorothy McGuire, Jean Peters and Maggie McNamara are three secretaries working in Rome who have their hearts set on author Clifton Webb, prince Louis Jourdan and translator Rossano Brazzi, respectively) C+

11. To Have And Have Not (1944 drama; Humphrey Bogart is a professional fisherman on the island of Martinique, pre World War II, who romances singer Lauren Bacall while simultaneously (and reluctantly) agreeing to help the French patriots outsmart the Nazis) A-

12. The White Cliffs Of Dover (1944 drama; American Irene Dunne travels to London, marries English nobleman Alan Marshal who goes off to fight in WW I, and gives birth to a son who ends up fighting in WW II) B

Movie Review: "Trouble With The Curve"

"Trouble With The Curve": B-.  The last two movies I saw starring Clint Eastwood were Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino.  In the former he plays a crotchety old boxing manager.  In the latter he plays a crotchety old war veteran.  In his new movie, Trouble With The Curve, which made its Twin Cities debut yesterday, Eastwood plays a crotchety old professional baseball scout, Gus Lobel.  In real life, Eastwood is 82 years old.  If he were actually a baseball scout instead of an actor, I'd guess he would be almost an exact replica of Gus.  It makes one ponder this question:  If you are playing a character who is more or less yourself, is it really acting?  Eastwood has been around Hollywood long enough to have earned the right to play whatever characters he wants.  Judging by his last three movies, he chooses to play Clint Eastwood.

Gus is an old school scout for the Atlanta Braves.  There are only three months left to go until his employment contract expires, but he has no intention of retiring.  Baseball is his life.  His territory includes Georgia and the Carolinas.  He doesn't believe scouting a player by researching voluminous statistical data on a computer can take the place of seeing a prospect in person.  One of the other Braves' scouts, a younger know-it-all named Phillip (Matthew Lillard), scoffs at Gus' obsolete methods.  Truth be told, Gus probably would not even know how to turn on a computer.  Instead, he drives himself to amateur games in his rusted out car, and relies on the sounds of the ball hitting the mitt or the bat to determine a prospect's worth.  His auditory senses are acute to compensate for his rapidly failing eyesight.   

There is a fair share of baseball in Trouble With The Curve, but this is really more of a father-daughter movie.  Gus' 33 year old daughter, Mickey (Amy Adams), is a senior associate with a large Atlanta law firm.  Mickey is named after Yankee Hall Of Famer Mickey Mantle, Gus' favorite player.  She is up for partnership, but must first win the proverbial big case before the firm's partnership committee, a small group of middle-aged white guys, makes the decision whether to promote her or a male colleague, Neil (Clifton Guterman).  Just as Mickey is in the throes of preparing for a huge presentation to an important client, she gets a visit from the Braves' scouting director, Pete Klein (the always solid John Goodman).  Pete is Gus' boss in the team's chain of command, but moreso he is Gus' personal friend going back over thirty years.  He has known Mickey forever.  He tells Mickey that the Braves have the second pick in the upcoming draft and they are real interested in a kid named Bo Gentry who is playing amateur ball in North Carolina.  Gus' job will be on the line if he makes the wrong recommendation on whether to pick Gentry.  Pete suggests to Mickey that, because of Gus' macular degeneration, she should go to North Carolina to help her father scout Gentry.  Mickey rejects Pete's entreaty, but as we know from the trailers we have seen, she changes her mind and surprises her father at the Carolina field.  Her prospects for partnership are now in jeopardy.  She has prioritized her father's situation over her professional obligations, although she assures her firm's partners that she won't let them down.

While they are in North Carolina Mickey tries a few times to have a heart-to-heart talk with her dad, but he always cuts it short.  She wants to get some answers from her father about how he raised her and some decisions he made following her mother's death when Mickey was six years old.  Gus does not want Mickey there in the first place, even though she knows as much about baseball as anybody, thanks to Gus.  He certainly isn't interested in digging up the past.  Meanwhile, a young scout named Johnny (Justin Timberlake) arrives on the scene to take a look at Gentry.  Johnny is a former pitcher originally signed by Gus for the Braves several years before.  Johnny developed arm trouble and eventually was traded to the Red Sox over Gus' objections.  Johnny's career was cut short due to that injury, and now he is a Red Sox scout.  Would you believe he is just about Mickey's age?

Will Gus make the right decision about whether to draft Gentry?  Will Mickey get the answers she is seeking from her father?  Will Johnny and Mickey end up as more than new friends who like to challenge each other with baseball trivia?  Will Mickey make partner?

Trouble With The Curve is too cheesy and predictable to be considered a top notch baseball flick.  Bull Durham is far and away the gold standard for that genre.  The best parts of Trouble are the one line expletives uttered by Gus and his beyond-hope style of housekeeping, which includes stacks of sports pages all over his house and his inability to do something as simple as flipping a burger over the stove or backing his beater out of his garage.  Amy Adams is miscast as Mickey.  I might be able to see her as a big firm lawyer, but she doesn't have a tomboy bone in her body, a characteristic called for in the role.  The characters of Neil (her fellow senior associate), Phillip (the know-it-all scout) and Bo Gentry (the hot amateur prospect) are one-dimensional horses' asses.  The other guys on Gentry's team look like they should be playing chess instead of baseball.  Pee-wee Herman must have been unavailable when the casting call went out.

Near the end of the movie there is a scene involving a pitcher's mound which just happens to be situated on the lawn next to the Carolina motel where Mickey is staying.  How many motels have you stayed in where the accoutrements included a pitcher's mound?  In order for the movie to have its over-the-top contrived happy ending, with nary a loose end, the motel pitcher's mound was necessary.  I am surprised the story did not end with the Braves winning the World Series.  

Movie Review: "Arbitrage"

"Arbitrage": A-.  Abraham Lincoln is credited with making the observation that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Richard Gere plays investment firm founder and CEO Robert Miller, who apparently never studied Honest Abe in a history class. Miller has lots of secrets that are eating away at him, but he has boxed himself into a corner and the only way to get out of the box is a strategy of playing it cool, and of course telling lie upon lie to keep each secret a secret. He has a mistress, Julie (French actress Laetitia Costa), whom he's hiding from his wife (Susan Sarandon). He has ordered the head of his accounting department to falsify a multi-million dollar transaction, and must keep that secret from the Chief Financial Officer, Brooke (Brit Marling), who happens to be Miller's daughter, and from the tycoon who is negotiating to buy one of Miller's businesses. He is being pressed for the repayment of $400 million which an impatient business acquaintance has loaned him "off the record," but he can't come up with the money until the sale to the tycoon is closed. Julie is pressing him to ditch his wife, as he has been promising to do for years. On the outside Miller is Mister Cool, but the inner turmoil is raging.

All of those problems pale in comparison to what happens when he becomes a prime suspect in the death of one of the aforementioned characters. The events surrounding the death bring two more interesting characters into play. Jimmy (Nate Parker) is a young ex-con whose father was Miller's personal chauffeur for many years. When the father died, Miller made sure the dead man's family, including Jimmy, was provided for. Thus, Jimmy owes Miller big time, and feels obligated to help when Miller needs Jimmy's assistance in leaving the death scene. How could Jimmy say no, even though if the cops find out he'll most likely return to prison? Speaking of cops, Tim Roth plays Detective Bryer, who fingers Miller for the crime but bides his time building a case against him.

There is not much to like about Robert Miller, but director Nicholas Jarecki unveils the story in a way that gets the audience involuntarily pulling for Miller anyway. Gere is credible in the role, dashing and debonaire like a Wall Street honcho should be, but with a simultaneous sleaziness that must be part of his core to be up to his chin in this kind of marital, financial and legal trouble. I loved Tim Roth as the detective. He asks all the right questions of all the right people, knowing when to press and when to back off. Has Miller met his match in Detective Bryer?

This was a fast-paced 100 minutes, with no extraneous scenes and a plot that fairly well holds up to logic. Almost everything Miller says and does is what you'd expect from a man with his problems and character flaws. The same is true for his wife, his daughter, Jimmy, and the other people with whom Miller interacts. For example, the dialogue between father and daughter after she finds out the books have been cooked is extremely well written and performed. Likewise for the dialogue between Detective Bryer and Jimmy, who is torn between maintaining loyalty to Miller and the prospect of returning to prison as an accomplice after-the-fact. Bryer dangles the likelihood of a ten year prison term over Jimmy's head.

Arbitrage, in financial terms, occurs when an investor buys a commodity in one market (say, the US) and immediately sells it in another market (say, China), keeping the difference in the values of the related currencies as his profit. In Arbitrage, there is no actual arbitrage occurring, but the term is nevertheless a good metaphor for Miller's methods. He is, in a sense, buying time and hoping to cash it in for a better life in the future. But as he buys his time he runs into more problems, all of them through his own doing. If only he'd realized that the life he could have led without the lies, the fraud and the deception would have still been pretty sweet.

Ha Ha! The Yankees Are On The Precipice

As you no doubt already know from reading my March 6 post (Baseball Expands Its Playoff Format), there will be five teams (not four as in the past) making the playoffs from the American League this year. They will be the three division (East, Central & West) champs plus two wild cards. The wild cards will be the two non-division champs with the best record, and they will have a one-game series. Therefore, there is a BIG incentive to qualify for the playoffs as a division champ instead of as a wild card. Lose the wild card game and you are doneskie for the year.

The NY Yankees, with their $196 million payroll (highest, by far, in the Majors), might not win the AL East Division. In fact, they might not even make the playoffs! Right now they are tied with the Orioles (with a payroll of only $81 million) for the AL East lead. Each of those two teams currently has 59 losses. If, for the sake of discussion, the Orioles win the AL East, that means the Yankees would have to have a better record than all but one of the other non-division champs to qualify for post-season play. Let's look at the competition.

In the AL East, the Tampa Bay Rays have only 61 losses, so they are definitely in contention for the playoffs, maybe even the division championship. In the AL Central, the White Sox and the Tigers have 62 and 63 losses, respectively. One of them will make it in as the division champ; the other has a shot at a wild card. In the AL West, the Texas Rangers have an almost healthy four game lead for the division championship, but the surprising Oakland A's (just 59 losses) and the underachieving LA/Anaheim Angels (63 losses) are in the hunt.

Picture a scenario where the three division champs are the O's, the White Sox and the Rangers. The Yankees would then have to fend off the Rays, the Tigers, the A's and the Angels, assuming none of those teams goes in the tank between now and October. Two of those five teams would make the one-game playoff, while the other three start their off-season early.

Today, the Rays will try to finish a three game sweep against the Yankees, and starting tomorrow, the Yankees open up a four game series in Baltimore. That will be huge. Maybe the boys in pinstripes are starting to feel the heat. A question along those lines was put to Yankee star Derek Jeter last Saturday and again on Sunday. Both times he shrugged off any concern. "Yankees Say Sky Isn't Falling" read the Star Tribune's sports page headline. Despite the bravado, if the team fails to make the playoffs, the sky in their world will indeed have fallen.

By the way, you might wonder which of the thirty Major League Baseball teams has the lowest payroll. That would be the Oakland A's, a team which has an identical record to the Yankees. Oakland's $49 million payroll is, for all intents and purposes, equal to the combined individual salaries of just two of the Yankees' players on their twenty-five man roster, CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira. Unless one is a native New Yorker, how can you possibly cheer for the Bronx Bombers?

Chrome Dome & The Cub Reporter

You might remember from my March 30 post (Hoop Dreams At St. Joe's) that I moved from Illinois to Iowa in January, 1961, in the middle of my eighth grade. My school in Illinois, St. Joe's, had two rooms of eighth graders, about twenty boys and twenty girls in each room. My new school in Iowa, Our Lady Of Lourdes, also had two rooms of eighth graders, but the guys were in one room and the girls were in the other. Just my luck! Things did not improve on the social front when I started my high school career at Assumption High in Davenport. Assumption was neither co-ed nor all-guys; it was "co-institutional," a term which was foreign to me. That meant that both boys and girls attended the school, but the sexes were physically separated within the building. Woe was the male student who was caught by the nuns in the girls' wing! The upshot of all this was that from January 1961 until September 1963, I did not have a girl in any of my classes. I decided to do something about that.

At Assumption there were only a couple of courses which, due to the small enrollment therein, were offered on a co-ed basis. Those classes were held in a room off the hallway which ran between the boys and girls wings. One such class was journalism. You would think that the guys would be elbowing each other out of the way to register for journalism, if for no other reason than having the pleasure of being in the company of the fairer sex. In reality, such was not the case. For one thing, journalism was offered only to juniors, and those who applied for admission into the class needed to have achieved at least a B in freshman and sophomore English. The second reason was that the teacher, Father Wiebler, was one tough hombre, maybe the toughest teacher in the school. But I took a chance, applied and was admitted. I had no delusions of grandeur to become the next Grantland Rice or Edward R. Murrow. (I would have written "Woodward" or "Bernstein," but of course no one knew who they were until the 1972 Watergate break-in.) Journalism was simply going to be a step up in my moribund social life, a means to an end.

Almost every priest at Assumption had a nickname conferred upon him by the students. Wiebler's was "Wilma." I don't know the genesis of that nickname, but I do know we never had the guts to call him that to his face. Wilma was pretty much a celebrity, at least in the state of Iowa. Assumption did not have a yearbook. Instead, the student newspaper, The Knight Beacon, was published eight times throughout the school year, and the eight issues were kept in a faux leather binder - - red one year, white the next - - which the students could buy in the fall. When completed, the eight issues of The Knight Beacon were deemed to be "a book of the year." Not a yearbook, mind you. A book of the year. That was not a misnomer mistake you'd make in front of Wilma.  The Knight Beacon was his baby, and rare was the year when Assumption did not win some award for having one of the best student newspapers in the state, if not the entire Midwest. This made Wilma a legend in his own time. It also resulted in his standards for excellence remaining in place. The pressure on the newspaper staff was palpable. No student wanted to be responsible for a poor showing by The Knight Beacon.

The journalism class was taught with one goal in mind, viz., that the juniors would learn how to help the seniors (the previous year's journalism students) put out The Knight Beacon in the highly professional and accomplished manner that had become an Assumption tradition. Almost all of the articles appearing in the paper would be written by seniors, but on a rare occasion Wilma might bestow upon a junior the honor of submitting a story for publication. I was the recipient of such an honor, but it almost cost me my teeth.

In October, my assignment was to do an article on how the freshmen ("freddies") were getting along at AHS, now that they'd been high schoolers for a month. I needed an angle or a hook for the story - - I did not just want to interview a dozen random freddies - - so I found out the names of some Latin I students and gave them a call. At the time I was taking Latin III from Father Mulligan, aka "Chrome Dome," a thirty-something Irish tough guy who looked and talked like a longshoreman. He was not big on pleasantries, and assumed that because we were third year students our mastery of Latin was at hand. I knew Chrome Dome taught a couple of periods of Latin I in addition to his Latin III duties. Since the point of my assigned newspaper article was focusing on how freshmen were adjusting to high school life, their ability to fare well in Latin, a language they probably hadn't studied before in grade school, seemed like a good take-off point.

I conducted my interviews by phone. After intoducing myself, I should have begun the conversation with a general softball question. Instead, for many of the phone interviews, I started off the conversation with something like this: "So, how are you and Father Mulligan getting along?" What I meant to ask was "How are you getting along with your Latin studies?" but unfortunately my phrasing left a little to be desired. As luck would have it, word got back to Chrome Dome the next morning that The Knight Beacon was going to run an expose on unloved teachers, and that I was the reporter! Chrome Dome was waiting for me when I showed up for his class that afternoon.

He stuck his head in the door and called me out into the hallway. At that point I had no idea why he wanted me outside the classroom. He grabbed a large chunk of my upper shirt with his clenched fist, brought it up to my chin, and slammed my shoulder blades into the metal locker behind me. The veins were popping through his neck as he got right in my face. "I hear you've been trying to stir things up against me with the freshmen!" It wasn't until then that I realized how my phone conversations from the night before could have been interpreted. My mind was racing, weighing whether I should plead ignorance, innocence or stupidity. The thought of insanity never crossed my mind, but in retrospect that might have been a good choice. Amazingly, I also quickly pondered if I would be able to block a punch, in case he decided to throw one. I would not have been his first human punching bag.

I stammered a few unintelligible sentences and then thankfully heard a shout from a familiar voice. It was the voice of Father Charles Mann, the principal of the school and, coincidentally, the teacher I had for Latin I and II my freshman and sophomore years. Surely my guardian angel must have prompted him to walk down the hallway at that precise moment. Father Mann, who of course was nicknamed "Charlemagne" (get it?), may have kept Chrome Dome from killing me right outside the classroom. The crisis subsided long enough for both Chrome Dome and I to tell our sides of the story. I apologized to Chrome Dome and went back in to the classroom. After a few minutes, Charlemagne went on his way and Chrome Dome, still seething but not to the boiling point he had been moments earlier, returned to the classroom and conducted class without so much as a sideways glance in my direction. Yes, he had calmed down a little, but I was persona non grata. For the rest of that semester, things in Latin III returned to normal. It must have killed Chrome Dome to give me the "A" that I deserved.

My journalism career ended before it started, kind of like the glory days of my basketball exploits at St. Joe's. Wilma had a senior write the story about the freshmen, and I was assigned a less glamorous task which has escaped my memory. Less than three months later, my family moved from Iowa to Minot, North Dakota. My new high school, Bishop Ryan, did not offer journalism, so I was never put in the position of having to lie about my newspaper experience.

Movie Review: "Hope Springs"

"Hope Springs": C+.  I hate to say it, but the best part of "Hope Springs" was a short dialogue between Kay (Meryl Streep) and Karen (Elisabeth Shue), a bartender in a small Maine tavern, as Kay bellies up to the bar.

Kay: Do you have wine?
Karen: Yes. Do you like white or red?
Kay: Red.
Karen: Then I'd go with the white.

Kay and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) are empty nesters living in a comfortably modest house in Omaha. They've been married thirty-one years, but their relationship resembles that of housemates rather than spouses. As omniscient observers we quickly realize that the problem lies entirely with Arnold. It isn't just his lack of warmth. It's his cluelessness at the unsubtle hints that Kay throws his way when she wants to rekindle the spark. From the time he sits down to breakfast until the end of the day when he falls asleep in his chair while watching golf lessons on TV, he barely acknowledges Kay's existence. Kay cries herself to sleep.

According to Eileen (Jean Smart, ooo-la-lah!), Kay's fellow clerk in the Coldwater Creek store, there's no sense trying to get her husband to change. "A marriage is what it is," advises Eileen. Unconvinced, Kay soon learns of a week-long marriage counseling class offered by author/practitioner Dr. Feld in a quaint Maine tourist town. The cost is a hefty $4000, but Kay signs up herself and Arnold, and buys the plane tickets. Of course Arnold puts up a fight, insisting that he's not going, but we already know from having seen the trailers that, indeed, he does end up making the trip with his wife.

A very large portion of the movie is spent in the counseling sessions conducted by Dr. Feld. As a viewer I found the sessions to be painfully long, repetitive, too scientifically technical and too verbally graphic. Is there an editor on board? Comedian Steve Carell is cast as the doctor. I kept waiting for him to break into a comedy soliloquy but it didn't happen; he plays it straight, which makes me wonder why he was chosen for the part.

Every session ends with an assignment given to the couple by the doctor. The first night's homework is simply to put their arms around each other. The assignments get more intimate with each passing day, but I would just as soon have been spared the details. Some of the scenes, particularly one in a darkened movie theater, are enough to make the moviegoer want to yell, "Get a room!" What's puzzling is that Arnold and Kay did have a room at the Econolodge. I wrote above that I was surprised Carell was chosen to play the counselor. I am equally surprised that Streep and Jones, two great actors who do not need the work, accepted the producer's offer to play these parts.

Streep is wonderful, as always. Some of her best acting moments occur without her speaking a word, such as when she's embarrassed by some of the self-help book titles she examines in a Barnes & Noble, or when she is visibly hurt by her husband's cold shoulder right after she got herself all dolled up before bedtime. Jones, on the other hand, let me down. (I never thought I'd ever write or say that.) He demonstrates his oafishness and his selfishness in scene after scene, both before and after the couple arrives in Maine. There is no range. We get that Arnold is a curmudgeon, but it keeps getting pounded into our heads. Surely there must be more depth to the man. Maybe his plus is that he doesn't physically abuse his wife, but he is guilty time and again of emotional abuse. I missed the self-assuredness and wit Jones usually gives us. Perhaps I should blame the script writer, but then again, nobody put a gun to Jones' head to take the part. Maybe he simply wanted to work with Meryl.