(I offer no excuse. Okay, yeah I do: I was in Cedar Rapids, had some time to kill, had seen everything else, and was with other people. Plus the other option was Down With Love.)

Surprisingly unfunny, even when you allow for the fact that I’m predisposed to dislike the premise, this was the movie that was to take Jim back to his classic comic roots. It hit all the formulaic high-points and sure seems to have scored at the box office.

But for all that, there are more laughs in The Onion’s lacerating review of this pic than in the film itself.

Stylish, sometimes silent, and certainly not short.

Let it never be said that all theaters are the same. I was the only occupant for the 9.30 showing of Thief, my fourth flick of the day, but I still couldn’t find a good seat. The screen was up too high for the size of the venue, and the sound was poor.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t get too engaged in the story. Or maybe it was the distracting presence of Nutsa Kukhianidze, whose whiny 17yo skankishness was just irritating. (Though Nick Nolte gave a great performance — it’s almost as if playing an alcoholic has-been just comes naturally to him.)

It got better towards the end, though.

When it came to the end, I counted. There were more than 50 assistant camera people in Winged Migration, a 2003 Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary.

With cameras mounted on gliders, RC flying machines, helicopters, delta wings and all sorts of other rigs, the five crews followed birds across all seven continents during their annual migration.

The three year project involved some 14 cinematographers and promised that no digital special effects were used in the filming of the birds. (More details about the filming can be found on Sony’s elegant Flash site.)

When all this comes together, the result is some amazingly rich and up-close pictures of fascinating animals traveling extreme distances (some fly more than 6,000 miles each year) to produce offspring.

It’s also a lot of silence — the narration makes up perhaps 10 minutes out of a 90 minute film, and there sometimes seems to be no rhyme or reason to the structure. In addition, a digital special effects house was credited and some shots were clearly dramatized (e.g., birds being shown at such a height the continent outlines were visible) so it left me wondering what was real and what was doctored.

Perhaps it was just the fact that it was my 3d movie of the day, but I left wondering if the material would have been better presented as a tightly-edited PBS hour.

An intriguing examination of two contrasting lives that intersect thanks to some soluble aspirin.

Weathered-looking Milan (the Man on the Train) rolls into town with no place to stay, but thanks to a chance encounter in a pharmacy he soon has a place under the roof of retired poetry teacher Monsieur Manesquier.

The film unfolds by examining the men’s two lives as each sizes up the other. The result is a compelling examination of what it’s like to realize that perhaps you didn’t take the right path after all, done in an unhurried character-driven style that seems somehow very French.

A moment ago I looked up the proper spelling of this film’s title, and it was only then that I realized it won the Oscar for best foreign language film this year.

That’s not really a surprise. This gorgeously shot picture has a fresh perspective on the second World War: rather than being set in the cold, desolate ghettos most recently recalled by The Piano, the Jewish characters in Nowhere in Africa make their home on the bright, sunny land of Kenya.

The film is just as much about the marriage of the lead characters, which undergoes tremendous stress. It’s a fascinating to watch lead actress Juliane Köhler as Jettel, the woman who first treats the “Negroes” as the help, even as her peers are being rounded up in her homeland. Jettel, like her daughter and husband, is deeply affected by her situation, a fact brought into relief whenever a letter comes from Germany with “the stamp that always brings tears.”

Husband Walter has strong ideas about what it means to be German, and his unbending stance leads one to question how much of being a citizen is about birth and how much is about will.

Gorgeous, and good.

Hey, how does a French movie, set in Spain, that tells the story of college students from all over Europe sharing an apartment grab you? As irresistible? Me too.

The film follows Xavier, a French student of Spanish, as he moves to Barcelona to learn the language as part of the Erasmus exchange program. Along the way he finds himself in a house with fellow students from Germany, England, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Together they have good times and bad, and while the movie works fine on its own, it particularly resonated with me — not just because I recognized some parts of Barcelona that I had visited, but also because I thoroughly enjoyed my own time living with several other people whose accents were drastically different from my own.

Basically the whole thing made me want to go back to Europe. Like, right now. (Oh, and note to subtitle-phobes: 1) Get over it — there’s tons of good stuff out there that’s not in English. 2) This movie is a good place to start; fair-sized pieces of it are in English, so you don’t spend the entire time reading.)

(I actually saw this last Saturday at a sneak. Of course my lazy ass would only get around to posting this on the day it actually comes out.)

Look at a poster for The Italian Job and it seems to have a lot going for it. Specifically: attractive guys (including that new guy with the huge arms whom Confidence put on my radar screen), good actors (Sutherland and Norton), plus a serviceable plot (gotta love heist pictures.)

Yet there are potential minuses as well: Charlize Theron is an annoying wench who should be forever shunned for Reindeer Games (umm, not that I saw it) and her sometimes similarity to fellow sucksmith Ashley Judd. And would the movie suffer from a desperate desire to be Ocean’s Six?

Turns out it’s fine. While it’s certainly not art, it flows comfortably and is fun to watch. Some of the gags run too long (a cameo in Seth Green’s backstory is great, but then they milk it dry) and somehow Wahlberg managed to convince them to let him keep his shirt on, but by and large it’s a good guy movie. Even Theron isn’t annoying.

Oh, and the sneak started as ushers walked slowly up and down the aisles (then stood at the front for a brief time) on the lookout for camcorders. For those who didn’t get the hint, a big disclaimer also appeared: Warner Bros. reminds you that filming the movie off the screen is illegal.

The interesting part: Job was a Paramount release.

I actually downloaded Beckham from the Internet many months ago. As I’m not a fan of watching features on my computer, I put off seeing it. Then I heard that Fox Searchlight was releasing it in the US, with rumors that Posh and Becks had so enjoyed the movie (which was made with stand-ins) that they volunteered for re-shoots so that they could actually appear in it.

Now that I’ve seen it in the theater, I know that David and Victoria play a very small part, and that’s OK. The story is just as much about main character Jesminder as it is about the football star. Her quest to play footie in a traditional Indian family (delightfully captured by this poster) plays much more successfully than My Big Fat Greek Wedding, its closest analogue.

This movie is funny, warm, and welcoming. Good to see if you like that little touch of Britain, and a perfect choice if your basketball-playing sister happens to be available.

I know, I know. It wasn’t my idea. (And I didn’t pay.) Yet for the first bit, at least, I was surprised. The movie seemed to have a surprisingly mature attitude toward masculinity, and Michael Douglas seemed to be channeling from his Jewel of the Nile days.

Of course, it didn’t take long to fall in on itself. The movie was obsessed with maintaining an active pace, while Albert Brooks really started to get annoying (does he have any role where he isn’t just whining?) By the time David Suchet (who I recognized from his many turns as Hercule Poirot on PBS) made an appearance, I was amazed at just how hard everyone seemed to be trying.

Only the adorable Ryan (“Van Wilder”) Reynolds remained above reproach. How he can remain so charming in such schlock is beyond me, but he should keep it up as long as he can.

Oh, and I fucking hated the last two lines of dialogue in the movie.

OK, make that Friday. I was traveling this week, so computer access was not available. As such, I’m going to be doing a big batch of movie reviews for the films I saw over the past 6 days.

I could backdate them to the actual days I saw them, but I detest backdating as undermining the reader’s trust that posts are made in real time. So I’ll be posting them in chronological order, starting with the movie I saw Friday.

You ready?

I’m probably not going to do a proper update until Tuesday. I’m enjoying my extended weekend.

I failed to do my homework for Ghosts. I knew only that it was playing in an art theater that I like, and the setting was Cambodia.

The first hint I was in trouble came when the credits rolled: Matt Dillon not only starred and co-wrote, he directed. Naturally, my expectations automatically took a nosedive.

The movie surprassed those newly lowered expectations with the rich scenery of Cambodia, but the story was still lacking in a big way, with no clear reason it needed to be there.

Matt should really leave the writing to someone else.

Pepsi is running some stupid commercials with a white kid cradling a snifter full of Pepsi as old white guys talk about how they made their first billion. The kid won his from Pepsi, of course — and now apparently thinks hanging out with pretentious old guys is cool, provided they have a “foosball table.”

This preposterous scene seems appropriate for this particular contest. Why? Well, let me save you the time of reading the official rules. Here’s how it goes down:

1. Through 27 Aug 03, Pepsi draws a total of 1,000 names from entrants who submitted 10-digit codes from Pepsi products to the game Website.
2. Those people are flown (or, if they live nearby, driven) to Orlando, FL. Coach. They get a 2 night hotel stay, single occupancy, and $100 spending money. Oh, yeah, and an appearance on a show “currently anticipated to be broadcast on live television” on the WB 14 Sep 03.
3. Before the show starts, each person selects a distinct six digit number from 000,000 to 999,999. “All numbers selected will be recorded in a digitally signed database.”
4. Pepsi also picks a number, which they call “the Billion Dollar Number.”
5. The person closest to the BDN wins a million bucks. If (s)he guesses it exactly, (s)he also wins $1,000,000,000.
6. The million is paid in full. The billion is paid — here’s the fun part — either as a) $5m/yr for the first 20yr, then $10m/yr for 21-39, then $710m in year 40 or b) a $250m lump sum payment. If you don’t choose (b) within 60 days, you get the “40-Year Payment Schedule.”

So it’s literally a one in a million shot — provided you’re picked to be part of the thousand to begin with. Pepsi’s chance of paying out the $1b is 1 in 1,000. Not that they would, of course. Their insurer will make the payment.

And who better to insure this prize than Warren Buffet’s company?

I’m not so much of a music person. Sure, I listen to it, but not as much as… well, everyone I know. I’m also 25 years old. That’s two big strikes against me in understanding all of the jokes in A Mighty Wind, the new “mockumentary” from Christopher Guest.

But that’s hardly a handicap. Even without the background to really decipher the Peter, Paul & Mary references, one can appreciate the talented actors in this wacky movie. (But as with Best of Show, I’m left thinking that Jennifer Coolidge is one weird chick.)