Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Ali G Indahouse (2002)

    Ali G Indahouse (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, April 2012) Sasha Baron Cohen became quite a bit better-known in 2006 after Borat‘s runaway success, lending retroactive interest to his earlier feature film.  His debut Ali G Indahouse features Cohen’s dim wannabee rap-gangster alter-ego as he improbably gets elected to Britain’s parliament and uses his passion for sex, drugs and rap music to make the world a better place.  Unlike Cohen’s subsequent Borat and Brüno, this one seems entirely scripted.  It definitely has a few funny moments, but the entire film runs a bit thin. Not only is Ali G’s character a one-note annoyance, unfit to sustain a feature-length film, but the script depends on idiot-plotting writ large: even allowing for the unreality of silly comedies, this one requires a lot of disbelief.  But there are compensations: the soundtrack is an impressive greatest-hits blend, Cohen fully commits himself to the material, Borat makes a cameo appearance and there are a few good jokes here and there.  As a borderline stoner-comedy, it works more often than it doesn’t; even the annoyances don’t suck all the joy out of it.

  • Our Idiot Brother (2011)

    Our Idiot Brother (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, April 2012) There’s something almost archetypical in the holy fool that Paul Rudd plays so loosely in Our Idiot Brother: a childish man with no perceptive filters and an almost-infinite good faith in his fellow humans, the titular brother becomes a catalyst for dramatic change when he’s forced to spend time with his three sisters and their families.  The specific of the plot becomes secondary to the character work and the conflagration when too much unfiltered truth exposes everyone’s illusions.  The trailer makes the film look like a laugh-a-minute, but the actual film is more measured and demands to be taken more slowly.  In the roles of the three sisters, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, and Emily Mortimer do fine work, but it’s really Rudd who holds the film on his shoulders.  With all the self-deluded characters, painful confrontations and elaborate rationalizations, Our Idiot Brother becomes a profoundly humanistic film.  As a result, and with the help of a conclusion in which everything predictably goes well, it’s a charming, likable and self-assured film.  It may be a bit too gentle and slow-paced to please those looking for laugh-a-minute hilarity, but when a film has so much charisma, it doesn’t really matter.

  • The Way Back (2010)

    The Way Back (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2012) The Way Back is inspired by a story that may or may not be true (check Wikipedia for the controversy), but the premise is the stuff of epic adventure as a few prisoners escape from a Russian Gulag and make their way, on foot, to India –crossing Siberian forests, enormous caverns, the shores of Lake Baikal, vast plains, the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas along the way.  By the time the film ends, it feels like an odyssey, and not solely in the best sense: This is a long, sometimes tedious film.  The characters suffer, the attempted realism of the presentation offers very little levity, and the script doesn’t trouble itself with compelling dialogue.  As a result, The Way Back feels longer than it should, and ends up shortchanging viewers on the “viewing pleasure” aspect.  Still, there’s a lot to like and admire: The scenery is often breathtaking, the actors (including Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Saoirse Ronan) do a fine job in rough circumstances, the story kills off a number of characters you wouldn’t expect, and the feeling of a difficult odyssey certainly comes across on-screen.  A bit of plot-tightening, more compelling character work (enough so that we can distinguish between the minor players) and some punched-up dialogue may have helped The Way Back rise above the good and become great.

  • Mr. Nobody (2009)

    Mr. Nobody (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, March 2012) I like to think that I’ve got a pretty good knowledge of the past few years in science-fiction movies, but some things can still slip through the cracks. Missing out on a big-budget experimental SF movie shot in Montréal with tons of special effects, and featuring at least four name actors, is a pretty big oversight. Granted, Mr. Nobody is a very unusual kind of Science-Fiction film: It’s about a 118-year-old man reminiscing, circa 2092, about all the lives he’s led. Most of those occur between 1980 and 2010, meaning that most of the film takes place in contemporary times. Still, there’s little that’s ordinary about this 140-minutes meditation on fate, choices, happenstance and a rewinding universe. Mr. Nobody hints at a multiplicity of lives by showing the protagonist in three different marriages and about as many other fates. The first few minutes show a far future psychiatry station, a spaceship breaking apart, as well as the protagonist getting shot, and drowning in at least two different ways. Don’t hope for a tight movie, though, because in-between the SF framework, Mr. Nobody sometimes takes a lot of time to make its dramatic points: The first fifteen minutes are a fast-paced montage of marvels and the last ten wrap up everything very well, but in-between the film can dawdle for a while.  Still, the result is often pure cinematic joy.  Jared Leto makes the most out of a complex role(s) and the cast of character around him include names such as Diane Kruger, Sarah Polley and Rhys Ifans. Director Jaco Van Dormael has an ambitious agenda with this film, but he seems equally at ease with big ideas and small character moments –the film is packed with inspired moments even when they don’t quite sustain critical scrutiny.  (Many SF-related details look good but are wrong, and let’s not even get into the role of coincidence in the story.)  What is perhaps most impressive from the film, from a critical SF perspective, is how the SF devices are used in support of what the story is trying to tell about the human condition –that’s a textbook-perfect definition of what Science Fiction does in the best of circumstances.  For a film that got nearly no attention in North America, Mr. Nobody really isn’t too bad: I hope more people get to see it, even as flawed as it is because its strengths are considerable.  Few films are good and meaningful enough to make one viewer happy about life, but this is one of them.

  • How do You Know (2010)

    How do You Know (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, April 2012) Watching well-made romantic comedies is so effortless that making them seems easy… and then you find one that doesn’t quite work as well as it could. On the surface, How Do You Know isn’t a hard movie to like: It has four good actors in the lead (Paul Rudd is charming as the co-protagonist and Owen Wilson is almost hilarious as a clueless baseball player but the film’s highlight is that Reese Witherspoon is aging really well –I can’t recall her looking any better), appealing characters, quirky details, a few big laughs and a somewhat witty script. Shot to glossy perfection in the streets of Washington DC, it’s the kind of film fully steeped in movie-magic, fit to send audiences in a feel-good trance. And yet… it never quite clicks. The dialogues, even from the first few scenes, seem willfully scattered. The scenes go on for longer than they should, and no amount of character charm nor scene-setting can excuse the tepid rhythm. While How Do You Know earns a few credits for avoiding the more obvious clichés of romantic comedies, it doesn’t quite replace those clichés with anything remarkably compelling. The look at the struggles of an aging female athlete seems eclipsed by the look at the idiocy of an aging male athlete, while the corporate malfeasance plot doesn’t quite boil at any point in the story. It all amount to nothing much; at best, a pleasantly eccentric but forgettable romance. But then, looking up the film’s production information, you find out that it cost $120 million, almost half of which was spent on five key salaries… and the film goes from unobjectionable to incomprehensible.  Really, writer/director James L. Brooks? Did you really need Jack Nicholson to play his same shtick for that amount of money? How Do You Know feels like the kind of low-budget romance given to hungry up-and-coming directors for a quick release a modest box-office… not blockbuster budgets and massive audiences: there’s nothing here to warrant more attention. No amount of “Eh, it was all right” can recoup those losses.

  • Cross (2011)

    Cross (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand Video, March 2012) As honorable it is to try to find something nice about every film, no matter how low-budget or low-imagination they can be, sometimes there’s no going around saying it outright: Cross is a bad, bad movie, and the fact that it’s interestingly flawed doesn’t make it any better. At least its first five minutes won’t create any false hopes:  From the first moments, the awkward attempts at humor, the cringe-worthy macho bluster, the incompetent direction, the terrible dialogue, the low-quality no-originality pseudo-comics introduction, the subtitles standing in lieu of characterization… everything about this film stinks of bad ideas piled on top of each other.  The plot is a lame variation on overused urban horror clichés, and the development has trouble making it feel interesting.  The presence of Vinnie Jones as the antagonist brings to mind the similar The Bleeding, except that that Cross has even more macho attitude and even less charm.  The film’s most thought-provoking facet is the casting: For a film having reportedly cost a mere two million dollars (and looking like it), how did it attract name actors such as Jones, Michael Duncan Clarke, Jake Busey (who does get a few of the film’s better lines) and Tom Sizemore?  We may never know, but the result really doesn’t do anyone any favors.  Cross often strays into unintentional comedy, but in such a plodding way that it’s more a pitiful sight than a guilty pleasure.  It introduces a flurry of characters but barely make use of a few of them.  It aims for macho swagger without having the substance to back it up.  In many ways, Cross attempts tricks that would work in better movies, but is so badly-made that the attempts all backfire and make the film feel even cheaper than it is.  The focus on meaningless violence, big guns, scantily-dressed women, muscle cars and comic-book-inspired fantasy elements make Cross feel juvenile in ways that most kids’ movies aren’t, and it’s hard to respect the results.  This is as low as filmmaking can go and if it isn’t, I don’t want to hear about it.

  • Videodrome (1983)

    Videodrome (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, March 2012) The media landscape has changed so much in thirty years that there was a real risk that Videodrome, in tackling the TV anxieties of the early eighties, would feel fatally outdated three decades later. In some ways, that’s true: at a time where gory execution video-clips are never farther than a Google search away, the premise of satellite channel piracy uncovering a snuff TV show doesn’t quite have the same power to make audiences shiver. The average moviegoer now has effortless access to a vastly more complicated media diet in which can be blended the worst perversions: Videodrome really scratches the surface of the horrors out there as we realize that we now all have access to the same. But there’s a lot more to Videodrome than a treatise on the dangers of satellite TV and a charming throwback to early-eighties techno-jargon: As the body horror of the film’s second half kicks in, director David Cronenberg (who, a long time ago, still made horror movies) truly uncaps the techno-surrealism that still makes the film worth a look. Videodrome still deserves its cult status as an unnerving piece of bizarre horror, perhaps even more so now that cathode-ray tubes are receding in the past. The visuals, as imperfect as they were in a pre-CGI age, still have a sting and the shattering of the protagonist’s reality is good for a few kernels of terror. What really doesn’t work all that well is the last act of the film, which disarms the film’s increasing sense of paranoia and ends up burying itself in pointlessness. Videodrome, even today, is more interesting for its potential rather than its execution. Oh well; at least James Woods is captivating as the protagonist, and Toronto gets a pretty good turn in the background. A stronger third act would have been a good way to wrap up the film, but as a cult classic, it probably doesn’t need any improvement.

  • Battle of the Bulbs (2010)

    Battle of the Bulbs (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand Video, March 2012) It would be tempting to dismiss Battle of the Bulbs (not unfairly) as being too saccharine, family-centric and unwilling to fully make use of its premise as meaner-spirited filmmakers may have pushed it.  The film’s central conflict is a neighborly feud over Christmas decorations; it wouldn’t take much to push this limit to very dark and very funny extremes.  Battle of the Bulbs, however, keeps things civil and restrained, up until the moment where the two neighbors have a chat and decide to end it. But come on: this is a Hallmark Family Channel movie-of-the-week holiday special… it would take a real Grinch to grump against the result.  It’s meant as light and broadly silly family-friendly fare, and generally succeeds as such.  It may be low-budget, but it presents a nicely textured portrait of suburban family life (including a messy house) and wraps up everything in the holiday spirit.  Battle of the Bulbs isn’t good enough to warrant a viewing at any time but during December, but it should be innocuous enough to be good background viewing while putting up the holiday tree.

  • Friends with Benefits (2011)

    Friends with Benefits (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2012) There really isn’t anything new to this romantic comedy, but it’s a small triumph of capable execution.  From the whip-taut dialogue of the opening sequence to its cheerful ending, Friends with Benefits is a clever self-aware take on the romantic-comedy formula.  The fast-paced dialogue makes up a lot of the film’s appeal, but there’s a lot to be said about the hipness of the film’s assumptions as coupled to the solidity of its morals.  It’s a bright and cheerful comedy, funny except when it becomes convinced that it has to be serious for a while.  Justin Timberlake adds to his growing repertoire of thankless roles, whereas Mila Kunis is an able sparring partner.  (Woody Harrelson’s performance is also a small delight.) Friends with Benefits‘ witty script and solid dialogue (as well as brief appearances by Patricia Clarkson and Emma Stone) reminded me of Easy-A, which is all too reasonable given that both films come from writer/director Will Gluck.  As much as it would be easy to criticize the schematic nature of the film’s romantic angle, its heavy dose of unreality or the carefully delimited nature of the film’s irreverence (those satin bed-sheets surely get arranged strategically, don’t they?), there’s still a lot of sheer movie-watching pleasure in watching a slick rom-com gorgeously shot.  New York looks beautiful in this film, and Gluck’s direction has a nice flow helped along by some fluid camerawork.  It amount to a much-better-than-average romantic comedy, one that doesn’t push any boundaries but entertains charmingly.

  • A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

    A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2012 reprint of 1998 original, 1040 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-553-57990-1

    Reading a long and tightly-plotted series of books isn’t like other kinds of reading experiences.  Unlike loose series of novels, a fantasy saga spread over five books (so far) with dozens of characters and almost as many subplots demands commitment, patience and indulgence.  In fact, considering the experience of reading a fantasy series like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice like a long-term relationship makes a whole lot of sense, especially in considering what to say about the second volume in a series. 

    The first volume is all about boundless expectations, the thrills of seeing something new and the giddiness at what’s going right.  A Game of Thrones spent so much time introducing its gigantic cast of characters, discussing eight thousand years of back-story, establishing its harsh and unforgiving tone (most notably in getting rid of its most honorable character) that readers couldn’t help but be enthralled at the result.  With second volume A Clash of Kings, however, the long-term relationship is starting to set and some of the charm is becoming an established pattern.

    If nothing else, the novel does deliver on the mayhem promised at the end of the first volume.  The king is dead, there’s considerable turmoil surrounding his succession and no less than five kings are proposing themselves as the rightful heir to the throne.  (How complex is this series’ plot?  Well, consider that one of the self-designated heirs is on another continent and remains unknown to the other four.)  After a first section in which it becomes clear that there will be no gentle alliances, the remainder of the book sees the four pretenders fight it out.  Westeros is scoured (peasants don’t have a good time during wars), various dirty tricks take place, fortresses fall and Martin once again presents his battles in an elliptical, highly subjective point of view.  One major battle midway through the book is averted through a shocking death that still remains unexplained by the end of the book (one of the hallmarks of the series are its longstanding mysteries), whereas the results of the second half of another major battle late in the book is announced through an unreliable character’s ranting.  Fans of battle action may want to confirm their impression that the series is not meant to wallow in lengthy fight sequences (although there’s a rather good naval engagement near the end of the book.)

    But never mind the broad strokes of the war of succession: What about the characters?  Long-form series such as this one live or die based on their cast of characters and whether we want to follow them along.  With nine viewpoint characters and about ten times that number of secondary speaking characters (and who knows how many named ones), there’s a lot of ground of cover.  Poor Arya gets hauled from one part of the continent to another, gradually regaining agency in the second half of the book.  Jon Snow goes trekking in the Great White North.  Tyrion Lannister gets the chance to prove how clever he actually is.  Theon Greyjoy gets less and less likable.  Mom-and-daughter Catelyn and Sansa Stark don’t do much but look on as other people do interesting things around them.  Meanwhile, far away, Daenerys Targaryen solidifies her power base and plots her return.  There are, mind you, a few significant plot developments.  Another king dies in mysterious circumstances; a mighty safe haven is burned down; two pretenders to the throne clash leaving one triumphant; and the Starks lose one major engagement, with several supporting characters killed in the process.

    More significantly, the series’ mostly hands-off approach to magic gets a bit less hands-off in this volume.  Characters comment that magic spells are becoming more effective; the best-informed of them suspect that dragons have something to do with it.  Reading between the lines, a red priestess seems to be raising all kinds of hell in the parts of the story our viewpoint characters can’t see, whereas the North’s zoo of bad critters seems to be poised to bring even more misery to the Seven Kingdoms.  Slowly, the action is reaching a boiling point.

    And “slowly” is a key word in this case.  One of the particularities of long-form series is that they favor depth and scope over pacing and intensity.  We do not experience these stories as a series of events as much as we live with the characters as the events occur around them.  The difference is as significant as watching a long-running TV show over a feature film: The ten-twenty hours of a series make up for a radically different pace from the energy of a two-hour film, and so Martin’s series is meant to be read leisurely.  There’s little instant gratification as plot threads and unanswered questions multiply: there is, however, a far stronger sense of identification with characters and sympathy at their odyssey.  This is a different kind of reading experience, and Martin’s better at building up the atmosphere required for this kind of narrative than most of his contemporaries. 

    If it means that readers have to be patient and enjoy the trip rather than being in a hurry to get to destination, then so be it.  The sequels will tell if the journey is worth the trip –in the meantime, it’s best to be swept along with the plot and make frequent reference to the cast of characters at the end of the book.  Because, as in any relationship, you get as much from Martins’ series are you’re willing to invest in it.  With A Song of Ice and Fire so far, Martin’s achievement has been to present a hugely detailed universe that rewards intense attention.  Even small characters can live fully and die (dis)honorably in the back-pages.  Such depth isn’t common, nor can it be found easily in smaller narratives.

    While even the kindest reviewers will note that A Clash of King may not carry the same punch as its predecessor (fewer set-pieces, repetition of effects, a sense of languid rhythm are all fair charges against this second volume), it does an effective job at carrying the story forward, delivering on a few promises and setting up further mayhem later during the series.  That’s good enough for most middle-volumes of series, and when it’s done as skillfully on a chapter-by-chapter basis as it is here, there’s little cause to complain.  A long and complex series is what readers asked for in reading this sequel, and A Clash of Kings delivers in that regard.

  • The Captains (2011)

    The Captains (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand Video, March 2012) As far as premises go, this documentary keeps it simple: William Shatner goes around interviewing the five other people who have played a captain (as lead) in a Star Trek universe.  While there’s a little bit of footage of Shatner being himself at a Star Trek convention, much of The Captains is a series of one-on-one conversations between very different actors.  Shatner seems to be enjoying himself (he wrote and directed the film), as he adds another piece to his very public voyage of self-awareness regarding his most iconic role –you’d think that after a few books, and many self-referential appearances in Trek-related works, there would be nothing left to say, but there is thanks to his interviewees.  Patrick Stewart is grace incarnate as a top-level actor who has accepted his place in Trek history, but it’s his regrets at the toll the acting life has taken on his personal relationship that ends up being his moment in this film, much as Kate Mulgrew’s extraordinary description of the rigors of a TV series lead over a single mom’s life that ends up being the film’s emotional highlight.  Otherwise, well, Avery Brooks is one weird/cool cat as he riffs off jazz music and somber themes.  There’s no denying that The Captains is for trekkers: While it’s kind of entertaining to see Shatner arm-wrestle with Chris Pine, the film remains a definite vanity project meant to develop the kind of meta-Shatneresque personae that Shatner has been enjoying for the past two decades.  Even so, it’s remarkably entertaining for those who know a bit about the Star Trek universe: discussions between fellow professionals often are.

  • Scream 4 (2011)

    Scream 4 (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2012) Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, but what if you still loathe what comes back after a lengthy hiatus?  The eleven-year gap between Scream 3 and Scream 4 means that the last film emerges at a time where the original trilogy has become a nostalgic footnote in the horror genre, but one thing hasn’t changed: It’s just as unpleasant to watch a film in which a quasi-infallible serial killer goes around killing innocent people.  No amount of post-modern ironic meta-commentary can save that genre out of its dead-end hole, and within moments of the opening segment (which, in retrospect, manages to foreshadow the film’s ending) I found my opinion of the film racing in negative territory and my interest wandering elsewhere.  I’m now comfortably out of the demographics that enjoys extended murder sequences, and there isn’t much more to this latest entry in the Scream series.  The one thing I kind-of-liked is the now-unusual feel of the film as a depiction of an alternate-universe America where every character is a high-schooler living in expensive houses without adult supervision.  There’s something quaintly charming and pleasant (in a wish-fulfillment sense) about those lives, and it’s really too bad that they have to come complete with a supernaturally swift knife-wielding psycho.  Of the actors stuck in this wholly useless film, I can only say that it’s good to see Neve Campbell again, and that of the younger actors, Hayden Panettiere is the most captivating as the short-haired sarcastic Kirby.  Otherwise, I can’t even muster any enthusiasm about this limp Scream 4.  The only thing that deserves to be killed here is the psycho-killer genre.

  • Wild Target (2010)

    Wild Target (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, March 2012) I could go on and on about this being the epitome of the quirky/funny low-budget British crime comedy if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a remake of French film Cible Émouvante.  Still, Wild Target is short, dark, witty, quite funny and British to the core.  Bill Nighy is up to his usual charming standards as a dapper, uptight hit-man contemplating getting away from it all, and he finds a great foil in the beautiful Emily Blunt as a flighty con artist needing protection who comes to change his regimented life.  For a film that got nearly no press in North America, this is a very enjoyable surprise: the script is smarter than average, the actors look as if they’re having fun and the film perfectly doses a small amount of violence in this dark but not overly downbeat comedy. The dry humor doesn’t pander too much, and the film manages to remain interesting even when it abandons London (after a hilariously clever “car chase” through the City) for a small country estate.  Wild Target‘s production qualities are fine for its low budget, Jonathan Lynn’s direction is generally unobtrusive and the result is worth a look.  This is the kind of film that plays a lot better on the small screen as an “eh, might as well watch this one” choice than a big-screen event. 

  • Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010)

    Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand Video, March 2012) I’m not particularly receptive to the “but it’s for kids!” argument as to why we should be more lenient regarding bad films for children.  Great movies are great movies, and there are plenty of kids’ movies that are just as satisfying to adults.  Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore certainly isn’t one of them.  Built around the “Awww” reflex that humans have for pets, it’s an assortment of numerous special effects and awful jokes strung on a generic James Bond plot template.  It’s cute and the CGI look as if many people worked a long time to perfect them, but it’s also terrible and dull to watch.  There’s an occasional smirk or two in the numerous winks at the whole spy-movie genre, but otherwise it’s a film that quickly becomes background noise as watchers are compelled to make better use of their time.  I suppose that parents with young kids may find some use out of it at a diversion.  Otherwise, it’s useless to tell anyone to avoid Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore: they’ll come to that conclusion fast enough if they try to watch the film.

  • The Blind Side (2009)

    The Blind Side (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2012) Some movies just rub me the wrong way, not matter how skillfully they’re made and how upbeat they can be.  Seen from far away on paper, The Blind Side is pure movie-of-the-week stuff: A desperately poor and lonely teenager is rescued by the unbelievable kindness of strangers and goes on to earn some success in sports.  But then you pile up the extras, increasingly the misery of the protagonist, making sure the rescuing strangers are kinder than virtue itself, ensuring that the sport is all-American football and topping it off with “this is based on a true story”.  The film itself is well-made: Sandra Bullock plays her age well as a charming southern belle who decides to rescue the disadvantaged teenager; dialogues are occasionally very funny; technical credentials are just fine and the film ends on a note of unabashed optimism.  The Blind Side earned accolades all the way up to an Oscar nomination, made tons of money and it’s almost disgusting to criticize a real-life true story like this one.  And yet… it’s not that difficult to be troubled by the portrait of a rich white family rescuing a traumatized black child.  There’s an element of unctuous Caucasian paternalism there that overshadows the rest of the film’s virtues, and being the whitest guy I know doesn’t change the cringe-inducing way the film portrays the issue. (Compare and contrast with Precious.) I’m just as uneasy about the way The Blind Side seems to be courting mainstream audience approval with its repeated devotion to religion, football, family and other traditional values.  It certainly doesn’t help that the film seems adapted from a very small portion of Michael Lewis’ far more cerebral eponymous book, and that its structure seem built on a series of short dramatic loops, suddenly introduced and quickly resolved.  Every character seems nice, every passing difference can be overcome after a conversation or two and the film seems unwilling to tackle any serious issue along the way.  It works, but it seems so deliberately paternalistic that I can’t buy into it.