‘Ghosts of Girlfriends Past’ is dead on arrival So-so script rendered even less palatable with McConaughey in the lead

By Alonso Duralde

Film critic

msnbc.com contributor

updated 2:43 p.m. ET April 28, 2009

Alonso Duralde Film critic

While “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” was probably never going to be a particularly good movie, it certainly could have managed to be a little less awful without that ghastly jackanapes Matthew McConaughey in the lead role. His self-satisfied and oleaginous performance scrapes away the trace amounts of charm the film has to offer.

And what, exactly, did Charles Dickens’ immortal “A Christmas Carol” do to deserve such horrible treatment on the big screen of late? Last year’s reactionary wank-fest “An American Carol” was painful enough, but did we really need Scrooge refigured as a fashion-photographer cocksman with intimacy issues?

McConaughey can’t be bothered to drop the Texas drawl even though he’s playing Newport-bred, New York–based shutterbug Connor Mead; the film begins with him humiliating a famous singer he’s shooting for a Vanity Fair cover, after which she naturally falls into bed with him. But he has to leave her — and simultaneously break up with three other women via Web chat — to head home for the wedding of his younger brother Paul (Breckin Meyer).

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Quick facts Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Breckin Meyer, Michael Douglas Director: 1 hour, 40 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13

Connor keeps trying to talk Paul out of tying the knot, in between verbal jousts with lifelong friend Jenny (Jennifer Garner). And then the ghost of Connor’s uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) shows up; he’s an old-school playboy of the Robert Evans variety (although Douglas is starting to resemble his dad Kirk more than anyone else) who has come to warn Connor that he’s being visited by the titular specters because of his free-wheeling ways.

The first one is gawky teen Allison Vandermeersh (Emma Stone), who deflowered the young Connor. We see him as a boy, falling in love with girl-next-door Jenny, but after he has a failure of nerve at a junior high dance and she goes off with someone else, he adopts his uncle’s love-’em-and-leave-’em attitude. (Thanks to the movie’s faulty chronology, they go from being six years old in the early ’80s to teens in the mid-’80s, but that’s barely a blip on this movie’s list of flaws.) When Connor and Jenny met again as adults, his reputation as a ladies’ man made her keep her distance, so he wooed her aggressively; when she finally gave in to his advances, he skulked out before dawn.

Video Garner, McConaughey talk ‘Girlfriends’ "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner hit the red carpet at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in L.A., where they both chatted about their respective kids. Access Hollywood

The later ghosts show Connor that he’s poisoning Paul’s relationship with his fiancée and that one day he’ll die with only Paul to show up at his funeral. But Connor’s behavior has been so obnoxious and grotesque up to this point that it’s hard to care whether or not he’s going to be redeemed.

The Soloist

The Soloist

Submitted by Kimberly Gadette on Wed, 04/29/2009 - 14:15.

If a lone horn sounds in an LA traffic jam, wonders Kimberly Gadette, will anyone notice? Or care? Tuning in to The Soloist, where two men struggle to resonate.

One is a musical prodigy. The other, a well-loved LA Times columnist. Music and words, words and music. Could this be the start of some splashy musical about La-La-Land? Not when the prodigy is a paranoid schizophrenic, one of the 90,000 of LA's homeless. Not when the columnist is simply searching for a story to meet his next deadline. But something happens on the way to the soup kitchen.

The writer (Robert Downey Jr's Steve Lopez) discovers that the guy playing the two-stringed violin at the foot of Beethoven's statue (Jamie Foxx's Nathaniel Ayers) isn't just another vagrant. He's a brilliant musician who once attended Julliard before mental illness destroyed his promising career. Lopez writes one column about him, and then another, ultimately going to great lengths to get Ayers off the streets and back into the concert halls.

There's much to love about this film, particularly thanks to director Joe Wright's ability to delve deep into Ayers' mind. We see what Ayers feels as he hears a live orchestra play for the first time in decades, his emotions metamorphosing into kaleidoscopic colors splashing across the screen. This film may well contain one of the best cinematic depictions of schizophrenia ever accomplished: the torturing voices, the claustrophobia, the fear, the frustration, the rage.

Just as Wright conveyed the multiplicity of emotion at the Dunkirk beachhead in Atonement (combining freakish carnival with glorious seascape, soldiers drunk or dead, victorious or defeated), he conducts his version of downtown LA with a maestro's baton. Using legions of LA's homeless as extras, Wright gives us his take on this tale of two cities. Filthy makeshift cots lie at the foot of the gleaming stainless steel panels of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall. Sleek BMWs zoom through tunnels trafficked by beggars hauling shopping carts that are precariously piled with their worldly goods. When Ayers first puts bow to strings on his new cello, Wright employs a 100-foot Strada crane to take us from Ayer's euphoric face, up through the tunnel's vented ceilings, to the streets, to the skies, until we find ourselves floating overhead, looking down on the iconic freeway cloverleaf that is LA. It is shot in one fluid motion, accompanied by music that can break your heart.

Yet there is a gloss to this plot that promises too much. In the trailer, Downey's protagonist says, "We take care of each other … we look after each other." Untrue. Mentally unsound Ayers may inspire Lopez, but he'd never be the one to call in case of an emergency. These sentimentalized claims are pure Hollywood, as if Lopez and Ayers are best buds who've always got each other's backs. It results in denigrating the very nature of the film.

Unfortunately, writer Susannah Grant gives Lopez' character short shrift. While filmmakers refer to the fact that he's disheartened about his career at the film's opening, we don't see it. The Lopez we meet is caring, smart, fearless, curious about the people he writes about. The Lopez along the film's journey is just more of that guy, more caring, more fearless. When the biggest change is cosmetic – the bruises from his biking accident finally heal – that's a problem. If supremely accomplished Downey can't show us a character's dramatic arc, then it either ended up on the editing room floor, or there wasn't one to begin with.

However, the script takes a provocative nod toward the role of the assumed saint: ie, once you try to save someone and he/she doesn't fall in line, are you allowed to feel betrayed? Angry? Annoyed?

Starring as the one who won't fall in line, Foxx' Ayers is a revelation: first, in his musical exactitude (Foxx, a classical pianist, trained for months in order to convincingly portray a virtuoso cellist); and second, in his depiction of schizophrenia: the speech patterns, the intelligence intermittently breaking through, the sorrow after a violent episode, all the while giving us the sense of a man-child muffled behind an intangible fog. Unlike Dustin Hoffman's mentally challenged Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, this performance explores the character's humanity on a much deeper level.

Wright brought in many of his collaborators from Atonement – and once again, the cinematography, editing, costume design and soaring musical score by Dario Marianelli are all first rate.

If you're expecting a tidy film with nice subplots and a great payoff, then The Soloist may disappoint. But for its hard look at schizophrenia, the homeless and committed performances by two of today's best actors, this opus deserves a standing ovation.

Rating on a scale of 5 Beethoven sonatas: 4

Release date: US: April 24 2009; UK: Sept. 11, 2009
Directed by: Joe Wright
Screenplay by: Susannah Grant
Based on the book by: Steve Lopez
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener, Stephen Root, Tom Hollander, Lisa Gay Hamilton
Rating: US = PG13
Running time: 109 minutes

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

by Nick Schager
Posted: April 29, 2009

ox may have been robbed of box-office booty when a leaked workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine landed online last month, but the real victim of theft in this ordeal seems to have been the adamantium-clawed Canuck himself. Purists will surely bristle at the alterations made by Gavin Hood's prequel to the origin story of feral Canadian mutant Logan (Hugh Jackman). Yet far more troubling than the specifics surrounding his transformation into the nearly indestructible Wolverine is the film's fundamentally wishy-washy characterization of its protagonist, whose inherent animalism is oft-mentioned but never witnessed. In an attempt to pay lip service to his inner struggle with unseemly bestial instincts while simultaneously maintaining his unquestionable heroism, Wolverine turns its future X-Man into a blandly brooding bore too grumpy to be a prototypical do-gooder yet too noble to be a cold-blooded antihero.

Such indecisiveness is married to a more wide-ranging lack of imagination, as Hood expends so much time and energy on stuffing his narrative full of lame cameos of fan-favorite mutants—including wise-cracking assassin Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) and ragin' Cajun Gambit (Taylor Kitsch)—that his combat centerpieces receive embarrassingly short shrift, and in the case of a boxing match between Wolverine and the Blob, also devolve into cartoonishness. With the exception of an adequate helicopter attack, the action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés, whether they be shots of Wolverine screaming in anguish to the heavens (employed three times!), stoically walking away from a fiery explosion, or standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his squadmates.

Once Wolverine escapes the fish tank where his former government employer General Stryker (a pleasantly menacing Danny Huston) has bonded his skeleton with unbreakable adamantium, Hood indulges in an interlude featuring Ma and Pa Kent photocopies that throws into sharp relief the film's lack of identity. After rewriting numerous character backstories without any appreciable gain, most notably in the case of Wolverine's antagonistic central relationship to bloodthirsty brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber), Hood concludes matters by interjecting some real-world history into his throwback proceedings by bizarrely positing Wolverine as responsible for the Three Mile Island disaster. The catastrophic capper is apt.

Russian Retrospective Features 1936 Film Indicting American Racism

For my money, Circus (1936) is the standout in a Russian retrospective of five films each featuring Lyubov Orlova (1902-1975), The First Lady of the Soviet Screen. This series of what some might call Communist propaganda pictures is being hosted by The Film Society of Lincoln Center in Manhattan and will run from May 1st to 4th. The collection is entitled Red Diva because they were made in the U.S.S.R. where Ms. Orlova was something of a cultural icon.

Besides Circus, the offerings include Moscow Laughs (1934), The Shining Path (1940), Volga Volga (1938) and Spring (1947). I was fortunate to watch several of the films with friends who speak Russian and their explanation of each one's cultural context certainly served to enhance my appreciation of the stories.

Circus opens in the United States with a harrowing chase scene in which a popular circus performer named Marion Dixon (Orlova) is literally being run out of town on a rail with a baby (Jim Patterson) in her arms by a bloodthirsty lynch mob. Why? Because she's white, and the father of her child is black.

With chants of "nigger lover" filling the air, she barely escapes with her life by jumping on a moving train. Forced to flee from her own country alone, the disgraced single-mom ultimately finds political asylum in Moscow where she is able to resume working as The Human Bullet, a vaudeville act in which she sings, dances before the big finale during which she is shot out of a cannon into a trapeze net.

In the Soviet Union, Marion is managed by Von Kneishitz (N. Massalasky), a racist foreigner whose mind is unfortunately already infected by Hitler's sick notions of white supremacy. But when she rebuffs his romantic advances in favor of Ivan (Sergei Stolyarov), a younger, more handsome and more open-minded local lad, the jilted German decides to ruin her career by embarrassing her in a very public fashion.

Von interrupts the circus in the middle of Marion's performance to announce to the crowd that she "was the mistress of a Negro and gave birth to a black child," whereupon he produces the toddler as proof. But while blacks and whites mating might have been both taboo and illegal in the U.S. and Deutschland back in the Thirties, the bigoted buffoon gets the surprise of his life when he is booed out of the arena by the entire audience which responds with catcalls like, "So what!" and "What's the tragedy?"

Meanwhile, the women in attendance take turns singing a lullaby to Marion's frightened baby whose tears are soon replaced by a big smile. To drive home the movie's salient message, a proud Russian patriot proceeds to explains to the Nazi in no uncertain terms that, "In our country, we absolutely love kids. You may have a kid of any color here: a black kid, a white kid, a red kid, or even a kid striped like a zebra, or polka-dotted. Whatever's your pleasure!"

A touching tale of tolerance that doesn't deserve to be dismissed as propaganda but rather elevated as a refreshing and more-enlightened alternative to the racist depictions of blacks that Hollywood was cranking out at the same time.

Excellent (4 stars)
Unrated
In Russian and English with subtitles.
Running time: 94 minutes
Distributor: The Film Society of Lincoln Center