Short Takes

RUN FATBOY RUNActor-screenwriter Simon Pegg’s follow-up to the surprise hits Shaun of the Deadand Hot Fuzzisn’t as quirky or distinctive as those earlier films, but it confirms he’s one of the only comic actors working today who’s as adept at banana-peel pratfalls as he is at brainy verbal wit. Pegg’s Dennis has never lived down the day, five years earlier, when he made a feverish 500-yard dash away from the altar—and away from his pregnant bride, played by the exquisite (if overqualified) Thandie Newton. The weight of that decision bears literally on him: He’s now a paunchy watchman at a posh lingerie shop. When his still-smarting ex takes up with an overachieving fitness nut (Hank Azaria, oozing self-satisfied smarm), Dennis wakes from his ever-say-die funk to declare he’ll run the same upcoming marathon as Mr. Right—in three weeks’ time. What flab Run Fatboy Runhas comes from the adipose prefab elements it’s lifted from inspirational-sports sagas and romantic-comedy clichés: as director, actor David Schwimmer doesn’t supply the sixth-sense timing or jittery visual panache that Pegg gets from his usual collaborator, Edgar Wright, which stifles the sight gags. But Pegg, who co-scripted with Stella’s Michael Ian Black, has staked out a peculiar slant on genre material that ventures beyond irony toward rehabilitation. And nobody plays blithe humiliation with more style—as when Dennis, suffering from a runner’s rash in his “scrotal zone,” takes advantage of a mannequin’s outstretched hand for a scratch…unaware of the crowd gathering in the lingerie-shop window. —Jim Ridley(Opens Friday)

MARRIED LIFEFilm noir and melodrama cast a long shadow over native Memphis filmmaker Ira Sachs’ look back at the rotting heart of the ’50s nuclear family, but his movie rarely breaks a sweat. Slow, deliberate and russet to a fault, this quietly controlled chamber piece, based on a 1959 murder mystery by British writer and spy John Bingham, applies more surveillance than carnality to the couplings and decouplings of upstanding citizens in a Pacific Northwest suburb. The cast is top-drawer, if strangely muted: Chris Cooper is a drab company man seeking “true happiness” in the arms of a demure platinum blonde (Rachel McAdams) who’s coveted by his best friend (Pierce Brosnan), but he can’t bring himself to divorce his wife, seemingly happy homemaker Pat (Patricia Clarkson). This perfectly presentable film lacks the passion and radical vision of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, to which Sachs and co-writer Oren Moverman owe their biggest debt. Where Far From Heavencontinually renews itself by expanding and deepening each character’s pent-up longings, Married Lifesews them up too neatly; where Haynes’ lush cinematography bespeaks a world bursting with deflected desire, Married Life’s is punctiliously period-correct. And where Haynes insists on the ineluctably American pursuit of individual happiness, however dissident, Sachs seems undecided about whether he wants us to giggle at this benighted crew or purse our lips. —Ella Taylor(Opens Friday at Green Hills)

STOP-LOSSServing, for today’s audience, roughly the same cathartic purpose that movies like Coming Homeand The Deer Hunterdid for audiences of the ’70s, Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Lossdirectly addresses the unpleasant aftershocks of our latest unpopular war from the perspective of the soldiers themselves: it could easily have been called The Worst Years of Our Lives. There are moments here that crackle with uncanny verisimilitude, particularly the early scenes in which Sergeants Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) return to their small-town Texas home amidst much pomp, circumstance and streaming tinsel. As she ably demonstrated in her previous film, the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry, this is the sort of thing that Peirce (who co-authored the Stop-Lossscreenplay with Mark Richard) does very well: She puts blue-collar, red-state American life on-screen without glib irony or smug disdain. But Stop-Lossis on considerably shakier ground once the title—shorthand for a loophole in military contracts that allows soldiers to be redeployed in wartime even after fulfilling the terms of their service—comes home to roost, and Peirce shifts her focus from the vicissitudes of small-town life to one man’s fight against the military-industrial complex. —Scott Foundas(Opens Friday)

21Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best-seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millionswas a smart narrative about…well, you did see the subtitle, right? It was a risky proposition for Mezrich, relying on mathletes up to their asses in cash and a complex system of counting cards to tell his tale. But the big-screen version of Mezrich’s book ain’t no gamble at all—thing’s about as risky as playing the nickel slots with 10 cents in your pocket. The filmmakers have excised the book’s genuine thrills and instead filled in the blanks with blanks, chief among them drab Jim Sturgess as a newbie among the wizened ranks of card-counters. Director Robert Luketic has pared down the story to the most hackneyed of three-act fairy tales—the whiny rise-and-fall film in which a bright young thing ditches his dorky pals and wills his way to a fortune, then loses it all in a pique of stupid hubris, then redeems himself only after his pile of cash turns to a pile of shit. He’s a schmuck with brains, a dullard with cutes—a bust, in other words, in a movie that wastes a lot of time and money and really, reallyshoulda stayed in Vegas. —Robert Wilonsky(Opens Friday)