Easy Virtue (Stephan Elliott, 2008). Based on a play by Noel Coward, Easy Virtue has all the requisite pieces to help the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert director get his artistic sensibilities back on track after the disastrously bad thriller Eye of the Beholder. The story about an English gent bringing his headstrong new American wife home to meet his snobbish, disapproving family is abundant with basic, effective dramatic conflict, and the source material guarantees that the screenplay will be filled with admirable wit. The finished product is sadly in a perpetual state of overexertion, everything ratcheted up to a point of cloying neediness. Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas do solid enough work in their roles, even if they sometimes seem to be playing only the broadest strokes. In the lead, however, Jessica Biel is a textbook case of miscasting. She’s overmatched by the material, and occasionally even seems bamboozled by it.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Robert B. Weide, 2008). Based, loosely I presume, on a memoir by the odious Toby Young that primarily chronicles his failed attempt at a journalism career with Vanity Fair, the most interesting element of this comedy is figuring out if Simon Pegg can pull off a leading role away from the warm, nurturing cocoon of his collaborations with Edgar Wright. He’s appealing enough, but the film is a flimsy thing, as easy to ignore as the subscription card that tumbles out of a magazine. It moves lifelessly through standard romantic comedy paces with bland side-trips into the allure and shabby ethics of celebrity journalism. It has no appeal whatsoever. To continue with the magazine metaphors, it’s the equivalent of an article that you flip through on the way to something else, forgetting it was ever there once the pages are turned.

Smash His Camera (Leon Gast, 2010). This documentary follows the notorious paparazzo Ron Gallela, who was once sued by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and punched out by Marlon Brando. He probably represented the dregs of the ever-burgeoning celebrity exploitation business during his nineteen-seventies heyday, but now it’s Perez Hilton’s world and the aging photog just looks quaint in it. Gast gets some mileage out of the contrast, especially in a sequence in which Gallela’s pursuit of Robert Redford at a gala function seems about as benign as can be, even to his quarry. The point about time passing Gallela by is driven home by a late sequence featuring a gaggle of people too young to identify the legendary likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Steve McQueen as they peruse his photos at a gallery show. Still, a significant amount of the film is merely perfunctory, an adequate but bland recitation of the stories that made Gallela famous and infamous, and there’s a nagging sense that Gallela may not be either colorful enough or significant enough to hang a feature-length documentary on.

That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel, 1977). A wealthy, older Frenchman falls in love with a beautiful young woman. They embark on an affair that is marked by her indecision. She flits back and forth between adoration and disinterest, leaving the man flummoxed. Still, no matter how harsh her escalating rejections of him become, he’s always lured back into her arms with relative ease. As the film progresses it becomes clear that, for all his riches and worldly authority, she holds a level of power that is completely out of his reach. Bunuel’s most notable conceit is casting two different actresses in the role of the pursued woman. Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina switch off throughout, never with a flourish nor following any readily discernible pattern. In lesser hands, this could be a bit of pointless tomfoolery. Bunuel’s deftness means the cinematic tactic underscores and enriches his themes, emphasizing the woman’s elusiveness. What’s more, it creates the sense that the woman herself is unimportant, her actual identity insignificant. It’s the idea of her that has captured the man, and that lack of meaningful investment is the reason why he will never truly have her.

Observe and Report (Jody Hill, 2009). My, this is ugly. The film follows a mentally unbalanced mall security guard as he contends with a handful of transgressions in his workplace while simultaneously trying to woo a hottie from the makeup counter at one of the stores. Jody Hill seems to think that comedy can be achieved simply by depicting out of control aggression in multiple forms. Don’t find it funny when someone screams “Fuck you”? How ’bout if they whisper it? The film is shapeless and directionless. It wanders around like a frothing, ranting vagrant who the film’s central character would be dispatched to remove from the outskirts of the parking lot.