“Twilight: New Moon” is more like a waning gibbous

Seeing the sequel to the number one teen vampire romance set in rural Washington isn’t my top pick in movies of late 2009, but in the first 15 minutes of “New Moon,” we see a vampire get his head twisted off, so maybe it’s not a total wash.

We learn that a seemingly minor character in the first movie turn out to be a werewolf, which means that a minor character in this movie will turn out to be either Frankenstein or the mummy in the inevitable sequel, “Eclipse.”

When the movie opens, vampire groupie Bella learns that a paper cut and a room full of bloodsuckers aren’t exactly the best sort of guests you want at your birthday party. This head-slapping realization causes vampire/creepy-91-year-old-man Edward to ditch the clingy high-schooler for Buenos Aires.

Instead of moving on with her life and dating less-dangerous creatures of the night, she spends three months sitting in a chair contemplating her role as mayor of Dumpsville.

But as the dreamy (I’m told) Robert Pattinson is the cash cow for this franchise, he logs most of his screen time as an Obi-Wan Kenobi–type presence who constantly appears to Bella to warn her that getting on the back of a lowlife’s motorcycle of jumping off a cliff are bad life decisions.

With the addition of the new werewolf character and love triangle subplot, we reduce the number of unintentionally funny “emoting” faces made by the two main characters as seen in “Twilight” by about third. But don’t worry, “Twilight Saga” fans, there’s still plenty of footage of Edward and Bella auditioning for that coveted role in an Ex-Lax commercial. That said, “New Moon” is an improvement in most ways beyond its predecessor. (Admittedly, this is this is the only book in the series that I have read in its entirety, so the previous sentence probably validates this fact.)

Only the most oblivious viewer could fail to notice the biggest change between this movie and “Twilight”: the lack of shirts for most of the male characters. This was done no doubt to satisfy both the prepubescent female fan and the fact these shirtless characters are all werewolves and therefore have little need for post-transition clothing.

The fact that they shred any type of material when they change into gigantic wolves (no, they aren’t wolfmen) brings up an argument usually reserved for the pages of the Incredible Hulk. OK, they ruin their shirts, but why are they running around in human form wearing just pants?

For the money saved on shirts, “New Moon” was able to attract A-list stars like Dakota Fanning and Michael Sheen, seen here playing against type where he is neither a werewolf or Tony Blair, though here he is something of the vampire prime minister.

The world of vampires and werewolves is not that different from our own. Their movies are drippily titled “Love Spelled Backward is Love.” Or they have names like “Face Punch.”

Now there’s a movie I’d rather be watching.

Side note: At one point in “New Moon” Charlie, Bella’s police chief dad, is watching a football game on TV between the Arizona Wildcats and the Washington State Cougars. The funny thing about this isn’t its place in a movie that probably doesn’t appeal directly to fans of Pac-10 football, its that the game is at least 10 years old (judging by Arizona’s blue jersey and white helmet uniform). I’ve seen this movie twice and I still can’t tell you what else goes on in this scene since I’m always trying to figure out why Charlie is watching a game that a) is not broadcast on ESPN Classic and b) why they would be broadcasting any way if he was; both teams didn’t have outstanding seasons when the game aired.

‘Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant’ is strangely the lamer of the two teen-vampire franchises

During a  trip to the movies last Halloween, my wife and I were dead set (pun intended) on seeing “Paranormal Activity.” Cold feet and 15-minutes debating in front of the ticket counter, we instead went to the much less frightening “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant.” Although, if you think a tap dancing, flute-playing John C. Reilly is scary, then maybe the Vampire’s Assistant is not for you.

“Freak” falls into the category of well-meaning, more or less well-made, yet utterly boring movies based on children’s books that aim to be the next Harry Potter franchise. The dead giveaway is the colon in the title. Presumably, had this movie been a hit, it would be followed by “Cirque du Freak: The Werewolf’s Understudy” and Cirque du Freak: Frankenstein’s Butler.”

But sadly, movies like this one (and “Inkheart,” also was released earlier that year) fail not because they have a descent story to tell, but because either a) cram too much in what should be a standalone story in order to hook an audience or b) make woeful casting decisions when it comes to the child actor. (read: Jake Lloyd in “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.”)

“Freak” failed on both these counts.

Nearly every part big or small, is filled with an A-list character actor. Heck, Willem Defoe even shows up for a little exposition on what awaits the characters in a never-to-be-filmed sequel.

However, it’s the titular vampire’s assistant and his soon-to-be-evil best friend that drag the movie down. You know you’re in trouble when a bearded Salma Hayek has more charisma than your main character.

XX and YY are two typical high-schoolers with fascinations for spiders and vampires, respectively. (Note: these two characters are so dull, I’m not looking up their names on IMDB.) When they stumble into a performance of the titular Cirque du Freak (the movie tells us that the show has been in the western hemisphere for 500 years which means John Smith and the Virginia Company must’ve been in its first audience) , they discover  one act (bloodsucker Reilly and his deadly spider) to be of interest to both of them. Through a course of semi-dull events it’s our web-obsessed hero that becomes the half-vampire (or half-pire, if you will). This sparks a bit of jealousy in YY, who we later see has turned to the dark side when he inexplicably shows up for the final battle with gel in his hair.

It’s XX, though who seems so set in not drinking human blood (notice a pattern in young adult vampire literature, anyone?) that he’d rather waste away to nothing than use the non-fatal bloodletting practices that Reilly has shown him. Yet the minute his girlfriend shows him a bra strap, he’s all fangs. Now there’s a good role model for you kids.

At the end of the movie, the main bad guy gets away, the business with his friend/nemesis is unresolved and we learn that a war has just started between the bad vampires and the good vampires, leaving either gaping plot holes or the possibility that XX will live to whine another day in a equal.

Remember back to that time when it was just easier to slay them?

“Never Been Kissed” is the reality TV romance of our time

I’ve seen a lot of Drew Barrymore movies in my time.

OK maybe not a lot, let’s say seven. This includes E.T. and Batman Forever. Drew Barrymore was in a Batman movie? Yes. Was that movie a Drew Barrymore movie? No.

When taking Ms. Barrymore’s body of work together, the common elements like guy, girl, kooky situation, resolution usually come into play. Those things are all here in Never Been Kissed, a romantic comedy that also adds to the mix voyeurism, deception and a pedophile teacher.

Barrymore is Josie “Gross-y” Geller, a Chicago newspaper copy editor who dreams of shedding her traumatic high school past by going undercover as a high schools student for a story.

She is fitted with a hidden camera so her co-workers can watch the hilarity unfold.

The pedophile teacher in question is Michael Vartan, better known to non-chick-flick watchers as Jennifer Garner’s main squeeze in Alias. Vartan’s character develops feelings for Josie and begins to act on them, convinced she’s a student. Once her cover is blown and she’s revealed as an undercover reporter, he’s no longer attracted to her. Ah l’amour.

While I continually point out this seemingly innocent plot detail to my wife every time this movie comes on, I get the obligatory, “It’s just a movie” argument, which only seems to work in one direction.

(I once tried to use the “it’s just a movie” argument to get out of explaining why in “Army of Darkness” the evil Ash keeps coming back to life, but all I got was a disinterested sigh and my wife leaving the room.)

Josie is smitten by the teacher character because (and I’m taking a wild guess here) he’s the only member of the opposite sex to show her any attention. Why she goes to such lengths to win back a man who is all to ready to put the moves on one of his underage charges is beyond me. (Side note: We watched another movie, “Election,” involving inappropriate teacher-student relations; which my wife though was disgusting and went to bed before it was over.)

Once you get past the ick factor of Josie’s love interest, what follows is par for the course for most high school movies: every students falls into some identifiable clique, the cliques don’t get along, the students must sit through a sex-education course involving condoms and oblong yellow fruit, and all the problems will be addressed/sorted out at the prom.

There’s also a sub-plot where Josie’s has been brother reignites her high school angst when he turns out to be the more popular person-who’s-pretending-to-be-high-school-age-but-isn’t-really-high-school-age-and-somehow-this-is-supposed-to-be-perfectly-acceptable-especially-when-he’s-being-courted-by-someone-whose-actually-high-school-age person.

Hey, we’ve even got a voice over of Josie explaining via her article that her hot-for-teacher episode was perfectly OK because she pretended to be a student, filmed other students without their consent, is within her rights to do so because no one kissed her in high school, ousted Teachy McStatutory in print, and expects him to forgive her in the course of an afternoon and kiss her in front of hundreds of people while standing on a baseball diamond.

Ah l’amour.

‘Mamma Mia’ is the mother of all musical chick flicks

Every so often a movie comes around where no amount of protesting will get me out of watching it. It was like that with “Sex and the City” and it is like that with “Mamma Mia.” The buildup to this movie was such that there was no use in resisting this, especially in the annoying manner I chose such as repeating the film’s title over and over whenever my wife threatened to show it to me.

The problem with ABBA music isn’t that it bad (it isn’t) but that it’s so infectious that when you get 20-plus songs blared at you in movie form, the next few days aren’t spend humming the beat to “Dancing Queen” or “Voulez Vous,” but some strange mixture of the Swedish band’s entire back catalog. Key changes or tempo be damned, I’m able to seamlessly transition between “The Winner Takes it All” and “Honey Honey” anytime I want.

Even as I write this, I’ve got “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie,” stuck in my head, a song so infectious that Madonna chose to use the instrumental hook in her disco album. My foot is moving and I don’t know how to stop it.

The movie is more or less a retelling of the Broadway musical of the same name, not to be confused with the Shakespeare play of the same name. Girl on Greek island, about to get married, wants her father to walk her down the aisle, but doesn’t know which of three possible candidates her (shall we say, ah, open) mother bedded at the crucial time. She invites the three of them (that dude in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, that dude in the Bridget Jones movie, James Bond) to the wedding. Dancing ensues.

The actors all sing their own songs, something the critics were quick to harp on Pierce Brosnan for his off-key rendition of “S.O.S.” I agreed with them the first time around, but the other funny thing about ABBA is after hearing him belt it out more than half a dozen times, I can’t tell the difference anymore.

The musical has been adapted for countless countries, each translating their own lyrics. Whether audiences hear songs about platform boots or sequins is beyond me, but I’m guessing that the more conservative countries played down the “my mom’s a slut, so which of the three of you are my dad?” angle.

Bronson is plays an architect, Colin Firth a banker and Stellan Skarsgard is some sort of Dutch adventurer, which as we can deduce from the actions of all those other Dutch adventurers, he probably has as many illegitimate children as vowels in his name.

Streep seems the only lead actor to be at home in the movie, but then again she could probably win an Oscar for pulling off a convincing portrayal of Orson Wells reading Paradise Lost on helium; so playing someone who’s bedded Mr. Darcy AND James Bond that’s probably not a stretch. Seyfried (looking bug-eyed here, compared with her turn in Mean Girls), practically disappears from consciousness when she’s on screen, but then again, she is given the dullest songs (“I Have A Dream,” seriously?).

The thing that annoyed me the most about the movie (and I know this isn’t the point, so please don’t write to me) is we never find out which of the three men are the actual father. Through various points in the movie, we see each of them assuming parental duties as they convince themselves that they are dear old dad. So all we have left to infer are which of their younger selves is the most, ah, responsible; as we can infer that the guy riding a motorcycle next to a boat is probably the least likely to care about something like birth control.

That’s why my money’s on Skarsgard.

‘Australia’ gives us yet another foreign language film

Early winter is always time at my house to revisit the Oscar-contending movies we missed in theaters. And nothing says Oscar-contention like sweeping landscapes, a long running time and a shirtless-Hugh Jackman.

He’s the chief reason we’re watching “Australia” and only way I can get my wife interested in an X-Man movie. Though he drips with manhood, he makes 18^th century manners (Kate and Leopold) and musical theater (Oklahoma) seem almost macho.

My parents watched this movie a week before us and gave the following three-word review: “It was awful.”

Maybe they didn’t see the most telling thing listed about the movie: Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Knowing who helmed the movie is telling of what will likely happen. John Woo’s “Australia” features the two main characters holding boomerangs at each others heads. Gus Van Sant’s “Australia” has long, drawn-out takes of Ayers Rock. Judd Apatow’s “Australia” has an entirely new meaning for the billabong.

We decided to give the movie a shot determined that my parent’s brevity of distaste meant there must have been something to enjoy here. No doubt my they were confused by the sense that “Australia’s” tale of an English noblewoman herding cattle Down Under would be the next “Out of Africa” or “The English Patient.” Two-and-a-half hour epic, yes. Best picture, no.

They were also a bit confused at the “terrible” dialogue. Maybe they couldn’t come to terms with Nicole Kidman’s character being referred by different names by each of the characters. To Jackman’s Drover, she is “Lady Ashley” (or Ash-leh in Austrailio-speak), to the Aboriginal boy she’s taken under her wing, she’s known as “Boss Lady,” and to Tom Cruise she’s known as “The person I used to have a better career than.”

This leads to another common practice of movie watching my wife subjects me to: subtitles.

Even movies she’s made me watch over an over, the subtitles still come on. So used to this practice, I even switch them on when I’m watching one of my movies for the umpteenth time, not to slavishly teach myself each line from Star Wars, but out of force of habit.

While the movie is more or less in English, the Australian patois makes it difficult to understand some characters. For example, whenever the soft-spoken Drover (or Drov-ah as he calls himself) say’s he has to “drove cah-ttuh ‘cross the Nev-ah-Nev-ah” what he’s actually saying is “this movie better win me an Oscar.” Likewise, the young Aborigine Nullah? Says “Boss Lady gunna makka me teachum through the bigga mcneron cernv,” he’s actually saying “I sure hope the author’s parents aren’t rolling their eyes right now.”

Hence the subtitles. While we were able to read what the characters said, my parents had to navigate through every flat vowel and truncated –er suffix the movie could dish out.

Couple that Luhrmann’s way of making movies and it’s easy to see why the enjoyment of Australia greatly hinges on knowing what you’re in for.

Still, movies on an epic scale like this one tend to lead to another one of my wife pet peeves, the unhappy ending. Most time’s I’ll argue against the requisite happy ending simply because it’s used so much that no matter what sort of jam the characters get themselves into, they’ll always work it out in the end. However, being that this movie approaches the Gilligan’s Island boat tour mark, I can understand that you want to see things conclude nicely if you’ve been watching digital cattle, digital airplanes, and digital Hugh Jackman teeth for almost three hours.

My wife is so concerned by this potential let down what we stopped the movie at the halfway point so that I could watch the rest of it by myself in order to report back if the Jack and Kid men make it though Japanese bombs and the errant thrown spear. I don’t think I’m stunning anyone if I say that the movie does end to my wife satisfactions, but there’d be very little chance of it otherwise ended with Jackman ending up as an Australian shish-kebob.

‘(500) Days of Summer’ can’t quite breakup with the chick flick

It occasionally happens that there will be a romantic comedy that I want to see, although this greatly hinges on the on-screen presence of Zooey Deschanel.

It’s no surprise that my wife likes a happy ending to go along with her romantic comedies. I know that there is no way that she’ll go see a movie that begins with a breakup.

So, I had to concoct a new, more wife-friendly plot to get her interested in “(500) Days Of Summer.” My movie takes place in the post-glacial melt Arctic. Due to the warmer climate and the earth’s rotation, the characters really do have 500 days of summer as they try to bond amidst the occasional polar bear and a life floating on the water.

Since she eventually saw through my ruse and took me to the movie, I thought it fitting to include it on the list.

While “Summer” might be seen as an alternative to romantic comedies, it still has one foot in the world of “Never Been Kissed” and one foot in “Before Sunrise.”

Twentysomethings Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Deschanel) are the happy couple who breakup near the beginning of the movie. Since the story jumps around among its 500-day timeline, this doesn’t occur at the chronological midpoint but soon enough for the audience to begin searching for fault lines.

I am often reminded that murder mysteries take one of two forms. Either you know what happened and you find out who the killer is or you know who did it, but you must figure out how. “Summer” is of the latter structure; we know early on that the two aren’t one anymore, and we are captivated to find out why. The movie would probably be a lot duller if not told in this structure, but that’s the point; which begs the question, if “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” were told in this fashion, would it be a good movie?

Another thing that makes “Summer” different from most movies like it, is it’s told from the guy’s perspective, and once you realize this, you see how it’s already in a class of its own. Showing this side of the relationship can be successful, as seen in “High Fidelity” or “I Love You Man,” but whether a guy-side movie called “Bro Actually…” or “Fried Green Buffalo Wings” can rake it in like their feminine counterparts can would be a risky gamble which would immediately backfire from the presence of a Renee Zellweger or Kate Hudson.

Still, “Summer” does borrow from more feminine oriented movies. We have the wacky best friends, the occasional voiceover and the wise-in-all-things-romance prepubescent girl. It’s these things that, to use a baseball metaphor, keep the movie from knocking it out of the park even though it hits a strong home run. If you can’t outdo “Pushing Daisies” in your voiceover, it’s not worth doing.

For every rom-com staple, we’re rewarded with genuinely good scenes like a musical dance number and a split screen telling of the main character’s perception of a party and what actually happened. There’s even a few Fellini and Ingmar Bergman references thrown in for good measure.

Though like its nonlinear storytelling, “Summer’s” male-centric lead is almost a gimmick, but a good one. There are more men that can identify with Tom’s ever-present iPod and real human feelings than with Matthew McConaughey and his lost shirt.

‘Leatherheads’ is more like ‘Montage:The Movie’

George Clooney can be thought of as the Gary Cooper or Cary Grant of our time, a leading man’s man. While the look and feel recall that era of movie star, “Leatherheads” just shows the world that, like Fletch, Clooney is the right man for any job. It’s not that he isn’t right for the part, it’s just that we see him here in another profession where he essentially plays himself (which is not necessarily a bad thing in a leading man.) We’ve seen George Clooney the escaped convict, George Clooney the spaceman, George Clooney the doctor, George Clooney the Batman and now we get George Clooney the football player. Strangely, there hasn’t been a movie with George Clooney the grocery store manager, yet.

“Leatherheads” aims to tell the story of the legitimization of professional football, a time before rules ruined things like dirty tricks, unsafe gear and low attendance numbers. We see Clooney, who at his age could never cut it even at the Pop Warner level, lead a ragtag team through what passes for pro football in that era.

College football, in contrast, is where the crowds are, and nowhere bigger than where Jon Krasinski, football star and war hero, is. Krasinski plays essentially the same character here as he does in his breakout role in “The Office” smug, comfortable in his own surroundings and irresistible to women under 5’6”.

This is where Renee Zellweger comes in to compete the love triangle. Clooney wants Krasinski as a ringer for his struggling Duluth Bulldogs team, reporter Zellweger wants Krasinski for a newspaper story and possible something else, and Clooney wants Zellweger to be his, uh, halfback.

This movie combines several different genres together: sports movie, screwball comedy, and even the journalist movie.

It’s not that I don’t believe Zellweger in the reporter role, but it’s almost boilerplate how in every movie, women seem to have one of three jobs: journalist, fashion designer or ad executive.

When Zellweger discovers that Krasinski’s war story is less Sergeant York and more Private Benjamin, she grapples with the implications of exposing him but also ruining her chances with the young football star.

One of the elements of a screwball comedy is the rapid-fire back and forth dialogue between the characters. This shows us two things: that both characters are trying to outwit each other through wordplay and audiences were a lot smarter when screwball comedies were actually made. Instead we get this:

Zellweger: (speaking slowly) Being the slickest operator in Duluth is sort of like being the world’s tallest midget, if you ask me!
Clooney: (pauses, then speaks) You know, it’s too bad we are so much alike, otherwise we would have gotten along perfectly!
Zellweger: (considers what has been said) I’ll live.
Clooney: (takes deep breath) Alone!

This is how it should play out:

Zellweger: Being the slickest operator in Duluth is sort of like being the world’s tallest midget, if you ask me!
Clooney: You know, it’s too bad we are so much alike, otherwise we would have gotten along perfectly!
Zellweger: I’ll live.
Clooney: Alone!

Notice the difference?

Yet, somewhere in all this, people manage to play a few games of football.

Like all sports movies, “Leatherheads” makes use of the montage. We’ve got montages to show the teams improvements, montages to show the hard times, montages to show the traveling between cites, montages that have that sepia-old-old-timey feel with the plunky piano music, there’s even a montage of montages.

The point of the montage is to show progress being made or time passing in a way that won’t bore the viewer. Having one every other scene defeats this purpose.

Like the predictable nature of the romantic comedy, the movie comes down to the Showdown where Clooney and Krazinski (sounds like a criminal duo if you say it a few times) square off at Soldier Field for The Showdown, which is moviespeak for a contest that will determine who Zellweger ends up with during the final montage.

And no, the two male leads are not the ones who ride off together on a motorcycle at the end. That would give the movie’s title a whole new meaning.

“Lovers on the Bridge” an exercise in amor and merde

Every once in a while I am granted a reprieve from the standard chick-flick fare and my wife rents something a little more on the arty side.

Sometimes it’s McConaughey. Sometimes it’s Fellini.

And sometimes it’s “Lovers on the Bridge.”

I was not immediately apprehensive to watching it, it did have the reliable Juliette Binoche in it. It took about eight minutes before the movie violated the Excrement Problem.

We are shown what happens to French vagrants after they are rounded up at night in a squalid bus, stripped down and hosed off.

It didn’t help that I was eating a chicken dinner while watching this.

I like to think I have an iron gullet, but it’s a no-win situation watching one of the lead performers gyrating in what I hope is prop poo.

I understand that the director was going for realism here, but there is really no good reason to show the drug-addled Alex taking a mud bath for more than 10 seconds. I get it, institutions for Paris’ homeless are filthy, but next time you are going to make a movie about bums falling in love, please, please imply the scatological aspects of the story. I’ll rent the documentary if I’m still curious.

In what must be an obscure reference in an obscure music video, the actor playing Alex also appears in a Thom Yorke/U.N.C.L.E. video where he is a troubled man being hit repeatedly by cars in a French tunnel. OK, here he only gets hit by one car and it’s in a Paris street, but the connection is made: this guy doesn’t do well with cars.

Thankfully, it’s not long before we’re introduced to the titular bridge, the Pont-Neuf, here being renovated for the French Revolution bicentennial. Since it’s being renovated, it provides the ideal place for street performer and substance addict Alex and another bum to make their living very much car-free.

It’s not long before Binoche wanders onto the bridge as an artist who’s gradually goes blind. Alex and Binoche form a bizarre symbiotic relationship: she needs him for sight and he needs her for a stable human connection.

As much as I disliked the movie’s pretentious feel, it did have one scene worthy of its inclusion in Cannes: as Binoche is almost totally blind, the older homeless man living on the bridge helps her break into a nearby art gallery. There, with the faintest of candlelight, he shows her the art that is slipping from her life forever. Since this happens at the middle of the movie, we aren’t sure where it will be headed.

When a treatment for her eye condition becomes available, Alex obsesses about loosing her and tears down posters trying to locate her and even goes so far as to set a man on fire to keep Binoche to himself.

At this point, I was hoping for anything to happen to Alex so Binoche can find a situation a little more stable.

When you find yourself cheering for the movie’s characters misfortune, you know you’ve got a problem. It’s no that Alex is an evil person, we realize that he may not be fully aware the damage his actions cause. It’s like he has the childlike simplicity of Michael Bay.

The issues I had with the movie fall chiefly on the characters who don’t know whats good for them. For all his obsessions about Binoche, whenever he not making hommes flambé, Alex seems incredibly bored and irritated when he’s with Binoche. Therefor it’s hard to see the beauty in the profane if the profane makes no attempt at improvement. Every cloud has a silver lining but it’s still a cloud.

My wife (who obviously loved the movie) explained that it showed that not all love stories are pretty or have the storybook happy ending.

Ok, granted, but love doesn’t need to be rolling around in poo either.

“Priceless” is like Tiffany’s without the breakfast

The movie “Priceless” deals with the two favorite things of the French people: sex and fashion. The other two favorite French things, cheese and berets are better saved for a review of “Frommage: Le Film.”

The star, Audrey Tautou is known to audiences west of the Atlantic for her roles in Amalie and the Da Vinci Code and plays not the descendent of Christ, but a cocktail waitress who attaches herself to wealthy men like a Brietling watch attaches itself to, well, wealthy men.

What we call a gold digger, Tautou’s character is the more sophisticate-sounding bon vivant pour le hommes.

The beginning of “Priceless” seems to draw a page from the “Pink Panther” movies: animated opening titles, 60s-style jazz, and a bumbling male lead.

The lead in question is Gad Elmaleh, here playing the same role as he did in “The Valet” as a hotel worker who pretends he’s more well-off than he really is.

When Elmaleh falls asleep on the job, Tautou mistakes him for a high roller and her next provider of Chanel dresses and Riviera hotel suites.

When her previous vieux protecteur (sugar daddy in Low English) leaves her. Tautou sees Elmaleh less as a star-crossed lover and more as an annoyance, as she bankrupts him at a high-class restaurant.

Despite her character’s shortcomings, it’s easy to see Tautou in this Holly Golightly-type roll, which has more to do with Breakfast at Tiffany’s than just the portrayal of those who will do anything to be among the ridiculously rich. As Elmaleh struggles with the bill, he inadvertently becomes the object of affection for an older widow, who soon foots the bill for a fancy hotel room and a new wardrobe, assuming the George Peppard role of “Priceless.”

Once Tatau realizes Elmaleh isn’t following her, she begins instructing him in the ways of her world, teaching him how to finagle things like $30,000 watches and Vespa scooters.

Movies like this fall into one of two categories: guy-gets-girl and girl-gets-guy. While the latter is more common, the former never sat well with me. Usually the guy tries to convince the girl that he’s worth going out with, usually that girl turns out of a type that rhymes with the thing you scratch. In movies like this, the guy goes through an hour and a half of rejection before the girl realizes she had been mistaken by treating him like dirt for the previous running time of the movie. Somehow I find this a little more implausible than the other variation.

In “Priceless” Tautou is far from a sympathetic character, especially as she milks everything Elmaleh has while remarking that she doesn’t really enjoy the caviar she eats all the time. After a while, you wonder why the hapless bartender even bothers.

Since we tend to get our game shows and not our comedies from oversees, it’s easy to see how “Priceless” could exist only in its Gallic form. Movies like this one are not unlike the fluffly pastries eaten in the film: filling for the moment, but ultimately empty and full of air.

Remaking this movie for American audiences makes about as much sense as remaking it’s spiritual predecessor “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Imagine Matthew McConehy and Rene Zellweger in the roles and it’s easy to spot a dud of “Gigli” proportions.

But therein lies the difference. Audiences seeing American actors doing the same things as their French counterparts may see the result as being reprehensible, but there is something that can be said for how much “the other” can get away with. American action movies are big hits oversees, but replace the leads with local stars and you get something that just doesn’t fit.

Kind of like an Hermes scarf on the neck of a Wal-Mart greeter.

“Twilight,” or somebody please, please stake me

On the surface, complaining that my wife forced me to watch a vampire movie seems kind of whiny.

But “Twilight” is no ordinary vampire movie.

Coffins have been replaced with Volvos. Vaporization in daylight has been replaced with sparking in daylight. Castles have been replaced by Frank Gehry-designed forest mansions. Vampire bats have been replaced by thunderous vampire baseball bats. Death by stake has been replaced by death by being torn apart into little pieces and set on fire. (OK that last one’s pretty cool.)

Vampires still suck blood, but the vamps central to the story are vegetarian and therefore will expect a laugh every time they explain that they only drink animals blood.

On the surface, the movie seems like “Dawson’s Creek” with goth kids, but unlike the WB show with it’s twentysomething high schoolers, most of the pre-college-aged characters are actually pre-college-aged actors.

Bella is a high school junior who movies from Phoenix to live with her father in the small town of Forks, Washington where it’s always overcast, enabling vampires to walk around during daylight without that embarrassing sparkly-dandruff look.

Don’t get too excited, rather than film in the real Forks or Phoenix, the filmmakers chose to shoot the entire movie in the Portland, Ore. area. This means fans of the books (read: teenage girls) will have to make the pilgrimage hundreds of miles to the middle of nowhere to see the actual 7-11 where Edward and Bella bought Slurpees from.

As long as we’re being nit-picky, are the vampires restricted to playing only vampire baseball (imagine if Barry Bonds was allowed to use steroids and had Flash-like speed) during thunderstorms to hide the sound? Do they have to wait for the rain if they want to shoot some vampire pool or play vampire tiddlywinks?

When another group of vampires crashes the baseball game (non-vegetarians for those keeping score at home), Bella and Edward flee to Oregon-disguised-as-Phoenix.

The final showdown takes place at night in a ballet studio while its raining, three things that Phoenix doesn’t really have.

This movie hints at some animosity between vampires and werewolves, but if you want some serious fang and fur action, you’ll have to wait at least two more movies. Hopefully the money raked in by the first movie alone will be able to go towards better special effects, especially considering the vampire’s sparkliness less resembles thousands of diamonds than Stage 4 leprosy.

I get that the main character has been dead for 80 plus years, so the fact that he speaks all his lines in a stiff and awkward fashion makes perfect sense given that talkies hadn’t been invented yet. Nope, Edward is strictly a pre-Chaplin man thrust into a post-Mamet world.

He’s played by Robert Pattinson, who’s character was killed in one of the Harry Potter movies, presumably causing Pattinson to look like he’s been binging on the garlic in every single picture taken of the actor.

The movie is as good as example as any of a faithful book-to-screen translation.

I know this because the teenage girls sitting behind me in the theater were able to quote not only every line, but they even nailed the tone and inflection. Compare this to the pair of middle-aged women sitting behind me in “Adaptation,” skimming their copies of “The Orchid Thief” looking for the part where Nicolas Cage splits in two only to be run over by a car later in the movie.

My wife also made me read (re: skim) the book prior to the movie, hoping I would share in her obsession for the abstinence-creature of the night (no necking until we’re married) series as she was, but as of this writing, I’ve put my progress in the third book on hiatus.

The series’ climactic decision (foreshadowed in the movie) is Bella wanting to choose between remaining a whiny teenager or becoming a whiny vampire.

Bella: Why won’t you make me a vampire? I really wanna be a vampire, waaaaa.

Edward: If I turn you into a vampire, you’ll be incredibly good looking like me, but have no soul and be doomed to wander the earth for eternity and have to drive ridiculously expensive cars.

Bella: But I wanna be with you forever because it sure beats having around me creepy werewolf friend.

Edward: You vant to be with me forever? (vampire accent added for effect). Uhh. Vait right here. (Turns into a bat, flies away)

Ah, young love.