Alien vs. Predator wasn’t screened for critics, and the company line is that the special effects are still being tweaked.  People should be able to smell that bullshit from Nairobi.  Things are so bad, the studio even canceled the big Hollywood premiere this week.  Just as a comparison, Catwoman, Gigli and Jersey Girl were made available for advance screenings, so you’ve got to figure AvP will be even worse.  Hard to fathom, innit?

You couldn’t pay me to see The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement the un-eagerly awaited sequel to the film that unleashed the torrent of princess movies on a truly apathetic public.  Hasn’t this movie already been released three or four times this year, under names like The Prince & Me and A Cinderella Story?  Nothing like giving pre-teen girls unrealistic expectations about what their adult relationships will be like.  Meanwhile, pre-teen boys are running over hookers in Grand Theft Auto, so everything should all work out well for everyone in the future.

I’m not even going to talk about Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie because I don’t even know what the hell it is.  If it looks like Pokémon and walks like Pokémon, I’ve got no frigging business being anywhere near it.

That leaves us with two limited releases to discuss, and the better of the pair is John Curran’s We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which netted screenwriter Larry Gross the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.  Anymore is based on a pair of short stories from Andre Dubus, who you may remember as the source of such melodrama as In the Bedroom (as well as spawning the equally morose Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog).  Needless to say, if you’re looking for some light laughs while your Manicotti Formaggio from Olive Garden digests, you’re probably going to have to search elsewhere.

There’s a popular belief that people are suffering mid-life crises at earlier ages these days, and Anymore puts that theory to work as it shows what should ultimately be the last act of a pair of seemingly doomed marriages (like any good, non-cookie cutter film, it doesn’t offer any closure, which helps add to the overall gloominess of the proceedings).  Jack (Mark Ruffalo, Collateral) and Hank (Peter Krause, Six Feet Under) are best friends who are also both scruffy English professors at a small New England college.  Each is married with young children, and they both look forward to their regular runs through the majestic scenery of their small town.

The similarities end there, however.  Hank lives in a clean, bright house with a perfect wife named Edith (Naomi Watts, 21 Grams) and his well-behaved daughter.  He doesn’t smoke, he stretches before he jogs, and he’s more than happy to work during the summer, which keeps his family free from worries about money.  Conversely, Jack’s home, which is shared with wife Terry (Laura Dern, I Am Sam), is full of dark wood and is perpetually messy.  His kids are screaming monsters, and Terry does her fair share of shrieking, as well: Money, parenting, and a dwindling quality in the bullshit excuses Jack concocts to slip away and bang Hank’s wife.  When confronted, Jack lashes out with sarcasm and accusations, which only makes it easier for Terry to think about the passes Hank continually makes at her.  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Uhh, beats me.

I thought Gross’s script was the weakest past of Anymore, but was slightly more intrigued by it hours later, when I began thinking about how different viewers might identify with different characters and, therefore, be able to cull different things from the film.  While I was watching it, I assumed Anymore was being told from the point of view of the two men, particularly Jack (we get to hear his thoughts twice, for some reason).  But that might mean I simply identified with his situation more than the other three players.  I don’t know – see it for yourself and let me know what you think.  I’m still kind of scratching my head about the guy who wrote True Crime, Prozac Nation and Chinese Box winning the same screenwriting award bestowed upon The Station Agent, Memento and You Can Count on Me.

Curran’s direction is far stronger than Anymore’s writing (though it was topped by the four blistering lead performances).  He leaves the film dripping with enough dread and doom to make you think somebody was going to get hit by a train, or fall off of a cliff, or get gunned down in some convenience store robbery.  Curran purposefully saps the Jack-Edith tryst of any sexual chemistry, and constantly mixes up sound, images and the picture’s moody score in a thought-provoking style.

On the flipside of the food chain is Danny Deckchair, a slightly non-fictional Aussie import from storyboard artist-turned director Jeff Balsmeyer.  Rhys Ifans (Once Upon a Time in the Midlands) stars as the titular Danny, a Sydney dreamer who cooks up crazy ideas – like human slingshots and pancake breakfasts – only to have them shot down by his attention-junkie girlfriend, Trudy (Justine Clarke).  When Trudy puts the kibosh on Danny’s camping trip, he does what any self-respecting Welsh-playing-Australian man would do: Take a bunch of helium balloons, tie them to a deckchair, and take off into the ether.

Danny eventually crashes in the backyard of Glenda Lake (The Lord of the Rings’ Miranda Otto, who seems much better than this), a small town meter-maid hovering somewhere near the brink of Old Maid-dom because she’s been alone (read: hasn’t gotten laid) for much of her adult life.  With fun-loving men falling out of the sky, who needs internet dating?  Deckchair, actually gets worse after the lame setup, dropping Danny into both the kind of quirky small town that will make you stand up and shout for Kirk Gleason and Sookie St. James; and the type of broad situation comedy that should have fans of Everybody Loves Raymond lined up around the block.  This is the kind of film that might play well at a festival full of weary people who have spent day after day hip-deep in tragedy and drama (Deckchair closed the Toronto International Film Festival last September), but in the light of day, it’s the kind of movie you’d go Coyote Ugly on in order to get away from.

I also caught the painful A Home at the End of the World, a coming of age (read: unoriginal and boring) story that follows the life of Bobby Morrow (played, as an adult, by Colin Farrell) from his childhood in Cleveland to his adventures as an adult in Upstate New York.  The good news is that Farrell turns in a really strong performance that, on occasion, totally made me forget he was Colin Farrell (especially when he was briefly disguised as J. Mascis).  The bad news is…well, I already said World was unoriginal and boring.  On top of that, it’s poorly paced, over-acted by Robin Wright Penn, and full of bisexual melodrama.  Farrell’s Morrow gets involved in a three-way relationship with Wright Penn’s Clare, and Dallas Roberts’ Jonathan, making the whole thing Chuck & Buck meets Three to Tango, but in a slightly less complimentary way.  When Clare gets knocked up and takes off, I can only imagine she’s going off to meet Forrest so he can raise the kid after she suffers a glamorous death from her fast and loose lifestyle.  Plus, it'll be fun to watch the look on the faces of millions of Colin Farrell fans when he starts dipping his wick into musky man ass.