It's a hard out here for a critic.  Us online folk get zero respect, and there's a growing trend for studios to screen fewer and fewer films in advance for anyone to review.  You'd think they'd show us the good stuff (like The Bourne Mentholatum and Sunshine), but instead we get the ridiculous (Bratz and Daddy Day Camp).  The only stand the PSB staff can even think of taking is to not even mention the movies that aren't screened for us.  Oh, we'll still download them for free and watch them in the comforts of our cell phone-and-white trash-free living room.  We just won't talk about them here.  We're sorry it's come to this, but it's something completely out of our control.

The most interesting thing about Resurrecting the Champ, the latest from critic-turned-filmmaker Rod Lurie, is the casting of one of the planet's most boring actors in the role of sports reporter who writes really boring copy.  The actor is Josh Harnett, and the character is Erik, a bottom-rung writer for a fictitious present day Denver newspaper.  You get the impression the only reason his boss (Alan Alda) keeps Erik around is because his dead father was a legendary sports radio voice back in the day.  Erik dreams of covering the Broncos and the Nuggets, but instead he's assigned to boxing matches nobody gives a crap about.  Because he's boring.

When Erik interrupts a bum beatdown outside an arena, he discovers the elderly homeless victim is none other than "Battlin'" Bob Satterfield (Samuel L. Jackson) -- a fighter who was ranked third in the world many, many lifetimes ago.  Seeing an opportunity to exploit a black man to further his career, Erik pounces, and in exchange for some beers, he gets Satterfield's life story.  Bam!  Cover of a weekly Denver magazine, and national attention.  But you know what's coming, don't you?  You know this is going to boil down to another Hollywood story of a mystical negro who teaches Whitey a lesson about how to best deal with his not-so unique cracker problems (quit fibbing to his son about knowing John Elway, patching things up with his baby-momma, writing like you've got a pair, etc).

There is a bit of  twist, but that only briefly interrupts the mystical negro freight train headed right for your big ol' dumb heart.  Since Champ is based on a true story, you can't even credit the twist to decent filmmaking.  The messy screenplay comes courtesy of Michael Bortman (Chain Reaction) and Allison Burnett (Autumn in New York), and it makes you wonder why Lurie didn't have at it himself.  He's certainly no stranger to the craft, having penned his first two big screen offerings (Deterrence and The Contender) as well as the criminally-ignored ABC series Line of Fire and the early (read: not bracingly pandering) episodes of Commander in Chief.  The ending, which attempts to find closure in all the wrong places, smacks of something slapped together when test audiences didn't respond well to the original version.  So, when you're exiting the theatre, you'll not only be regretting the purchase of your tickets, you'll also be wondering what actually happened to Erik, and if the love interest they set up for him (Rachel Nichols) fell off the face of the Earth.  PSB says 5.

The Nanny Diaries, despite boasting interesting behind-the-camera talent, is equally disappointing.  American Splendor creators Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini direct and adapt the popular novel about a college grad reluctant to pursue employment in the business field.  Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) instead almost accidentally falls into a gig as a nanny for a wealthy but dysfunctional Upper East Side family led by a snooty, absentee mother played by Laura Linney.  If the purpose of Diaries is to tell us that rich people are clueless, emotionally detached, and view their children as sticky little accessories, then good on you, filmmakers!  Most of us have already figured that out on our own, though, and we'd just as soon save the $10.00 and the 106 minutes.  The height of unintentional hilarity via unrealized irony comes in the third act, when Annie falls for a rich guy and begins her cycle toward ambivalent motherhood.  PSB says 5.

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Next week: We'll be gearing up for the Toronto International Film Festival, from which we will provide daily updates about what we saw, and how much candy we ate.