E. Elias Merhige clearly has a thing for creepy bald guys.  The director follows his Max Schreck biopic (Shadow of the Vampire) with Suspect Zero, a film incessantly referred to by lazy critics as “Se7en meets The Silence of the Lambs…only not as good,” when it is, in fact, simply another film about a creepy bald guy.

Willem Dafoe is replaced here by Ben Kingley (of Thunderbirds fame), who plays an extreme nutter called Benjamin O'Ryan.  Not only is O’Ryan scary to look at, he can also do this weird, government-sanctioned thing where he can visualize – with the help of what sounds like the new Jim O’Rourke album – an event happening thousands of miles away.  This, theoretically, helps O’Ryan aid the government in the capture of serial killers.  But the freakazoid has clearly snapped, and taken the law into his own hands.  Surely his life would be different had he been a regular viewer of The People’s Court.

Meanwhile, mild-mannered FBI agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart, Paycheck) has just finished a six-month suspension for fucking up a huge case involving a mass-murderer, but still finds himself “demoted” from the Dallas office to a hole in the wall in Albuquerque (sounds like a lateral move to me, but then again, I would have taken the route to Pismo Beach and all the clams I could eat).  Mackelway chews aspirin like candy, gets strange faxes about missing children, and eventually falls into another huge case involving a serial killer.  It’s so huge, the Bureau calls in his ex-lover from Dallas (Carrie-Anne Moss, The Matrix Revolutions) to, so far as I could see, stand around make it impossible for viewers to say, “Hey, did you notice there weren’t any women in this movie?”

If you haven’t seen Zero’s trailer, consider yourself lucky because it reveals most of the film’s story.  If you have, it probably doesn’t matter because little in Zero makes much sense.  Merhige knows how to make with the creepy visuals, and Pop Will Eat Itself’s Clint Mansell contributes another decent, moody score.  As far as the acting goes, Kingsley is always fun to watch, but Eckhart does little to expand on the whole Tortured Cop thing that has been better so many other times.  Moss may as well have been made out of cardboard.

Admittedly, Vanity Fair is not my cup of tea, but I still approached my screening with a relatively open mind.  It didn’t help.  Now I want to cave in Reese Witherspoon’s head with a rock, and dig up William Makepeace Thackeray’s corpse so I can drop it into that stuff that killed Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.  It’s not that I hate all period films, or anything.  Just the ones that are pointless, full of bad acting, and feel like they’re five hours long.  I do, however, have an apparent dislike for anything cranked out by director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding).  The thought of her being in the running for a Harry Potter film makes me want drink Clorox.  Believe me, you’ll feel the same way after sitting through hour after boring hour of Fair, and then wondering what the hell is happening when the Britney Spears video temporarily takes over the film.

Thackeray’s novel, adapted here by a trio of screenwriters (including Gosford Park’s Julian Fellows) follows the life of a dullard named Rebecca Sharp (Witherspoon, Legally Blonde 2).  Though she has no money and even less social standing, Rebecca manages to hook up with a string of increasingly rich people and lives fairly high on the hog before it all comes crashing down in Fair’s final reel.  In that way, Fair is a little like The House of Mirth.  More so, when you think about both pictures being headed by amber-haired actresses who are in way over their heads.  Mirth didn’t have the Britney video, though.

Personally, I would have rather seen a film about the Crawley family, into which Rebecca eventually marries.  They’re kind of like a 19^th century version of the Bluths from Arrested Development, complete with a crazy aunt played by Cold Mountain’s Eileen Atkins, who represents the only redeeming quality of Fair.  Aside from her, we’re talking about a film way more concerned about costumes than things like story, acting and…oh, yeah – emotion.  Extremely disappointing considering the cast, which includes Romola Garai, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Gabriel Byrne, Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins and Rhys Ifans.

Here’s the thing I don’t get about Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny.  All anyone talks about when discussing the film is Roger Ebert and curses involving cancer.  Hello?  It’s a movie where an Oscar nominee gives a guy a real blowjob right there on the screen.  And she keeps the change, too.  Cancer, shmancer.

Just to set the record straight, the lousy reception Bunny received at Cannes 2003 was due, in part, to the film being unfinished – it ran two hours and was blown up from VHS to 35mm.  The version you’ll see in theatres is nearly 30 minutes shorter, and its visual quality is vastly improved.  For some people, that might not be enough, since Bunny is, essentially, 90 minutes of a guy (Gallo) driving across the country to get the aforementioned hummer (from Chloë Sevigny).  Sure, the trip is interrupted occasionally while the guy makes out with various women who are all named after flowers (including Cheryl Tiegs), but it’s mostly about the road.

God help me for saying this, but the blowjob scene was the worst part of Bunny.  I thought the film really worked until Bud finally met up with Daisy.  It had a Kiarostami-directing-The Hired Hand kind of look and feel to it.  And like Hand, maybe Bunny will be looked at in a much more favorable light in 25 years.

There’s good news and better news when it comes to Infernal Affairs (opens in limited release next month).  The good news is that it’s a gritty, noirish Hong Kong police drama.  The better news is that it’s being remade by Martin Scorsese for release next year, and I think he’ll take care of most of my issues with the film (most notably, the hella-irritating score/soundtrack).

Affairs, which has already spawned two sequels, is a delicious mélange of Michael Mann’s Heat and John Woo’s Hard Boiled.  It begins at a police training academy, where we first see star pupil Ming (Andy Lau – no relation to co-director Andrew Lau) scoring brownie points, while the reckless Yan (In the Mood for Love’s Tony Leung) is given the boot before graduation.  But things are not always as they seem.  Ming is really a mole planted in the academy by drug kingpin Sam (Eric Tsang), and Yan’s banishment was orchestrated by SP Wong (Anthony Wong) in order for him to infiltrate Sam’s gang in what becomes a decade-long undercover assignment.

Things come to a head 10 years later, on the eve of a huge drug deal.  Both Sam and SP Wong know there’s a spy in their camp, but neither one has a clue who it might be.  That’s a whole lot of fun, as are the performances from Lau and Leung (the latter of whom can be seen this week in Hero).  Affairs, which was edited by Danny Pang (of The Eye’s Pang brothers) and “visually consulted” by Wong kar-wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle, won oodles of Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film awards.  It made me long for the day when we had strong police dramas on television (a la Homicide: Life on the Streets) before CSI and Law & Order took over.  We gotta take the power back.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, which is playing in select theatres to boffo business despite being readily available for purchase on DVD, is like the little brother to Fahrenheit 9/11.  Each will divide their audience based on their political beliefs, despite not being particularly well made.  In Outfoxed, director Robert Greenwald (best known for helming Xanadu and TV’s The Burning Bed) takes on the Fox News Network, and their hysterically inaccurate “Fair and balanced” motto, which is really like a giant inside joke for people with IQs about 80.  Everyone else (read: Fox News’ target audience) just like the funny men who yell at people every night.  How else would you explain two-thirds of their audience believing the US found an actual link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?