No updates last week because the wireless mouse doesn’t work inside the oven, which is where the PSB staff rested its cumulative head after the opening salvos of the Red Sox-Yankees series.  Luckily, all is right with the world once again.  And we’re all immune to poisoning via natural gas, too!  Yeah!

So what did we miss during Oven Time?  These things, which we saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in larger markets:

Being Julia – a bloody waste of time!

Moolaadé – so that’s why genital mutilation is wrong!

p.s. – a less creepy version of Nicole Kidman’s Birth!

Shall We Dance? was a proposition nobody could dare to stomach (but who knew it would be the more palatable of the post-Bennifer breakup films – see Surviving Christmas below).

Oh, and there was the puppet sex movie called Team America: World Police, which made me laugh so hard, I almost blew snot all over my own mother.  She was amused by neither the snot nor the film.  Who could blame her?  Nobody wants to watch naked marionettes pretzeled together in the Daisy Chain-Helicopter position while sitting next to a relative.  Compared to South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (which was made by the same hysterical perverts), Police wasn’t quite as rapid-fire with the gags, and that gave viewers more chance to appreciate the funny.  Still, it’s the kind of film you’ll need to see at least one more time to catch the jokes you missed the first time because of audience’s rampant howling and guffaws stepping on the dialogue.

This week, you can check out these limited release films which were previewed in the PSB coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival:

The Machinist – Christian Bale playing Calista Flockhart!

Sideways – it’s as fricking good as everyone says!

Undertow – it’s not as fricking bad as everyone says!

I hate sequels and despise remakes even more, but there’s something kind of cool about a filmmaker having another shot at making one of his own films.  See a stupid mistake in the original (like casting Affleck)?  You get another crack at it.  Second guessing the way you handled a particular scene?  It’s like turning back time to correct it.

This is what we get with Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, an updated version of his very own sequel-spawning Japanese blockbuster of the (sort of) same name.  If you’re tired of the same old by-the-numbers American horror flicks, but enjoyed The Ring and What Lies Beneath, you’ll probably appreciate The Grudge.  It isn’t plagued with masked murderers, predictable killings or a bad modern rock soundtrack.  And Shimizu gives it all to us in jumbled time – a true rarity for a mainstream film of this genre.  Seeing a big star like Bill Pullman eat it in the first scene is pretty jarring.  I mean, he was in Caspar, for chrissake.

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Karen, a Tokyo college student who works at The Care Center to satisfy a sociology elective.  Her first solo home visit involves caring for a catatonic woman named Emma (Grace Zabriskie) in a house that, unbeknownst to anyone, was the site of a grisly family murder several years earlier.  Yes, Karen is a substitute for Emma’s usual caretaker.  Yes, that caretaker hasn’t been seen for a while.  Yes, there are forces in the house that don’t exactly warm up to people inhabiting it.  And yes, these forces (played by the same actors from several of the Japanese versions) kill Tom Cruise’s cousin.

.

Now here’s a remake that deserves to be put in a burlap sack and drowned like a litter of kittens.  It would be impossible to really remake Alfie and have its titular character be even remotely as smugly and smarmily misogynistic as Michael Caine was in the 1966 installment.  Without being picketed and egged and threatened, anyway.  So what we get is a watered down, softened up version in which we’re actually made to feel sympathy towards the unlikable star.  A version written and directed by Charles Shyer, a filmmaker known for such gritty work as Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and the darkly noir-ish I Love Trouble.  Yes, I am kidding.  So save your emails.

Jude Law, in role number three of six in late ’04 releases, replaces Caine as the eponymous Alfie, a self-centered, womanizing Brit-in-Manhattan limousine driver who has no problem banging his best friend’s girl (Nia Long) or stringing along a single mother (Marisa Tomei).  He also has no problem dictating his egotistical monologues right into the camera, which made him even more unlikable, in a Catcher Block from Down With Love kind of way.  There’s just something about forcing a puffy, homely film critic to listen to the inane prattling of an attractive, sexually active cad, I guess.

.

Did someone mention sucking?  It must be a coincidence that I just segued into the Surviving Christmas review.  I mean, a movie about Christmas that is being released before Halloween is bound to be a classic, right?  With Ben Affleck?  I mean, people aren’t at all tired of him.  Why else would his last three films (Gigli, Jersey Girl, Paycheck) have a 70 rating over at Rotten Tomatoes?  Oh, 70 total?  Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, why is this tool still being given the opportunity to say lines in front of a camera?

Like in Gigli, Affleck plays a successful but spiritually empty businessman.  Tragedy strikes not in a dead wife, but via a pre-holidays dumping from girlfriend Missy (Jennifer Morrison).  This sends Affleck’s Drew spiraling into a strange mental place where he returns to his childhood home and bribes the family currently living there to pretend to be his kin through Christmas night.  Hilarity ensues.  About two times.

.

I also caught a little flick called Seducing Doctor Lewis, which, sadly, was not an ER spin-off about Sherry Stringfield’s character ditching Chicago for a life of devious sexual adventures with the girl from Bend It Like Beckham.  It is, instead, about a tiny French-Canadian fishing village whose residents con a big city doctor into moving to Ste-Marie la Mauderne in order for them to lure a plastics company into setting up a manufacturing site in the economically-deprived area.  For those of you keeping track at home, that makes Lewis a cross between Northern Exposure (big city doc going to Hooterville) and Waking Ned Devine (wacky small towners uniting for their own monetary gain).  This doesn’t stop Lewis from being mildly entertaining, though.  You know, in that light, insubstantial way.