One-Liners

COLD WEATHER (2010) (B) - A low-key but effective character study of a brother and sister living in Portland and searching for some direction in life. This moody example of Northwest Mumblecore from Aaron Katz pays attention to all the important details and creates an authentic world in which a bunch of 30-ish slackers flail around for purpose.

Doug (Cris Lankenau) has forsaken his study of forensics for a no-brain job slinging crates at an ice factory while crashing with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). Doug finds out his old girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon) is visiting Portland from Chicago, and he meets up with her, taking his new blue-collar pal Carlos (Raul Castillo) along. Carlos and Rachel hit it off (he's a club DJ, too), but then one night Rachel doesn't show up to watch Carlos' gig, and Carlos is convinced that foul play is involved.

This triggers Doug's Sherlock Holmes fascination, and soon he's combing through Rachel's abandoned hotel room and later shopping for pipes. Those two scenes typify the charming deadpan humor that carries "Cold Weather."  Soon, Gail is tagging along as a wheelman and helping Doug crack a code left behind in the hotel room. This all plays like a slacker satire of '70s private-eye adventures, and it works, because the dialogue is believable, and the characters are finely textured. (It's also a valentine to Oregon.)

A final caper leads to an understated ending, and if you stick with it, "Cold Weather" will reward you.

ADORE (D+) - A ridiculous story that barely holds up after repeated fast-forwarding. Two childhood pals, now 40-something moms (Robin Wright and Naomi Watts), start sleeping with each other's hunky college-age sons. Really.

The crime here is not that there is barely any decent MILF action (which is why many people would bother with this), but rather that there is no tension in what could have been a taut, quasi-oedipal psychodrama. The timeline continues in fits and starts. The young men are wooden. The cinematography capturing the Australian coast is ho-hum.

This one completely falls apart by the end, with a late confrontational climax that strains credulity.

THE CAMPAIGN (C+) - This is either a wasted opportunity or the emblematic death knell for the genre of silly, foul-mouthed man-child comedies. Will Ferrell slips in and out of his George W. Bush imitation to portray a southern Democrat who is profoundly inept and offensive but still keeps getting re-elected. He's on his way to another term, unopposed in the race, when at the last minute a challenger files for the ballot, in the person of Zach Galifianakis' swishy straight arrow.

It's hard not to manage a few solid guffaws with Ferrell and Galifianakis acting like idiots. But this is beyond cartoonish -- the filmmakers thought it was so funny that Ferrell accidentally punches an infant that they repeat the gag with a dog later on. One classic repeat bit that does work perfectly, though, is Galifianakis' struggle to work a doorknob (inherently comic in a "Sunshine Boys" vein); it is funny enough the first time, but then catches you off-guard the second time and becomes even funnier.

Feel free to skip around this one, too. By the time Ferrell's character puts out a pornographic ad to save his campaign, you should be ready to bail out. This is the kind of lazy movie that parodies the real world by conjuring up two evil financiers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, meh) and naming them the Motch brothers. What, "Krotch" was too libelous?