Here are some DVDs that were a waste of my time and probably yours, too:

1. "Lions for Lambs": A serious political film that purports to examine the issues underlying our current foreign policy with respect to Iraq.  Meryl Streep gives the worst performance I can remember in the last 10 years.  Robert Redford acts stilted and looks like he’s on drugs (perhaps it’s his botox injections or face-lift), and the dialog he gives himself (he’s also the director) sounds like it came out of a college freshman’s writing class.  To cap it off, Tom Cruise delivers the coup de grace in the acting department, playing a self-satisfied super-patriotic senator, who has come up with a new strategy for winning the war in Iraq.

I left the film thinking that it failed on all accounts: despite trying to be a film like (the much-better) "Syriana" or "Traffic", that asks penetrating questions about our place in the world and delivers performances that infuse these questions with poignancy, it wound up taking rote Q&A dialog and trying to elevate it to a higher plane than it , the script, deserved.

See "Syriana", "Traffic" or "Babel".

2. "Sleuth" (the 2007 remake): At first blush, this film, directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Michael Caine–who was also in the original, but playing the other lead role–and Jude Law, seems like a ‘can’t-miss’ line-up.  If you thought that, you’d be wrong.  Caine does okay, but Law looks like he’s a couple of testosterone shots short of qualifying as male; I know women, including my wife, find Law to be irresistible, but here he seems like a real ponce.

The set design of Caine’s designer home is so bad, so distractingly awful,  that I spent most of the time, during the scenes set there, marvelling at how anybody could/would want to live in such a trainwreck of a contemporary super-upscale house.  It looks like it was designed by art-school grads who had suffered macular degeneration.

Finally, you walk away from the movie saying "I spent hours of my life on this?"

Watch the original with Olivier and Caine.

3. "Brothers Solomon": A ‘comedy’ (I put this in quotes because that’s what it claims to be, but doesn’t turn out that way) with two funny guys who manage not to be funny in this movie: Will Arnett (from "Blades of Glory", "30 Rock", etc.)  and Will Forte (from "Saturday Night Live") are brothers who want to find women to impregnate so they can give their comatose father a grandchild. Now you might blame me (probably rightly) for watching this piece of  crap film in the first place and say, "Joe, it doesn’t even SOUND like a good film in the first place, and I haven’t even watched it yet".  To this I would say, "it had good comedians including the two I mentioned and Jenna Fischer from ‘The Office’ tv series, and was directed by a writer for ‘The Simpsons’"–surely it could have had some decent scenes and laughs?"

Anyway, it’s bad–real bad. We’ve already spent too much time writing about it and reading about it.

4. "Suburban Girl": This would be a watchable movie with someone other than Sarah Michelle Gellar (she played Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the TV series).  However, she is not a good actress in my opinion and, to top it off, she had a bad nose job, which is almost as big a distraction as the set design in Michael Caine’s house in "Sleuth" (see above review of "Sleuth").  Alec Baldwin, who’s never bad in anything–he could make a cough syrup commercial compelling–does all he can here, but it’s not enough to save the picture from Gellar.

Rejoice in the time I’m saving you and see some good movies…

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