Hello America, how’ve you been? Those shingles clearing up all right? Solid. As you might have guessed, we’re back for another installment of the column that cares, Entertainment Police. Prepare to have your heart and other tender anatomical portions touched, buffed and spit-shone! If you’re like me, you’re ready for Hollywood to cough up another weekend’s worth of movies, and as usual they haven’t disappointed. Meaning they put out some movies, I’m not crazy enough to suggest the movies aren’t disappointing. So let’s take a gander at the who’s, what’s, and why’s of this weekend’s letdown.

In Theaters

In the Cute
Meg Ryan and Mark “Buffalo 66” Ruffalo shed their cute puppy-dog images for this light serial killer comedy. Taking the romantic comedy “Will they do it?” conceit a step farther to “Will they do it before the dude cuts her head off?” In the Cute ratchets up the fluffy tension notch by notch with every dismembered corpse and bit of funny first-date hijinks. While the obvious question is “Does it work?” and the obvious answer is “Who kicked your pregnant mother down the stairs, doofus?” the more compelling point to ponder is really “When is the right time to tell the girl you’re dating that you’re a serial-killing detective madman? Before you meet her parents? Or after the wedding?” Director and athletic sock magnate Kate Champion does an admirable job of keeping the two plates spinning at once, even if it does mean that nothing in the film is ever the slightest bit in focus, figuratively nor in the fuzzy-eyed literal sense.

The Human Stain
I got excited when I first heard this movie was coming out because I thought it was going to be about my brother, since that was his unfortunate nickname in High School. No such luck however, as it’s just another potboiler about the extreme inconvenience of a hit-and-run accident. Anthony “Psycho” Hopkins stars as the inattentive driver who spends two hours going from body shop to body shop in a vain attempt to get the weird purple butt-cheek marks out of the hood of his Audi. Extreme tedium can be a powerful motivator, and I doubt anyone will be talking on his or her cell phone while jerking off a transvestite on the way home from the theater after seeing this cautionary tale.

Radio
According to commune fact-machine Griswald Dreck, the radio was actually invented by Italian racecar genius Macaroni Vivaldi, not some retarded black guy from Alabama. As the story goes, Vivaldi got tired of not having any music to listen to while he was driving endlessly in circles, and he thought it also might be fun for when he was racing. So Vivaldi developed the world’s first radio, which he installed in the dash of his racecar. A few months later he followed this up with the crucial invention of the world’s first radio station, which not-surprisingly played only Vivaldi’s favorite Chechnyan oompa music. You’d think this story would be compelling enough to make into a hit movie, but apparently Hollywood thought Cuba Gooding Jr. would have a hard time passing for Italian, so they rewrote Vivaldi’s story as Forrest Gump meets Rudy and slopped it onto our plates with a ladle. Sorry Hollywood, but even we’re not that stupid.

Scary Movie 3
Looks like the poofs at Merchant Ivory are at it again, trying to deceive the American moviegoing public with yet another misleading movie title. Anyone who went to Howard’s End expecting a classy gay porno or walked out of Remains of the Day after a pulse-pounding slasher flick never materialized can feel my pain here. After The Golden Bowl failed to live up to its billing as the second coming of Cheech & Chong, I gave up on these guys for good. Scary Movie 3 is indeed scary, if the thought of paying nine bucks to sit through a long, boring chick flick terrifies you as much as it should. Though if seeing nerds dress up in period costumes and act boring does it for you, and the Renaissance Fair isn’t in town, then this should be right up your twisted alley.

The Swinging Detective
Hollywood’s latest ploy to squeeze every last drop of spunk out of the lousy turnips they’ve been producing (spunk’s turnip juice, right?) is the highly-dubious practice of releasing the same film twice under two different names. Sometimes they score the doublecross of getting people to pay to see the same film twice (i.e. Jurassic Park and Godzilla or Under Pressure and Vanilla Sky), but the strategy is mainly employed so they can market one film to two wildly different audiences. That’s the case here with The Swinging Detective, released simultaneously with In the Cute and raising some suspicions by being exactly the same movie. But while trailers for In the Cute play up the film’s grisly serial-killer elements, The Swinging Detective looks like a straight-ahead romantic comedy that just happens to be going on around the same time the cops are trying to find a serial killer who cuts women’s heads off and balances them on his shoulders so he can re-enact his favorite scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Some might find these marketing tactics deceptive, mainly because they are, but the studio may have hit just the right balance this time around since romantic comedy and serial killer audiences rarely overlap. Plus it’s funny to envision the scenario where some guy drags his wife to see In the Cute and she tolerates it so she can drag him to see The Swinging Detective the following weekend, neither of them ever the wiser.

That’s all America. Even if there were more movies out this week, we wouldn’t have reviewed them, because enough is enough. Knowing when to quit has never been a Hollywood strong point, so the discerning consumer has to know when to yank the gin tap out of their puckered maws and kick the rascals curbward. Join us again next issue when we answer the eternal question: “Yuck! What?”

October 13, 2003
The House of the Dead, Intolerable Cruelty, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Miss Tick River, Runaway Jury

September 29, 2003
Duplex, Out of Time, School of Rock, Shit Creek Manor, Wonderland

September 15, 2003
Cabin Fever, Matchstick Men, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Secondhand Lions, Underworld

September 1, 2003
The Backyard, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, Jeepers Creepers 2, The Order, Party Monster

August 18, 2003
American Splendor, Freddy vs. Jason, Grind, Open Range, Shaolin Soccer, Uptown Girls

July 21, 2003
Bed Boys II, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Rock the Cradle of Love, Seabiscuit, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over

July 7, 2003
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, Pirates of the Caribbean The Ride The Movie: The Curse of the Black Pearl Harbor, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Sequel, Terminator 3: Rise of the Meatheads

June 23, 2003
28 Days Later, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Jet Lag, When Harry Met Lloyd: Dumb and Dumberer

June 9, 2003
2 Fast 2 Furious, Daniel Day-Car, Hollywood Homicide, The In-Laws, The Italian Job, Love the Hard Way, Rugrats Gone Wild

May 26, 2003
The Matrix Rebooted, Finding Remo, Bruised Almighty, The Hoke, Downey with Love

May 12, 2003
The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Owning Mahowny, The Real Cancun, Whale Rider, X2: X-Men United

April 28, 2003
Anger Management, Bulletproof Monkey, Holes, House of 1000 Islands, Identity