Can Johnny Depp Pull Off the "Wise Native American" in <i>The Lone Ranger</i>?

07/05/2013 11:58 AM |

Stuck in Love Greg Kinnear

Stuck in Love: Speaking of Greg Kinnear: while his Little Miss Sunshine costars reunite, he’s stuck in this movie, one of those movies about writers and writing that takes its passing familiarity with a few good writers as carte blanche to engage in ridiculous and (moreover) dramatically inert fantasy about the world of writing (a world wherein a college-aged daughter of a semi-famous writer can immediately get a book deal by sending out her manuscript under a fake name, and the high-school-aged son of the same semi-famous writer will inexplicably feel jealous that he, too, isn’t handed a fantastical book deal before he’s old enough to work a full-time job). It’s not the cast’s fault; Kinnear, Lily Collins, Kristen Bell, and poor sad Jennifer Connelly do what they can with this terrible material. Maybe people who don’t care about writing wouldn’t notice the most idiotic details, but then again, the movie tries to pitch itself as people who very much do care about writing; it even callback-quotes Raymond Carver to (spoiler alert) close the whole story out. It might be a nice touch if it didn’t also seem so desperate.