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LEATHERHEADS Football may be a rough-and-tumble sport, but Leatherheads is handled by director and star George Clooney with all the delicacy one extends toward an antique vase. Working from a first-time script by sports writers Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, Clooney offers an occasionally wistful look at the early days of professional football, when its popularity was nil and it was viewed as college football's deformed and ignored stepbrother. The year is 1925, and realizing that the league is about to fold, veteran player Dodge Connolly (Clooney) convinces Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski), the nation's most popular college football star, to put his studies on hold and join the pro ranks. With Carter – a beloved World War I hero, to boot – drawing in thousands of fans, the sport catches on, but working the sidelines is tough-talking reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), assigned to determine the authenticity of Carter's WWI exploits. As screenwriters, Brantley and Reilly are, not surprisingly, clearly more comfortable with the gridiron aspects of the story than with the ofttimes flat romance that never quiet manages to make itself at home within the film's structure. But ever the jokester, Clooney doesn't rely on his writers to come up with all the funny stuff. Leatherheads is full of visual sight gags, whether the humor derives from elaborate setups or merely from knowing when to repeat the same shot for maximum potency. Admittedly, the humor is as muted as most other aspects of this low-key production. But Clooney obviously sensed that such an approach suited this material, and why mess with a winning game plan? ***
NIM'S ISLAND If your kids have been totally weaned on ADD-addled animated flicks that mostly coast on crude humor and instantly dated pop culture references, then this clearly isn't the film for them. If, however, said children still find as much enjoyment (if not more so) in opening a book as in piloting a video game's remote control, then this delightful family film will satisfy them in no small measure. Like last year's Bridge to Terabithia, it views a child's imagination as a tangible playground, and this angle is sharply delineated by the colorful flourishes of directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin. Jodie Foster, the most prominent child actress of the 1970s, here hands the torch to Abigail Breslin, with the latter playing Nim, a precocious girl who lives on a remote island with her scientist father (Gerard Butler). When she's not frolicking with her animal friends, Nim enjoys reading adventure novels featuring the Indiana Jones-like Alex Rover, so when her dad goes missing and strangers invade the island, she naturally e-mails Alex Rover to help her. What her young mind doesn't grasp is that her hero doesn't actually exist; instead, the books are written by Alexandra Rover (Foster), an eccentric agoraphobe who carries on conversations with her fictional creation (also played by Butler) and who reluctantly sets out to help Nim in her hour of need. Nim's Island is occasionally silly (as befits a movie aimed at youngsters), but the sumptuous visuals as well as the presence of Foster insure that discerning adults will also find it worthwhile. ***
RUN FAT BOY RUN Run Fat Boy Run stars one of the two male leads (Simon Pegg) from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and, no, it isn't the fat one. Instead, it's the average-sized one, immediately nullifying this movie's title. Now if only someone had nullified this picture's very existence, we'd have one less bomb taking up valuable multiplex space. Instead, we're stuck with a wretched comedy whose greatest claim to, uh, fame is that it marks the directorial debut of Friends co-star David Schwimmer. But with friends like Schwimmer, who needs enemies? Along with writers Michael Ian Black and Pegg, Schwimmer has served up a broad, crass and spectacularly unfunny piece about a sad sack who abandons his pregnant fiancée at the altar on their wedding day. Five years later, Dennis (Pegg) hopes to somehow win back Libby (Thandie Newton), but time is running out since she's becoming more heavily involved with a successful businessman named Whit (Hank Azaria). The lazy and physically unfit Dennis is no match for the health-conscious Whit, but that doesn't prevent him from entering a marathon in an effort to gain back Libby's love and respect. It's a thin premise undermined by rampant stupidity at every turn, from the lazy decision to turn Whit into a paper-thin villain (so audiences won't have to strain their brains deciding who's better for Libby) to the infantile brand of comedy that appears at alarming intervals right up to the very end (literally; the final shot in the movie is a bare bottom). Any random episode of The Benny Hill Show looks as elegant and sophisticated as Top Hat when compared to this dud. *