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GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has more to offer than Matthew McConaughey's past rom-com dalliances; it's still formulaic, disposable nonsense, but at least it benefits from a stellar supporting cast to prop up its leading player and a reliable source – Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol – to steer it in the right direction. McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a fashion photographer who goes through women the way viewers of Titanic went through tissues. His boorish behavior threatens to ruin the wedding of his younger brother (Breckin Meyer), but his womanizing Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) returns from the grave to show him there's more to life than just wooing the women. A more versatile actor would have sold this material more efficiently than McConaughey; as it stands, his tanned, aging-frat-boy routine allows his character to remain such an unrepentant, misogynistic creep for such a good chunk of the running time that almost all sympathy has been lost for this character by the time he finally begins to see the light. Luckily, co-star Jennifer Garner is a step (or 10) up from such vapid past co-stars as Kate Hudson and Jennifer Lopez, and she works hard to coax out his rakish charm. She succeeds more often than not, meaning a small measure of genuine warmth enters the frame during the latter portion of the film. While she (and Meyer) provide the emotion, others pick up McConaughey's slack by providing the laughs – especially indispensable are Robert Forster (as the father of the bride) and Douglas, both amusing as dissimilar examples of aging, curdled machismo. **1/2
NEXT DAY AIR From its slapdash opening that rips off City of God to its guns-blazing finale that feels like a steal from the Quentin Tarantino playbook, Next Day Air doesn't possess one moment or idea that can be called its own. Here's a project so ill-conceived that it finds room in its cast for the talented Mos Def but then bungles that gift by giving him the smallest role among the principal cast members. Of course, you wouldn't know this from the posters and previews, most of which place the actor front and center. The marketing gurus behind this picture are brilliant; maybe they should have been assigned to make this film instead of director Benny Boom and writer Blair Cobbs. At least Mos Def is good while he lasts, appearing in only two scenes as a perpetually stoned delivery man for a UPS-style company. Much more of the screen time is given to Donald Faison, also playing a perpetually stoned delivery man – and the one who mistakenly delivers a box of cocaine bricks to a pair of bumbling bank robbers (Mike Epps and Wood Harris) instead of the proper recipient, a Latino middle man named Jesus (Cisco Reyes). When the crime lord (Emilio Rivera) who sent the package learns of this screw-up, he decides to handle the matter in person. Despite the fact that they're only required to play "types" rather than characters, all of the actors acquit themselves nicely, including Yasmin Deliz in a feisty film debut as Jesus' girlfriend. But even a gung-ho cast can't work miracles when the scripter can't think of anything witty for them to say and the director is incapable of building any sort of momentum from scene to scene. Just mark this one Return To Sender. *1/2
THE SOLOIST Here's yet another film that comes off as little more than a liberal screed. It has its merits scattered about, like so many chocolate sprinkles adorning a scoop of ice cream, but for a movie that's about compassion and understanding, it makes for a shockingly indifferent experience, filled with too many calculated homilies to allow for much more than superficial connections. It may be based on a true story, but it feels synthetic all the way. The heart of the piece – the relationship between Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a homeless man who was once a Julliard-approved musician – actually feels like the picture's most artificial component. Perhaps that's due to its similarities to Resurrecting the Champ, another recent film about the friendship between a white journalist (Josh Hartnett) and a black homeless man (Samuel L. Jackson). Or maybe it's because of its greater role as yet another picture that tries to assuage middle-class guilt by using a proxy to allow moviegoers insight into the travails of the most unfortunate among us. But the problem is that it usually only skirts the issues it raises (homelessness, lack of health care, mental illness, etc.), with the raw scenes – Nathaniel's physical assault of Steve, Steve's ex-wife (Catherine Keener) drunkenly taking him to task – too few and far between. Foxx and Downey do what they can to keep the story prickly, but when they have to contend with scenes as offensive and patronizing as the one that ends the film, even they can't prevent this from frequently hitting the wrong keys. **
