Anyway, the really terrific movie I saw was TRAVELLER, about Irish con men called Travellers who roam the Southeast, particularly North Carolina, scamming the innocent. The movie presents them as a lot like the Mafia, only with pickup trucks and bagpipes. And I should add that the movie was filmed in Wlimington, NC, when my Duke friends and I were down there at a beach house last May, and my friend Kirk thought he saw Bill Paxton at a restaurant that we went to, but he didn't see fit to TELL me this until TWO WEEKS LATER as opposed to actually telling me AT THE RESTAURANT when I might have seen Bill Paxton, too. (I'm a big Bill Paxton fan, in case you hadn't guessed.)
Sorry. Bill Paxton is sensational in this movie, better than he's ever been. He plays the mentor to "Don't Call Me Marky" Mark Wahlberg, who's decent as a new initiate to the Travellers. Julianna Margolies (yes, Nurse Hathaway from "ER") unfortunately doesn't have much of a character to work with, but she does a good job with what she's got. And James Gammon, eerily similar to Lee Marvin, is great as a solo grifter who joins up with Paxton and Wahlberg for one big scam.
Sure, there are plot holes you could drive a trailer through (example: Margolies's character falls for Paxton's after he scams her out of $500... run that one by me again?), but overall the movie is smart, funny, original, thoughtful, and engrossing. It may be hard to find at a theater near you, but you should definitely make the effort.
The good movie I saw was THE DAYTRIPPERS, a comedy about a woman (Eliza) who finds a note that may or may not indicate her husband is having an affair, so her entire family piles into the station wagon and drives into NYC to confront him at his office. They encounter many goofy, lonely people along the way. Most of the actors are quite good -- Liev Schreiber as Eliza's sister's pseudo-intellectual, unctuous, smug boyfriend and Anne Meara as Eliza's shrill mother are particular standouts -- but Hope Davis is too wispy and pokerfaced to carry the lead role of Eliza, and I'm getting pretty tired of Parker Posey's way of pouting and arching her eyebrows instead of acting.
Most of the time, it's funny and enjoyable, but parts of it
drag, and
again, not everything makes sense (you're going to confront your mate
about
infidelity and you bring along... your parents, your sister, and her
boyfriend?
Run that one by me again), and quite a lot of issues are left
unresolved.
In fact, it seems more like the pilot for a sitcom, bringing up a lot
of
characters but never really fleshing them out, leaving us hanging for
the
next installment. Then again, it's probably just a tad too clever
for TV.
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