The Invisible Counterpoint

Bad Words One of the key things we take from this film is that if you want to intrude on an exclusively prole ritual like child beauty pageants, dismaying parents and causing participants to cry, by all means go for it -- we'll chortle right along with you: films like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Bad Grandpa" paved the way for us to feel no compunctions. But if you're intruding on a ritual being used to build up children's resumes expecting to get into the ivy leagues -- like Spelling Bs -- then you only get to half mean it. A bright child of affluent, educated parents is inserted into this movie -- purposely beset upon Jason Bateman's Guy Trilby, on the presumption that Guy won't defeat the dreams of a kid he ends up considering a friend. And though the gambit works, you sense it wasn't owing to friendship but that the kid served as a grinning "Cheshire Cat," castration-reminder afflicting him throughout the movie: this kid is...

(Originally posted at Movieline.com) Wallie tries to explain to Cassie what he had done, essentially immediately after he recalls his having made the switch 6 years before. Cold sober, chilled but vividly intent, he is well on the way to explaining ... and then the movie takes his moment away from him. Very evident that he is in the effort of trying to say something of huge import that he fears will damage both of their lives thereafter, that could ruin everything they shared between one another before then, the movie has her recoil away when her own embarrassing admission "demands" she suddenly stop him in his effort and squirrel back inside her apartment. Better, the movie seems to think, that he make his sin clear at a moment when it would look more last-straw and inadequate, which would allow her to announce that future contact would be under her terms and you wouldn't feel that she would even in this still be reckoning with someone with real "sand." She...