A movie slump

Herbie: Fully Loaded

Even when Matt Dillon is trying to be a NASCAR driver, he still sounds like Matt Dillon. Even when Justin Long is trying to be an auto mechanic, he still sounds like Warren Cheswick. Even when a Herbie movie tries to be clever and 21st-century, it's still a Herbie movie.

The Producers

I think Mel Brooks has become a nostalgia piece for me and not much more. I like Space Balls and Blazing Saddle because I liked them in high school. Robin Hood: Men in Tights is only barely tolerable, and other than a continuing amazement at the kinds of gay and minority jokes that Brooks can get away with in the twenty-first century, I didn't much enjoy The Producers. Okay, there was an Oedipus joke, and one doesn't find many of those in movies, but beyond that, kaput.

Capote

This one did what it did well, but there wasn't much of it. The story follows Truman Capote as he researches and writes In Cold Blood, focusing on the lies he tells to condemned men and his inability to consider them human unless he's in the room with them. Those moments of forgetting are some of the most haunting I've seen in movies in a while, but because the actors playing the death row inmates underplayed their roles, the contrast between Capote's salon coldness and the human moments with the killers didn't come across.