An ungifted Chicago TV personality ("My job's very easy, two hours a day, basically reading prompts"), accustomed to getting pelted on the street with fast-food items thrown by passing motorists, shoulders a number of private-life burdens: a Pulitzer Prize-winning father dying of lymphoma before the fortyish son has a chance to impress him (the mother, though alive and well, scarcely merits a glance); an ex-wife who has already found herself a new man; a teenage son in rehab, with a homosexual predator for his drug counselor; and an overweight daughter whose form-fitting clothes in the crotch area have earned her the nickname of "Camel-Toe" (an educational montage illustrates the phenomenon). But his overriding concern is frankly himself. It's significant that the movie opens with our mopey protagonist gazing at himself in the mirror, and significant, too, that it tells so much of its story in the form of his first-person narration. One stream-of-consciousness passage, not really narration but interior monologue, almost makes the whole thing worthwhile: a flashback to the time he was sent to the deli to pick up some tartar sauce with a to-go order. He starts out with a clear focus on his assignment ("Tartar sauce, tartar sauce, tartar sauce, tartar sauce ..."), but the sight of a shapely bottom in a pair of blue jeans at the crosswalk sets him off on a free-associative riff that takes his mind a long way from a condiment. Nicolas Cage, distancing himself from his action-hero persona, plays the part as a classic sadsack with glimmers of existentialist awareness, and he never remotely looks like someone who would have caught the eye of the network for a million-dollar job on Bryant Gumbel's morning show. His director, Gore Verbinski, ensures he won't look like that with an overcast image that appears to encase him in tinted or frosted glass. Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Gemmenne de la Peña, Nicholas Hoult. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.