The Last Shot (R) (99 min.) - The nasty comedy The Last Shot is right on the money about how no one is immune to the siren call of Hollywood. But there's no affection in this mean-spirited sendup of the movie business and nothing to mitigate its sour taste.
Alec Baldwin plays an FBI agent posing as a Hollywood producer for a sting meant to catch crooked Teamsters. The agent easily ropes in a novice writer-director (Matthew Broderick) and his undoubtedly terrible script.
Actors, extras and investors fall into place. A movie, even the suggestion of one, is a magnet for anyone on the fringe of showbiz. One example: An FBI agent whose job is photographing suspects through one-way mirrors signs on as cinematographer.
The Last Shot suggests that filmmaking not only doesn't require talent, it actively deselects for it. The dummy project, a melodrama set in the Arizona desert, is to be shot in Rhode Island - one of many jokes about creative compromise - and even attracts the just-out-of-rehab star power of Emily French (Toni Collette with a Norma Desmond flair for the dramatic). Step by step, the dummy movie starts turning into a real movie, which in its own pathetic way is still a dummy movie.
The Last Shot, loosely based on a magazine article about a real-life sting, has a keen eye for the sideshow elements of the movie biz. Hollywood loves self-parody, which explains the dynamite cast: Joan Cusack, Tony Shalhoub, Ray Liotta, Tim Blake Nelson and a few B-movie stars playing themselves. Except for Broderick, however, who tap-dances through his schlub role with comic delicacy, they're confined by the meanness of their characters.
As in Get Shorty, making a movie is presented as the ultimate way to square things with your lot in life. But in The Last Shot, there's nothing hopeful or artistic about a business that is the last refuge of losers.
It's "#$*!' nonsense
What the #$*! Do We Know? (Not Rated, probably PG-13) (108 min.) - In the age of creationism, a sympathetic mix of science and religion sounds like a promising premise. But in this cocktail of drama, documentary and computer animation, quantum physics is so subordinated to the anything-goes mysticism that little remains of the science.
Starring Marlee Matlin as Amanda, a confused and questing photographer whose life is slowly unraveling, What the #$*! Do We Know? intercuts her existential meltdown with interviews from a dozen experts who deliver snack-size sermons linking personal psychology through neurobiology to quantum mechanics. The subatomic universe is depicted as a place where everything becomes just a possible movement of consciousness - a vision that lends itself perfectly to the imaginations of the film's CGI wizards.
From here, it is a mere bunny hop to the proposition that each of us, with the right consciousness, can infect the quantum field, and create reality for ourselves. In the infinite sea of possibility that the film endorses as the ultimate reality, nothing is real except what you choose to accept. Fans of The Celestine Prophecy will feel themselves on familiar ground.
