The fascinating yet flawed Elite Squad opens in limited release today. Here’s my review from the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. — Scott Weinberg

It’s rare that a good film will irritate me, but it happened at least fifteen times during the rather intense Brazilian import Elite Squad, and here’s why: The film is saddled with an omnipresent voice-over narration from the main character, and this running commentary deflates, detracts, and nearly ruins every GOOD thing about the movie. Every time the viewer is offered a chance to think for himself, make a decision about a specific character, or draw a moral conclusion about the onscreen mayhem — up pops the stunningly unnecessary voice-over monologue. After a while it starts to feel like the filmmakers simply don’t trust your intelligence, and so they insist on explaining every scene, every theme, and every possible motivation the characters might have. It’s a damn good thing that Elite Squad has some other very solid assets in its corner, because that narration almost kills the whole movie.

Based on the book Elite da Tropa by Andre Batista, Rodrigo Pimentel, and Luiz Soares, Elite Squad takes us inside two very different Rio de Janiero police units. On one end we have the “regular” police, most of whom are either sickeningly corrupt or simply ineffective. On the other side we have the BOPE, which is Brazil’s ultra-elite unit of peace-keeping ass-kickers. Even the regular cops step to the side when the “elite squad” arrives on the scene, and it’s the leader of this unit who becomes our entry point. Next>>

You know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of romantic comedies about people who have special, magical relationship “skills” that they use to make money. You had Hitch, where Will Smith knew everything about women and could sell you his expertise. Then Failure to Launch had Sarah Jessica Parker being hired by exasperated parents to date their loser sons, boost their self-esteem, and get them out of the house. And just last fall there was Dane Cook as Good Luck Chuck, whom women would sleep with because they knew it would lead them to their soulmates. These movies aren’t all bad, but their cutesy premises have created a new cliché in a genre that already had plenty of them.

The latest is another Dane Cook offering, My Best Friend’s Girl, and it’s a misguided blend of frat-boy raunchiness (which is why they hired Cook) and the usual rom-com tropes (which is why they hired Kate Hudson as his co-star). Yes, chick-flick fans, all your favorite plot points are here — meeting under false pretenses, feeling betrayed when the truth comes out, declaring your love in the rain, and reconciling in a highly public place — but they’re mixed with testicle jokes and vomiting!

Cook plays Tank Turner, a first-class douchebag who, like Cook himself, takes pride in his douchebagginess. When he wants to sleep with a woman, he just treats her like dirt. Of course, this only attracts the type of women who enjoy being treated like dirt, but I guess everyone has a specialty. In his spare time, Tank accepts money from love-struck guys who want him to date their ex-girlfriends, show the women a miserable time, and drive them back into the arms of the guys they dumped. There is a certain logic to it: If you want a girl to think you’re terrific by comparison, set her up with Tank Turner. Next>>

It must be said, right off the bat: We all have bad days, we all behave obnoxiously sometimes, and (once in a while) we all do really stupid things that we regret big-time three seconds later. Having said that, it simply must be asked: Lou Lumenick … what the &%!#$ing &$)# were you thinking? I hesitate to even write about this story, but since a dozen other movie sites have picked up on it, we’d be a little tacky if we just brushed it under the carpet. Plus, hey, it’s interesting.

Anyway, according to various sources, NY Post film critic Lou Lumenick got into a brief altercation with Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert during a press screening at the Toronto Film Festival. More specifically (and allegedly, I suppose I should say), it seems that Lou ignored numerous shoulder taps from Roger, and then — in a fit of full-bore film critic snittiness — whirled around and landed a half-solid pop on Ebert’s noggin, er, knee. The weapon was some sort of portfolio or rolled-up program.

For his part, Roger Ebert has been (as usual) the epitome of class. At first he tried to keep the situation quiet, but once word got out, he penned this explanation. And since the guy already has a Pultizer, I say he now deserves a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Because let me tell you right now: If I was struck silent by a throat malady and the PROFESSIONAL FILM WATCHER in front of me refused to turn around and at least acknowledge my simple request, well, then I suspect we’d be reading blog posts about how “Cinematical Film Critic Scott Weinberg Just Wrapped a Fire Hydrant Around the Head of an Unidentifiable Man.”

And for HIS part, Lou Lumenick has remained distressingly silent. Whether or not the guy was dead-wrong or drop-dead apologetic, there’s no excuse for him not addressing the story by this point. Something along the lines of “Dear sweet lord, was I an asshole the other morning. I’m really, truly sorry” published on the New York Post editorial page should just about do it. Me? I’d have written that email six minutes after the incident occurred. Before sending it to every movie site, blog, and message board in the universe.

About a week ago, word spread that Robert De Niro had walked off the set of Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness. A spokesman for De Niro explained it to us like idiots: “Sometimes things don’t work out; it’s called creative differences.” De Niro would have co-starred with Mel Gibson as an agent tasked with cleaning up evidence of a murder Gibson’s homicide detective is trying to investigate.

It seems that Campbell has found his replacement: the great Ray Winstone, who is currently in negotiations to step into the role. Winstone obviously doesn’t have De Niro’s profile, which is a loss for a film that’s benefited from a considerable amount of hype before even starting principal photography (most of it having to do with Mel Gibson’s return to acting after six years). But he certainly has the chops.

De Niro, meanwhile, faces a test of his drawing power this weekend with the release of Righteous Kill. The marketing campaign has concentrated exclusively on the presence of De Niro and Al Pacino, so the question will be how many people the two of them can get into the theaters. Not that De Niro has anything to prove, as evidenced by his walking off the set of a major film two days into shooting.