This year's Red Lights prize for underheralded French drama that I could hardly have liked more goes to Olivier Peyon for his subtly disquieting granny-and-tots road movie. New wave veteran Bernadette Lafont, as the disobedient gran indefinitely prolonging a day out with the kids, offers a smiling enigma of a performance that's calibrated beautifully, and Peyon, a new name to me, has something of that Cédric Kahn/Laurent Cantet/Ray Lawrence knack for creating a kind of abstract unease by letting the camera linger: the sustained rear-view shot of a slow-moving log truck as the movie opens is a case in point, setting up a lot of the film's tensions by both obstinately stalling progress and prompting a dangerous urge to overtake.
After a grimly appropriate performance as a sleazy voyeur in Mr Brooks, Dane Cook returned to default obnoxiousness in the year's most calculatedly vile -- if not quite its creepiest -- mainstream rom-com. Jessica Alba "broadened her range" by playing a pratfalling penguinologist, and the penguins did not look impressed. They looked vaguely appalled. Worst bit: Cook testing his romantic mojo on the least attractive female he can find, whereby we discover that if you're over a size six in this movie, you lick your own warts, stuff yourself to farting point, and are barely human. This was like an STD infecting multiplexes.
The notion of eight movies worse than Good Luck Chuck is already deeply horrifying to me. I proceed with trepidation, but also with fascination, into the rest of this countdown.
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