5/30/10:  "Hard to think of many hits that spawned more flops than the 1992 comedy classic Wayne's World.  By expanding a popular Saturday Night Live sketch into a delightfully crazy feature-length story, World convinced SNL producer Loren Michaels and its studio Paramount that there was gold in the show's many bizarre recurring characters.  Alas, there wasn't, and trying to turn weird comic creations, many of them built around simply saying the same catchphrases over and over, into movie stars generated one It's Pat after another, until the SNL franchise seemed to shutter its door permanently after the failure of 2000's The Ladies Man.  But now, a decade later, a new recurring sketch has emerged that actually does seem to lend itself to a three-act plot.  MacGruber, played by Will Forte, is a spoof of iconic 80's action hero MacGyver whose attempts to defuse bombs with chewing gum and duct tape always fail, mostly because he's the exact opposite of his inspiration:  petty, greedy, selfish and above all else pretty darn stupid.  In giving the character his own movie, SNL contributors Forte, John Solomon and Jorma Taccone (who directed), have fashioned a broad, silly spoof of 80's action cliches." MORE

11/8/08:  "It's funny to think back to my childhood, when one could go an entire year without a new animated movie being released, and the ones that did trickle out were generally flops.  Now, the Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks revolution has firmly entrenched the animated comedy as one of our most dominant movie genres.  A big part of that formula is the use of popular comedians doing the voices, and we're always assured that lots of improvising went on while recording the dialog.  But because an animated movie is essentially one long special effects sequence, it's rare to see one that truly has a sense of spontaneity to it.  Madagascar:  Escape 2 Africa is such a movie, a big-budget modern day Hope/Crosby Road movie that puts a cast full of clinically insane talking animals through a bunch of loosely connected sketches that add up to a fast-paced, fun-filled story.  It's not without bumps in the road, and in one particular case falls victim to the sequel curse of giving far, far too much screentime to a throwaway gag from the original that now just won't go away.  But directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath have pulled off a pretty tough job:  turning a smart, funny movie in a smart, funny franchise." MORE

5/8/08:  "Of all the movie genres, there's none that takes more cinematic alchemy to pull off than the Romantic Comedy.  Let's be honest, you can likely count all the romcoms you've seen with real, quality, unique three act stories without needing your toes.  When they work, it's because of things that are hard to quantify:  star power, chemistry, writing that's light on its' feet even if not structurally sound.  But when they go wrong, it's pretty easy to quantify.  I could go on all day about the flaws of Made of Honor, a labored, charmless love story for which I'd had high hopes.  It's a movie only for completists of its' appealing stars and screenwriters looking to study what they should never do.

Tom (Patrick Dempsey) lives a charmed life as the inventor of that paper cup sleeve you use to hold coffee (fun fact:  a Jim Chelossi, who I'd probably like better than Tom, did that in real life).  Getting three cents for every one that's used, he spends his time hanging out with platonic best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), playing sports with his buddies and having casual sex with assorted bimbos.  Wait, did I say “casual”?  It's anything but, as the apparently OCD-stricken Tom has a lengthy list of Official Rules designed to keep his relationships from ever becoming legitimate, and he quotes them relentlessly to anyone who'll listen " MORE

5/27/08:  "There are some movies which, no matter how enjoyable they may or may not be to watch, clearly exist primarily for the people who made them.  Married Life, Ira Sachs film version of John Bingham's 1949 book Five Roundabouts to Heaven strikes me as such a movie:  with its' lovingly recreated 1950's setting and top-shelf cast smoothly and coolly wrapping their mouths around the kind of dialog that's meant to be enjoyed like fine wine, it's the kind of film the people who make movies would inevitably rather be making than the kind people actually pay to see.  Because of that great cast, and that great dialog, it's never anything less than interesting.  But at the end of the day, Sachs' thoughtful meditation on... something... is less than the sum of its' lovingly assembled parts.

Our narrator is Richard Langley (Pierce Brosnan), long-time friend of humdrum businessman Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) and his loving wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson).  Harry asks Richard to dinner to meet Kay (Rachel McAdams), a lovely young widow who's become his improbable mistress.  He explains to Richard that he's now in love, in a way he's not with Pat, and plans to leave his wife for Kay.  Except... she could surely never endure the heartbreak of a divorce, and Harry has a better idea." MORE

11/11/07:  "Everybody yearns, on some level, to connect with other people.  At least, “connect” is the word we use as adults; when we're kids, we say “fit in”.  Because while as adults we might respect and even treasure our differences, the worst possible thing for a child is to be different from those around them.  But when it's clear that those connections, that all-important “fit” isn't going to happen, we're likely to recede into the fantasy that we never wanted it to start with.  Martian Child (it's been a long time since a title so desperately pleaded for an introductory “The”), Menno Meyjes' new film version of an autobiographical book by former Star Trek writer David Gerrold, is a gentle, tentative story that takes this universal bit of human psychology to the extreme.  It's perhaps a bit too literal, its' metaphor too superficial to spend so much time exploring, but the movie is constantly engaging thanks to great performances by a first-rate cast.

David (John Cusack) is a science fiction writer riding high on the success of a bestseller he's struggling to sequel.  Always a social misfit, he's hard-pressed to restart his life after the death of his wife, and finds himself revisiting their plans to adopt a child." MORE

10/19/08:  "Truth be told, the vast majority of movies are mediocre, but there are different kinds of mediocrity.  There's the movie that's content to simply chug along at a mildly entertaining pace and keep us diverted until its' running time is up.  There's the movie that wants to be great, and sometimes is, but just can't consistently fire on more than a few cylinders.  The movie that's mostly bad, but contains a few scenes or performances that are really special.  And then there's Blockbuster Mediocrity:  that special product of trying to make the most possible viewers happy that pretty much guarantees that very few people will truly love the finished product.  Max Payne is such a movie, a 90 minute bundle of plot threads (a few of which seem to exist only to generate footage for the trailer) providing a reason for Mark Wahlberg to kill a whole lotta people, all of whom may or may not be bad.  As such, the movie's a mess.  But if you liked that trailer, you'll probably like the movie enough to get by.  It's the kind of Killing Machine Hero on a Mission movie I generally enjoy, complete with a pretty potent vein of (probably) unintentional campiness.  It's a pretty cynical way to mildly entertain an audience, but, you know, whatever works...

Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) used to have a happy life with his loving wife Michelle (Marianthi Evans) and their child." MORE

1/10/10:  "We've all got 'em:  historical people, places and events we'd love to time travel back to meet, see, or be a part of.  And for me, high on the list is the heyday of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater, stretching from their stage period, though the War of the Worlds radio era and ending with Welles' early films.  Oh, yeah, Welles was an egomaniac and a taskmaster, but he was also the kind of outsized genius who gives you a lifetime of stories, and the Mercury players hit one home run after another until their fearless leader finally burned too many bridges to continue.  But oh, to have been a part of all that!  Author Robert Kaplow, screenwriter Holly Gent Palmo and director Richard Linklater are with me, at least according to their tale Me and Orson Welles, which casts Zac Efron as a 1937 high school kid lucky enough to ever-so-briefly get pulled into the orbit of the Mercury players at the moment when a Broadway production of Julius Caesar was about to begin their golden age.  Quibble if you wish with the adequate but unspectacular A-story involving Efron's Richard Samuels and his quasi-romance with Claire Danes' Sonja Jones.  But Welles has Welles and plenty of him, with Christian McKay giving perhaps the best performance ever as the iconic filmmaker and James Tupper matching him every step of the way as the coolest Joseph Cotton ever." MORE

7/30/08:  "I've always thought (only half-jokingly) that the solution to our problems in a lot of foreign lands involves carpet-bombing those countries with DVDs.  Call it decadent or materialistic all you want, but our pop culture embraces individuality and happiness in a world where too many people are afforded neither by the accident of where they were born.  A very interesting story on that subject is half-obscured behind summer movie machinery in Brian Robbins' new Eddie Murphy vehicle Meet Dave.  While containing more than its' share of childishly course humor and indifferent performances (though not from Murphy, who's very good), it also packs some big laughs and fleeting but real flashes of what could have been one hell of a sci-fi comedy.

Near the Statue of Liberty, a fireball blasts through the atmosphere and crash-lands face-first.  It then stands, dusts itself off, and walks away.  What appears to be a person (Eddie Murphy) is in fact a spaceship, sent from the planet Nil with a tiny crew inside to locate a device previously sent to the planet to scout for water.  Once acquired, that golf ball-sized object need only be dropped into the harbor and it will suck all the salt from Earth's oceans, solving Nil's energy crisis." MORE

4/1/07:  "We've all got our lists:  things that geek us up or just generally improve our enjoyment of any film in which they appear.  Mine's a little long, but here are a few things that are on it: 

-Time travel, particularly when time streams are altered so we get to see more than one future depending upon what changes are made in the past.
-Wacky inventions.
-Evil machines.
-Dinosaurs
-Mad scientists.
-Oh, and my sense of humor is kinda loopy.

Since all these things (including the loopy humor) appear in Disney's new animated film Meet the Robinsons, odds were that I was gonna have a good time.  " MORE

11/20/09:  "No matter what end of the political spectrum you're on, we can all agree on this much:  the government is up to something.  All manner of secret deals and projects go on with our tax dollars outside of the public eye; some of them evil, some corrupt, and many just stupid and weird.  Jon Ronson's 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats was concerned with a stupid, weird military project that morphed into an evil one, and Grant Heslov's new film version uses it as a solid metaphor for our national loss of innocence post-9/11.  Fashioned by screenwriter Peter Straughan as an entertaining Iraq War road movie, Goats sports one of those  delightfully overcranked comic performances only George Clooney can give, and is generally filled with crazy and bizarre incidents, an alarming number of which appear to be true. 

Journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) lives a droning life of quiet desperation.  When his wife (Rebecca Mader) decides to seize the day by leaving him for another man, he also decides to make a big change and head for Iraq to cover the war there." MORE

2/15/10:  "It seems like I've written more on this site about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan then I would have if this were a political blog:  although war-themed dramas have failed to break through at the box office, they keep coming because the many tolls of war are on our minds in a big way, and it's something filmmakers of all budget levels are really interested in exploring.  But watching The Messenger, the feature directorial debut of writer Oren Moverman, I was taken with just how little luck Hollywood has had putting us inside the heads of those serving our country.  Both the best (In the Valley of Elah, Brothers and Stop-Loss) and worst (Rendition, Syriana) of this generation of war movies are pleas for peace, and while nothing in The Messenger makes one think for a moment that war is a good thing, it does step aside from the issue of whether we should be fighting or not long enough to really see the people caught up in the war machine's gears.  Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson are terrific in the lead roles, and the script by Moverman and Alessandro Camon really gets fascinatingly into the science of something (the art of notifying the families of the deceased) most of us have been fortunate to never give a moment's thought." MORE

10/14/07:  "The ads make it look like a cross between Erin Brockovich and Disclosure:  a fast-paced red meat legal thriller about an ethically challenged lawyer at war with both his own conscience and the dirty deeds of the farm-poisoning conglomerate he's defending.  Well, some of that stuff is kicking around inside Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, but the last thing you'd call Michael Clayton is fast-paced.  A triumph of mood and character, it's something of a stretch to call the artfully dispiriting film a “thriller” at all.  Instead, it puts its' hero (a sensationally beaten-down George Clooney) through the paces of one, but each step simply re-enforces the cold facts of his existence.  Yes, there are evil corporations in Michael Clayton killing innocent people with their defective products, but the movie's real horror is its' contention that no matter how “successful” you become, the American Dream is a joyless lie.

Yes, Michael Clayton (Clooney) has a business card that'll tell you he's a lawyer, but he's actually a “fixer”, the guy who swoops down when rich people screw up and makes their problems go away.  This skill makes him very valuable to those at his firm, led by friend Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), but has left him without a title, a partnership, or much in the way of assets." MORE

1/20/09:  "I graduated from a middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania high school in 1990.  Any gay classmates I had were triple-locked inside their closets, “queer” was still the world's most cutting insult, and our teachers were a hell of a lot quicker to speculate that AIDS was God's punishment for, you know, than to teach us anything about the history of the gay civil rights movement.  As such, my knowledge of Harvey Milk was limited mostly to a vague recollection that he was some 70's politician (couldn't have actually told you he was gay) who was assassinated by some guy who said Twinkies made him do it.  So, along comes Gus Van Sant's Milk, a respectful, restrained and quite interesting biopic that takes us through the process by which a closeted, 40 year-old nobody found a calling that allowed him to make the world a better place.  The movie's a bit wonky, lingers on unimportant details and could have stood to be a bit more fiery, but Sean Penn's atypically warm and gregarious performance leads an excellent cast in recreating a slice of 70's history that doesn't get its' due.

It's 1970.  On his 40th birthday, New York office worker Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) picks up much younger and much less closeted Scott Smith (James Franco) in the subway." MORE

3/16/08:  "It's my self-appointed job here at The Palace to break the movies I see down:  to tell you why they work (or don't), and to explain what about them might appeal to (or repulse) you.  But there are some movies that just ping me like a tuning fork.  I can tell you about the virtues of their acting and filmmaking, but the greatest thing they have going for them is that they just gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  Like this one.  Between the Great Depression and the coddling and appeasement of Nazis and Fascists that laid the groundwork for WWII, the 1930's wasn't exactly our finest decade.  But it was the heyday of Showbiz glamor and saw the birth of screwball comedy.  The new comedy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day somehow takes all four things and mixes them together into a lovely little comedy of manners and dreams.  Top-shelf performances keep the laughs coming while also delivering on the story's darker undercurrents, making this adaptation of Winifred Watson's novel as moving as it is silly.

Guenevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is at the end of her rope.  Already considered a “Governess of Last Resort” by her employment agency, she is dismissed yet again by an angry employer and finds no new job offers forthcoming.  Broke and homeless, she grabs a lifeline off an agent's desk:  the address of an actress seeking a social secretary." MORE

11/30/07:  "Confession time:  as The Mist's end credits ominously crawled up the screen to the continuing ambient sounds of its' shocking ending, I found myself experiencing an unfamiliar sensation.  I was shaking.  For the first time since I emerged from Se7en a dozen years ago, a thriller had so engaged, terrified and ultimately exhilarated me as to produce an actual physical reaction.  Frank Darabont, known for his work on the squishier end of the Stephen King spectrum (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) and his underrated piece of Capra-Corn The Majestic, has done a full 180, turning King's 1980 tale of apocalyptic isolation into a relentlessly thrilling, utterly pitiless horror machine that makes huge, hard points about our tendency to self-destruct in the fact of fear.

Artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) lives in a small lakeside community in Maine with his wife Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz) and son Billy (Nathan Gamble).  When a storm damages their house, David, Billy and hostile neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) head into town to buy supplies at the local supermarket.  David and Stephanie had already noticed an odd, thick white mist rolling in over the lake, and once it reaches town, a panic sweeps through the streets." MORE

6/5/07:  "You know it'll bust your diet to have that second donut, but it would taste so good...  that you can't afford to lose money betting on that game, but you can feel in your gut that it's a sure thing...  that alcohol is destroying your life, but you need just one drink to get through the night...  that killing is wrong, but there's something about that couple you see in the street that just calls out to you to put bullets in both their heads...

Did I lose you with the last part of that progression?  Hopefully so; the fewer budding psychopaths visiting my site, the better.  But it also means you probably haven't seen Mr. Brooks, the sensational new thriller that manages the trick of making a serial killer played by All-American Kevin Costner a sympathetic metaphor for the addictions large and small that tease and torment us.  Working its' magic on all sorts of different levels both thoughtful and escapist, Mr. Brooks is a crackerjack thriller with a pair of amazing performances.  And it's the best movie I've seen so far this year." MORE

12/13/07:  "Those who go back to the beginning of this site (mostly friends and family, to be sure) may remember that I picked Stranger Than Fiction, the feature screenwriting debut of Zach Helm, as 1996's Best Movie.  It was literate, thoughtful and wildly humanist, qualities shared by Helm's second big-screen writing job, and first as director.  But while Stranger Than Fiction is very much a movie for adults, particularly those adults who write, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is aimed squarely at kids.  So while I can't say I was captivated throughout, the movie does pack a strong emotional punch, and I can imagine it affecting 10 year-olds just as profoundly as the Best Movie of 2006  resonated with me.

Eric Applebaum (Zach Mills) is a kid with no friends.  Well, he's got one:  Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), the 23-year old failed piano prodigy who manages Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, a magical toy shop filled with stuffed animals that move under their own power, doors that lead to different rooms depending upon where a certain dial is set, and a giant book that makes any item listed in its' pages materialize out of thin air.  They sell books, too, all written on demand by a guy in the basement." MORE

3/27/09:  "Back in the day, the eternal struggle in animation was between the Merry Melodies shorts of Walt Disney, with their cute, non-threatening menagerie of well-dressed animals living recognizably human lives and Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes, with vaguely psychotic critters living in the wild and blowing each other up with dynamite.  Today, a new generation of Disney animation is just as popular and just as proper:  hard to think of too many Disney/Pixar flicks that don't play to the 80-year-olds in the audience just as well as the preschoolers.  There's considerably less artistic ambition at play across the aisle at breakaway rival Dreamworks, where a winning formula that dates back to Antz mixes anthropomorphic critters of all shapes and sizes with what the MPAA likes to call “rude humor”.  You could argue that Disney's model is aimed at the adult in kids while the Dreamworks one shoots for the kid in adults.  And this time out, they've delivered a title to stir the imagination of 10-year-olds of all ages:  every last letter of Monsters vs. Aliens 3D promises awesomeness, and this animated sci-fi action comedy delivers it in spades.

It's Susan Murphy's (Reece Witherspoon) wedding day, but her plans to tie the knot with vaguely loutish TV weatherman Derek Dietl (Paul Rudd) are interrupted by a meteorite which falls on top of her outside the church." MORE

8/29/09:  "The old folks reading this (that is to say, old in moviegoing years, which these days means anybody over 25) might recall a time when sci-fi movies were based on the genre's literary tradition of using the fantastic to tell stories that illuminate the human condition and the issues of the day.  They might also recall a time before CGI, when models and animatronics were the primary tools of the special effects artist.  And if you remember any of that, you might find yourself shaking the person sitting next to you at a screening of Moon asking “What year is this?!?”  Because while the movie's set in the future, Duncan Jones' directorial debut feels a whole lot like a product of Rod Serling's time, a thoughtful, gripping one-man show that slowly peels back a deceptively simple story to reveal the depths of corporate depravity and the power of the human spirit.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of a three-year contract as the lone worker at a mining station on the moon, where he monitors the mining equipment with the help of robot GERTY (voice of Kevin Spacey).  They've been three lonely years in part due to failing communications equipment that doesn't allow real-time conversation with people back on Earth.  Instead, he can only trade video messages with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and watch old sitcoms." MORE

8/2/08:  "So, how long do you want your favorite franchise to continue?  Past the departure of the filmmakers?  The stars?  The supporting cast?  Anyone even remotely involved with the original?  Do you want to meet adult children of the heroes who hadn't even been born in the original?  Some would rather never see ANY sequels, while others would go to see anything that slaps a number (or, the current fashion, a subtitle) behind the title of the movie they once loved.  Somewhere between those two extremes lies the fan base that will embrace The Mummy:  Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  Gone are many of the characters (Imhotep, Ardeth Bay, Anck Su Namun)  from Stephen Sommers' two Mummy films, the original actors who played Evie (Rachel Weisz) and Alex O'Connell (Freddie Boath), Sommers himself (although the credits list him as a Producer) and the Egyptian setting.  In their place, we get an interesting infusion of Chinese mythology, a few cool new characters, one great piece of recasting and one awful one, and a less effective outing behind the camera by Rob Cohen.  Tomb is a fun summer movie, but it's a shadow of the series high point, 2001's The Mummy Returns."  MORE

2/20/07:  "I want to like romantic comedies.  I really do.  But they don't make it easy for me, and I think it has something to do with The Formula.  You know, the exact plot structure all romcoms (as they call them in the business) are required to follow as surely as if they had a gun pointed at their adorable little heads.  Two people with nothing in common meet, fall in love, have a huge, hurtful meltdown and then get back together.  It doesn't sound so hard, except that while most (though certainly not all) movies can lick the meeting and the falling in love, the meltdown and the getting back together are mighty obstacles indeed.  While real-life couples fight all the time, screenwriters can rarely come up with a reason to have people split up that doesn't involve the revelation of monsterous, hugely unfunny lies that reveal the characters to be so unlikeable that I no longer care about their fates (are you listening, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days???).  And don't get me started about how often the getting back together part seems so completely unmotivated it's as though the directors started screaming in people's ears that the end titles are gonna roll in 5...4...3...

But enough about my issues, because they don't really apply here except to say that I'm always happy to come upon a movie that manages to navigate this romantic minefield and come out unscathed on the other side."  MORE

1/20/09:  "As longtime readers know, I'm all about the 3D:  digital technologies like RealD are the latest and best attempt to lick a generations-old challenge to create movies that don't recognize the boundary of the movie screen.  At the least, it's a cute diversion.  At the best, we're watching the baby steps of the next leap forward in the medium's evolution.  As such, I welcome each new breakthrough, and the latest is My Bloody Valentine, an entertaining remake of the popular 1981 slasher movie that tests RealD for the first time in telling a fictional story that's not reliant on special effects.  Obviously, there's not much point in doing The Queen in 3D, and horror has always been a popular choice for 3D experimenters because the goals of both the genre and the technology are the same.  Valentine delivers the bloody goods (although you'll hopefully forgive me for being such a 3D geek that I was more fascinated by the textures of the windows than the swinging pick axes) wrapped in a reasonably engaging mystery story.  It's a bit longer than it needs to be, but there are a lot of characters waiting their turn to take one for the team.  Slasher fans should be thrilled with the combination of solid storytelling and gruesome mayhem, technologically enhanced to allow jawbones to go flying out of heads like never before."  MORE

6/17/09:  "Although, like many others, I got curious because of the sheer amount of money it made, I never have seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  As such, I missed the moment at which America fell in love with  Nia Vardalos.  But I do know that since that time, the writer/comic has conducted a clinic on how not to parlay a breakthrough into a career.  Her first move was to repeat herself on a smaller stage, starring in the knockoff TV series, My Big Fat Greek Life.  Only after its' failure came her cinematic follow-up, the cute but forgettable drag comedy Connie and Carla.  After that, she dropped off the scene for five years and now returns with a film that is more poster tagline than movie:  “The Star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding is finally going to Greece.”  Vardalos has undeniable charm and everywoman appeal, but My Life in Ruins is an awkward, drab comedy that only occasionally taps into either.

Georgia (Nia Vardalos) moved from her American home to Greece to become a college professor in the middle of the history and architecture she loves.  But cutbacks left her without a teaching position, instead falling back on a job as a tour guide.  She's no good at it, looking down on her customers' lack of interest in academics and generally not a people person." MORE

10/11/09:  "Ladies and gentlemen, Hell has frozen over.  Or, to put it more aptly, the business for movies pitched at adults has gone to Hell to the point that Freestyle Releasing, the do-it-yourself for-hire distributor of movies no one else wanted to release, has finally put its' own name (and not the boutique Yari Film Group label under which they unveiled The Illusionist and Resurrecting the Champ) to an honest-to-goodness GOOD movie.  After foisting Dragon Wars, Skinwalkers and In the Name of the King:  A Dungeon Siege Tale, among others, upon an unsuspecting public, Freestyle makes some amends with My One and Only, an adorable little 50's-era road trip comedy based on the teen years of movie star/raconteur George Hamilton.  Its episodic narrative opening roles for innumerable familiar faces and fronted by another of Renee Zellweger's delightful period performances, My One and Only is the kind of genetically-engineered crowd-pleaser you didn't used to need self-service distribution to get out to the public.  But perhaps in the movie business's current dark hour, we'll be glad to have Freestyle around.

It's 1953, and 15 year-old George Deveraux (Logan Lerman) arrives at a car dealership with thousands of dollars in hand and his eye on one of their Cadillacs." MORE