GREENBERG: Stiller's straight turn is a turn off

GREENBERG is not a film that sells itself. The title tells us nothing except that a guy called Greenberg is probably involved in the story somewhere, and maybe he's Jewish. 
It's a fair bet that Greenberg is a guy because if he were a she she'd have a first name too. Think "Erin Brockovitch" or "The Diary of Anne Frank." It's only polite to give a lady her full name.
In the absence of an enticing title GREENBERG has to rely on word of mouth to pull in paying customers. And in this kind of situation it really does help if those who've seen it feel able to utter good words from their mouth to encourage others to do the same.
I'm not one of those early adoptors. 
Having just sat through this enormously disappointing film I'm afraid that only bad words will spill from my lips. To put it another way - I'm going to badmouth GREENBERG.
Watching comedians stretch themselves artistically can be a tedious experience. For every Peter Sellers in "Being There" there's a dozen Adam Sandler's in "Punch Drunk Love" or Jim Carrey's in "The Majestic." To that latter list can now be added Ben Stiller as Roger Greenberg.
Roger's a 40 year old adolescent, selfish, self-centred and oblivious to anyone and anything that doesn't help him get what he wants, even when he doesn't know what it is that he wants - which is most of the time.

Fresh out of a stay in a mental hospital he relocates to Los Angeles to house sit for his vacationing brother, which fits perfectly with his plan to do nothing for a while. But doing nothing doesn't preclude him from messing with the head of Florence (Greta Gerwig), his brother's 25 year old personal assistant. Florence, who clearly has issues connected to self worth, finds herself falling for Roger and allows him to play her like a fish,  reeling her in then throwing her back only to reel her in again.
And when he's not screwing with Florence's emotions he's hamfistedly trying to reconnect not only with the fellow members of a band he singlehandedly wrecked years earlier (including an incredibly restrained Rhys Ifans as Ivan, a Welshman inexplicably living in LA), but also with a woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh giving it plenty of "look at me, I'm acting") he dated briefly 15 years ago and who can't remember anything about their time together.
GREENBERG is Stiller's most subdued performance ever. He drifts through the story giving away very little in terms of emotion or consideration for others. But where Peter Sellers portrayal of Chance, in "Being There," as a blank canvas onto which others projected their desires is intriguing and appealing, there's nothing likeable about GREENBERG's demeanor which gives us precious little reason to continue watching.
I stuck with it because I kept hoping something would happen to give GREENBERG his comeuppance but it never does. The story never sparks into life and Stiller's playing it straight just becomes tiresome.
I was hoping for much more from director Noah Baumbach after "The Squid and the Whale" (now there's an intriguing title) which I enjoyed so much. GREENBERG is neither fish nor fowl. It's not a comedy nor a drama or even a character study. For the last descriptor to apply there'd have to be a character to study and Stiller's effort to go straight and serious doesn't do it.

THE BOUNTY HUNTER: making a monkey out of us

You know that old chestnut about putting a bunch of chimps together in a roomful of typewriters and eventually one of them will write a Shakespeare play. Well, long before they got anywhere near the Bard one of them wrote the screenplay for THE BOUNTY HUNTER. 

This alleged romantic-comedy-thriller stars Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston. He's Milo, the roguishly charming bounty hunter - a man with an adorable, alternately Irish and American accent, who tracks down people who've skipped bail, in return for a cut of the bail money. She's Nicole, a newspaper journalist whose good looks are interfering with her being taken seriously. Their two worlds collide when she fails to show up in court on a charge of assaulting a cop and he's given the task of finding her and hauling her in to face justice.
So why should we care about this scenario? Because she is his ex-wife, and they got divorced because they drove each other crazy. They haven't seen each other in three years and now they're being forced to spend time together and maybe - just maybe - rediscover what it was that drew them together in the first place.
I'm actually making this premise sound far more interesting than it is.
The plot involving Aniston stumbling onto a murder disguised as a suicide, corrupt cops and cartoon gangsters is nonsensical, ridiculous, boring and sloppily constructed. Characters awkwardly summarise the twists and turns of Milo and Nicole's pre-film relationship in conversations no real friends would ever have ("Hello Bob." "Hello Terry." "Terry before we talk about that thing that we've got together to talk about allow me to briefly recap on the major events in your life up to this point, just in case you've forgotten them.") and even if it were artfully done who cares anyway because Aniston and Butler exude all the chemistry of a wet newspaper. 
But it's not only the dialogue that's contrived. Scenes occur in weird places for no good reason other than it would have cost too much to perform the action in a plausible setting, and director Andy Tennant can't even be bothered to make sure his shots match. In one sequence we see Milo and Nicole park and exit his car followed a moment later by a long shot of them driving in the car and preparing to park it!
It all adds up to a big heap of uninspired, unimaginative rubbish and a huge waste of time. I had the misfortune to have THE BOUNTY HUNTER inflicted on me by Delta Airlines during a flight from Tokyo to Minneapolis. If I hadn't have been strapped into my seat at 38 thousand feet I'd have walked out.