David Elliott on movies: ‘Love,’ ‘Fan,’ ‘Informant!’

“Love Happens”

Love scarcely happens in “Love Happens.” Instead, we get Aaron Eckhart as Burke, who has sublimated his guilty grief about his wife’s accidental death into best-selling success as author of “A-OK!,” a grief-counseling book. At one point, as therapy, he boldly marches about 40 grievers into oncoming Seattle traffic. Eckhart seemed more sane as the eager lobbyist for tobacco in “Thank You For Smoking.”

Despite Burke’s deep doubts, which sometimes turn Eckhart’s whole head into a facial tic, a big media firm is anxious to package him as a hunky Dr. Phil for mourners. Smiling, he feels no joy. Then he meets florist Eloise (Jennifer Aniston, again playing herself, or her TV self). When she calls a floral gift card “life on a 3×5,” she summarizes the approach of writer and debut director Brandon Camp, who alternates earnest death counseling with moments of cuteness that are the death of comedy (not the worst this year; that was “My Life in Ruins”).

Those run from the meet-cute of Burke and Eloise to a cute parrot, a cute concert scene, a cute “feminist” poet in a café and a cute gal who turned her husband’s ashes into cookies. Not so cute are Martin Sheen as Burke’s angry father, the visit to the Seattle graves of Bruce and Brandon Lee, and John Carroll Lynch’s disturbingly real performance as a grieving dad. Most of “Love Happens” is warm, fuzzy plastic, and must be the first chick flick to crescendo with two men sobbing in each other’s arms. (Opens Friday; rated PG-13) ★

“Big Fan”

Patton Oswalt, usually a stand-up comic, achieves such gritty reality in “Big Fan” that he almost had me thinking it’s a documentary. Not so, but director and writer Robert Siegel (who scripted “The Wrestler”) did plug into his obsession with sports radio and with the New York ethnicity famously branded on screen by Martin Scorsese (Oswalt’s Paul is like a lowly, Staten Island cousin of Rupert Pupkin in “The King of Comedy”).

Paul lives for the New York Giants, and delivers scribbled, rah-rah rants for the team on a call-in show. His most devoted fan is his only true friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan, perfect). There is a moment of sad sublimity when Paul and Sal, unable to afford game tickets, sit outside the stadium watching the game on a TV powered by their car. For them, the roar in their heads matches the real spectacle happening only yards away.

Otherwise Paul works at a parking garage, eats heavily and suffers his relations, push-pins of slobby stereotype including a nagging mom and a shyster brother whose bronzed wife looks like a stripper tanned in hell. The big twist in Paul’s story is easily found on-line. But let’s show some critical restraint and only admit that Paul’s encounter with the star of his beloved team shakes his faith down to bedrock, or at least the low-rent basement that is his life.

Siegel oversells geeky pathos, but Oswalt is fascinatingly credible as this loon who treats sports mania as life (movie addicts cannot afford to feel very superior). When you add up fine straight performances by comics, such as Robin Williams in “Good Will Hunting,” Jerry Lewis in “King of Comedy,” Shelley Berman in “The Best Man,” Lily Tomlin in “The Late Show,” even Milton Berle in “The Oscar,” you realize that Oswalt has climbed his own sporty pinnacle. (Opens at Landmark Ken Cinema; rated R) ★★★

“The Informant!”

The “!” in “The Informant!” is a gasp of desperation. Steven Soderbergh’s movie depicts  a real guy named Mark Whitacre, a “whistleblower” who uncovered price-fixing by a big agri-biz company but was also a lying embezzler (and almost certainly bipolar). The film corkscrews him into a lampoon figure, and as extra gravy we get Whitacre’s cute personal spiels such as, “I like an indoor pool, I like the steam off of it in winter. Very mysterious, that steam.”

The mystery is how so many brainy people get gulled, because Matt Damon’s Whitacre often comes off as a compulsive doofus pitching dubious goods, and looks like Ron Howard wearing a bad rug and pasted moustache. The time is the 1990s, but the Marvin Hamlisch score sounds more retro, like a lounge band cranking out TV cop show themes, sitcom music and twangs of dated country. As Corky’s sweetly ditsy wife, Melanie Lynskey is a marshmallow waiting to get burned.

The “dramatic arc” is simple: most characters act stupid, then look stupefied. There isn’t the crafty snap and tickle of Leonardo DiCaprio’s hustle in “Catch Me If You Can.” At a time when so many people deeply distrust corporations and the government, this bustling flush of complex issues comes off as antic but anemic satire. Soderbergh needs to get back to good work like “King of the Hill” and “The Limey.” (Opens Friday; rated R) ★

“Flame & Citron”

One of the great WWII movie moments is in “The Counterfeit Traitor” (1962), when a Danish trucker impulsively liberates William Holden and his comrades from Nazi arrest. The Danes have a good war rep, which makes “Flame & Citron” an oddity. It’s a salute to actual Resistance heroes, code-named Flame and Citron. They bond while gunning down traitors and fascists but then become increasingly reckless, confused and uneasy about their lethal work. It’s as if director Ole Christian Madsen is merging a 1942 war thriller with Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or.”

Flame (the Eric Stoltz-ian Thure Lindhardt) is also coded by his red hair, and flaunts it like a Danish flag even in bars full of Germans. Citron (Mads Mikkelsen) is a more Kierkegaardian soul. Sweating and glowering, he becomes even more ruthless because of his soul-soaking guilt. There are outstanding moments from the swastika swine, led by Christian Berkel as the Gestapo chief (Berkel is also the bar owner in “Inglourious Basterds”).

“Flame & Citron” is like a patriotic memorial suffering a spiritual migraine. It has traditional pacing, even a femme fatale, and tensions that recall the queasy moral sinkhole of John Le Carre’s fiction. As with the most famous Dane, Hamlet, there are many unanswered questions and many deaths. (Open Friday at Landmark La Jolla Village; unrated). ★★★

“The Burning Plain”

“The Burning Plain” seems to converge three TV soapers: one in English, one in Spanish, the third (the conceptual one) in chic PC gibberish. Mexican director Guillermo Arriaga, best known for scripting “Babel” and “Amores Perros,” is like a chef trying to re-build a yoke from a scrambled egg. Once again, he plays games with plot loops and time jumps, as if “cinema” was a dream that came to him while staring at that egg.

Charlize Theron manages a swank restaurant by the sea, sleeps with many men, cuts herself with rocks and is haunted by leaving her baby girl, sired by a Mexican lad when she was a teen. It might occur to you, well before the narrative gets around to joining its pieces, that angry Jennifer Lawrence is Theron as a teen. And Kim Basinger wedges in as the third key female (the film’s many men have the utility of interchangeable gears), having a secret affair after her mastectomy makes her husband feel impotent.

As plot staples there are symbols (scars, fires, sea vs. desert) and, of course, ethnic issues. What may linger with you, after the story haze clarifies into a soapy mist, is that the actresses are better than the material and Arriaga’s approach. Theron is again a gutsy actor, not just in nudity. Basinger remains one of the finest, sculptural beauties ever caught by a camera. Lawrence is a very promising talent. But their movie has egg on its face. (Opens Friday at Landmark Hillcrest, La Jolla Village; rated R) ★

STARS: FOUR (ace), THREE (worthy), TWO (involving), ONE (dud), ZERO (nil)

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NEWS Etc.

It’s September…: And therefore time for the annual, party-high San Diego Film Festival downtown, screening at the Gaslamp 15 from Sept. 23 to 27. Over a hundred movies will be shown, the info site is www.sdff.org, and for a scan of the basics look at the SDNN article by yours truly on the Arts & Entertainment page.

On DVD: Back like a whispery breeze from 1969 is Jacques Demy’s “Model Shop.” There have been larger reissues from that era recently, like “Woodstock,” “Zabriskie Point” and “Husbands.” But only this elegantly drifting film about Lola, a “model” (she poses in a cheesy shop for guys with cameras), adds the sublime structure of Anouk Aimee (star of Demy’s “Lola”) to the pastel cool of ‘69 Los Angeles. Gary Lockwood of “2001″ is the wannabe architect scared of the Vietnam draft who latches onto Lola. This sensual time capsule from a major stylist is better at looking than talking, despite dialog cooked by Carol Eastman, who would soon write “Five Easy Pieces.” It’s out in Sony Pictures Home Video’s Martini Movies series.

Return of the Beard: Fidel Castro still looms over Cuba like a bearded trinity of Karl Marx, Jesus Christ and Christopher Columbus. At 2 p.m. on Sunday (Sept. 20), the central public library presents Estela Bravo’s “Fidel: The Untold Story,” a doting if not quite worshipful documentary portrait containing old private movies, news footage and meetings with the star-struck: Harry Belafonte, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jack Nicholson, etc. There is a certain flavor of radical chic that is forever Fidel (just add a cherry of Che). Free at the library, 820 E St. downtown.

A QUOTE (not a blurb!): “Life is long and full of salesmanship, Miss Clara. You just might buy something yet” — Paul Newman makes his pitch to Joanne Woodward in “The Long Hot Summer” (1958). It worked in the movie, and in life.

David Elliott is the SDNN movie critic.

Tags: Aaron Eckhart, Big Fan, Big Fan review, Burning Plain review, Charlize Theron, Flame & Citron, Flame & Citron review, Guillermo Arriaga, Jacques Demy, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Basinger, Love Happens, Matt Damon, MOdel Shop, Patton Oswalt, review Big Fan, review Love Happens, review The Informant, San Diego Film Festival, SDNN, Steven Soderbergh, The Burning Plain, The Informant! review

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