Oh Ace of Bass...

The Hoax(dir. Lasse Hallström)
The film as a whole hovered around that fine line of being boring and entertaining. The film is pretty much fine all the way through until it tries to make itself seem more important and grandiose than it really is and starts looking as delusional as it's protagonist. It's easy to see how Richard Gere's character could cheat on his wife with Julie Delpy because she has a horrible accent. Marcia Gay Harden gave easily the weakest performance because you know, her accent was totally believable and didn't sound ridiculous at all. I slightly recommend.
**1/2 out of ****
Spartan(dir. David Mamet)
What happened to Val Kilmer's career? I'm not saying this movie is bad, but it's a serious question that I think about especially while I was watching this. What happened to Batman? An even more serious question is what happened to Ed O'Neil's career? Al Bundy needs to be in more movies. Watching this, I realized or more like it reinforced my disinterest in most purely plot-driven films. If your movie is going to be plot-driven, it better be melodramatic as hell. There is one fairly outlandish and overly dramatic moment that I might label the peak of the film since it took it's low-key story to fairly high heights, but other than that, it seems rather routine. I've never seen a David Mamet film before this and I've heard all sorts of praise about his dialogue. While I'm pretty sure this isn't considered one of his best, his dialogue in this is not all that impressive. It's the type of hard-boiled dialogue found in most film noir and some of it is, frankly, laughable. Derek Luke's character says "I saw the sign" so much than I almost mistook him for an Ace of Bass fan(and I hope he is). Veronica Mars stating "I was raised by wolves" isn't exactly ingenious, either. Val Kilmer gives a fine performance as pretty much a bad ass spy dude. The actors all around, though, are not convincing enough as these macho professionals. Compared to the performances found in Michael Mann's films, you almost think these characters are playing dress-up and play-acting as crazy assassin agent-types. The film is definitely compelling, but if it contained more memorable characters, I could picture giving it a higher recommendation. I recommend.
*** out of ****