FOOL'S GOLD

At one point during Fool's Gold's opening sequence, Matthew McConaughey's fortune-hunting hero is seen slo-o-owly hopping along the ocean floor, and for the next 110 minutes, the whole movie seems to be moving at the exact same speed. I understand that director Andy Tennant's (supposed) comic adventure isn't meant to be anything more than a featherweight romantic diversion - an excuse to watch the perfectly tanned McConaughey and Kate Hudson swap barbs while being photographed against intoxicatingly pretty Key West locales - and many in the audience appear content to accept it as such. But, good God, aren't these viewers at all bothered by how mind-numbingly lethargic the pacing is?

ELIZABETHTOWN

After a reportedly disastrous screening at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Cameron Crowe trimmed some 18 minutes from his latest project, Elizabethtown, before its national release on October 14. Of course, I never saw Crowe's Toronto cut, so I can't venture a guess as to what scenes wound up getting the boot. But having seen the finished project, I'm thinking that the loss of those 18 minutes was in no way satisfactory - to be honest, I'm not sure which scenes Crowe should have left in. For Elizabethtown is, in almost every respect, shockingly weak, so tonally incorrect and irrationally pleased with itself that it left me a little dazed. How could Crowe, who has made such wonderfully humane, marvelously detailed comedies, have gone so far afield?

DAREDEVIL

Though he tries mighty hard, Ben Affleck isn't quite able to ruin Daredevil, Mark Steven Johnson's screen adaptation of the Marvel comic. Among comic-book fans, the news that Affleck would be portraying the tortured hero - an angry, despressed, and, oh yeah, blind lawyer who, when not losing cases in court, dons leather and kicks bad-guy ass - was met with a collective rolling of the eyes; a friend of mine, upon hearing about the casting, put it succinctly: "Oh great. It's gonna suck."

K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER

Most movie trailers make the film in question look much better than it actually is; the previews for K-19: The Widowmaker don't give any indication how good it actually is.