Thank You For Not Completely Sucking
Last night I saw Thank You For Not Smoking. I was anticipating a solid political satire, I was also expecting a few big laughs and a film that would at worst merit some solid discussion. What I got was a well styalized messy story with limiting character archetypes and fairly formulaic structure.
The film was flat except for when it played with form. There was some good acting, or at least good performing. (The difference between acting and performing is the difference between characters and caricatures.) William H. Macy and Adam Brody seemed to do the best with their one dimmensional characters. Macy did well because he played his senator with the same duality with which he plays all of his characters and Brody playing a vacant media assistant (to the also pretty good Rob Lowe) had fun with all the stereo typical Hollywood jerk-off cliches.
All in all though, I think I would've preferred keeping my money and watching The Office.