Word: louts
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...Their surly demeanor and vicious behavior are a consummate failure of the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown era. The people who once famously claimed to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" chose instead to be even tougher on the victims of crime. Some young hooded lout threatens you or your family's safety, so you clip his ear, and an army of social workers springs to his defense while the full might and majesty of the law are brought down on you, with all the consequent personal and financial penalties. Robert Frederick Birkett, Drinkstone Green, England...
...utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider and Larry the Cable...
...Keri Russell, mixing defensiveness and determination) who has a gift for baking exotically named pies ("Pregnant Miserable Self Pitying Loser" pie is one example), which bring her creative happiness and her customers culinary delirium. The rest of her life is, however, half-baked. She's married to a lout named Earl (Jeremy Sisto) who is a pure feminist nightmare - self-centered, exploitative, whiney and angry - and her waitress colleagues (played by Cheryl Hines and by Shelly herself) are desperately looking for love in all the wrong places. Jenna is trying to save money to make her escape. This plan...
...such joy in a good ship, and a greater joy to have the ship's belly fat with other men's silver. It is the Viking joy ..." Such are the pleasures animating this big-bellied, bushy-bearded tale of 9th century England. Our hero is Uhtred, a good-hearted lout with a pleasantly sour disposition; he's like a 9th century Han Solo. As an English nobleman who was raised by the invading Danes but whose fate is to fight against them (with his deadly sword Serpent-Breath!), he endows the book with an unexpectedly complex, thoughtful soul...
...much intelligence, such vigorous picturizing of military assaults and gladiatorial entertainments that this dormant genre was reborn. The fatal "games" Maximus fights in the Colosseum might be a modern extreme sport or a Vin Diesel melodrama reimagined as art. Superb acting certainly helps. Offscreen, Crowe may seem a lout; onscreen, he radiates the maturity of a strong, scarred man--a star suitable for epics past and epics to come. --By Richard Corliss