Word: manfully
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Seeing Steve Buscemi on screen is like getting to a party and discovering that your friends hired a caterer; his professionalism makes him an automatic confidence booster for audiences. That's not to say there's any guarantee about his surroundings. As a 52-year-old man with over a hundred credits to his name, Buscemi has long been an egalitarian performer, turning up in almost as many Big Daddys as Big Lebowskis and playing an inordinate amount of creeps and whiners...
...What he doesn't get to do much is play the leading man, or get the girl. If the girl wants him, as in Ghost World, where he was chased by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, it usually plays as a joke. So when Saint John of Las Vegas, in which he gets the lead, opens with Buscemi hitting on a convenience-store clerk, we assume his character, John Alighieri, doesn't stand a chance. He's disheveled and his face is heavily bruised. But she gives John a considering look. He's buying $1,000 worth of lottery tickets...
...heretics in their flaming tombs, but he's got a broken zipper on his protective suit and a jammed fuel line that causes him to go up in flames every minute or so. And he's desperate for a cigarette. As a sight gag, it works, and the flaming man's relative optimism that such a dilemma can be sat out sticks with you. Other than that, Saint John of Las Vegas is one of those shaggy-dog stories that you keep hoping will get sharper, smarter, cooler, more worthy of its star. Buscemi may not be exactly celestial...
Beth (Kristen Bell) is bright, nice, pretty and the youngest curator at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum. She has just about everything a 20-something could want; but, since this is a standard contemporary romantic comedy, her life is empty because, she says, she hasn't discovered a man wonderful enough to make her want to chuck her job. She soon finds one, when she takes a two-day break from the big exhibition she's preparing and goes to Rome for her sister's wedding. There she meets the groom's best friend Nick (Josh Duhamel). In rom-com terms...
...speak about the importance of marriage, its impact on children and the role religion played in the campaign for Prop 8. The defense called just two witnesses, who attempted to show that marriage is fundamental to human society and that it has nearly always been limited to one man and one woman. Boies, who led an often blistering cross-examination, wrung concessions from those witnesses that thrilled gay-marriage supporters, including a statement that allowing gay marriage would help the children already being raised by gay couples who are not allowed to be married...