‘Someone Like You’ not something new

SOMEONE LIKE YOU, directed by Tony Goldwyn, written by Elizabeth Chandler, based on the novel “Animal Husbandry” by Laura Zigman. 100 minutes. PG-13.

With all this talk of tainted meat, mad cows and diseased bulls, it seems only fitting that Tony Goldwyn’s “Someone Like You” would stumble into heaters, collapse on screen – and die.

What’s the connection?

In the film, Ashley Judd is Jane Goodale, a sweet, likable talent broker for a newly syndicated talk show who recently has been dumped by Ray (Greg Kinnear), a duplicitous fiend who once professed his undying love for her. Heartbroken, Jane spends her downtime developing a theory that suggests all men are bulls – once they’ve had sex with a hot new bovine, they lose interest and move on to the next cow.

Indeed, as Jane’s research suggests, 95 percent of all men are genetically predisposed to being unfaithful.

The film doesn’t stop there. As if Jane needed more proof that men are pigs (or bulls, you choose), the movie punctuates her theory with the addition of Eddie (Hugh Jackman), a gruff, chain-smoking wall of muscle who works with her on the “Diane Roberts Show.”

On the surface, Eddie is everything Jane fears, loathes and secretly loves – a confident bull-about-town who leads one bovine after another into the sumptuous pastures of his bedroom. But when circumstances conspire to throw Eddie and Jane together as platonic roommates, well, even a hamburger could guess that Jane’s theories about men are about to be challenged as her relationship with Eddie deepens into something more than just friendship.

The problem with “Someone Like You” has nothing to do with its performances – the cast, including Ellen Barkin as a Diane Sawyer knockoff and Marisa Tomei again cast as the sidekick girlfriend, goes through the motions with a cheerfulness that suggests they’re being overpaid for their time.

Instead, the problem rests with the film’s lackluster direction and with its cliched script, a great deal of which it borrows from HBO’s “Sex in the City” and a handful of other romantic comedies – particularly those by Nora Ephron.

“Someone Like You” should have been called “Something Audiences Have Seen Time and Again.” Its situations and characters have been regurgitated so often by the Hollywood machine, the film has no shape, no character, no texture to call its own.

Indistinguishable, slowly paced and dull, the film ultimately is so awash in tears and heartache, whatever humor it tries to muster eventually is blown deep into the recesses of a tattered – yet all-too-familiar – handkerchief. You know, the one Hollywood has been using for years to clean up at the box office.

Grade: D

On Video and DVD

102 DALMATIANS, directed by Kevin Lima, written by Kristen Buckley, Brian Regan, Bob Tzudiker and Noni White, based on the novel by Dodie Smith. 101 minutes. G.

Kevin Lima’s “102 Dalmatians” may not be as good as Disney’s 1961 classic, “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” but it nevertheless stands on its own four feet.

The film is colorful, loud, boisterous and merry, a slapstick comedy set in London that features Glenn Close back in drag as the infamously cruel Cruella De Vil.

The film opens with the wicked one herself locked away in a prison for the criminally insane. There, under the care of the appropriately named Dr. Pavlov (David Horovitch), Cruella has been turned into a dog’s best friend. It’s scary, but it’s true. So committed is Cruella to dogs, in fact, that when she learns that the 2nd Chance pet orphanage is going to the dogs, Cruella, freshly paroled from prison and now asking everyone to “Just call me Ella,” is among the first to offer help.

The orphanage’s owner, Kevin (Ioan Gruffudd), gladly accepts, but he does so without knowing there will be dire consequences for letting this vamp cross through the doors of his business. Indeed, when Cruella hears the bells of Big Ben bong, Dr. Pavlov’s conditioned response goes to the birds – and Cruella’s evil ways come back with a vengeance.

“102 Dalmatians,” which also stars Alice Evans, Gerard Depardieu and Tim McInnerny in supporting roles, belongs not to the dogs, as in the 1961 classic and the 1996 live-action remake, but to Close.

As Cruella, she’s marvelous, playing this grotesquerie as if she were a cross between Jacqueline Susann and Norma Desmond dipped in bitters. She’s the only one who could play this character and she does so beautifully, lifting the film out of Disney’s threadbare formula with her over-the-top histrionics – and with the help of Anthony Powell’s outstanding, Academy Award-nominated costumes.

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the Scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.