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Eat, Pray Love

Cast: Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, Viola Davis, Richard Jenkins, James Franco, Billy Crudup

Director: Ryan Murphy

Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes

Eat Pray Love isn’t a bad movie — just a spiritually dead one, wearing and wearying. The cute supporting cast (Viola Davis is the wise-cracking best friend) tosses off cute one-liners and Roberts smiles broadly and tries to pretend the journey she takes isn’t rendered hilariously pointless by the finale.

It is a much better movie, one hour in, when Jenkins shows up. His character’s no-nonsense bluntness, labeling the indulgent Liz “Groceries” because here she is in a spartan spiritual retreat in the middle of India and all she does is eat, and his vulnerability, suggest a deeper but still amusing movie that might have been.

For a film about a woman whose motto is “I’m through with the guilt,” Roberts and Murphy & Co. have delivered a guilty pleasure. It’s great to see her in something this light again, looking much as she did ten years ago. Eat Pray Love allows Roberts’ longtime fans to travel the world, and back in time with her. If only we all could eat until we pop and age in reverse and still have the glow of amber backlighting.

Born July 2, 1986 in New York City, Lindsay Morgan Lohan was the oldest child of four born to mother Dina Lohan, a former Radio City Rockette, and Michael Lohan, a long-time Wall Street

Lindsay Lohan arrived in the morning. at Beverly Hills Superior Court on Tuesday morning to be taken into custody to begin her 90-day jail term. Lindsay Lohan,Beverly Hills Superior Court,Century Regional Detention Facility, With Lindsay Lohan’s trip to jail in the news, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is calling attention to a 2009 study in which its researchers has uncovered a shocking plot by major media

Salt is fun, and you probably know as much about the plot – which I won’t spoil for you because I can’t (and I mean I literally can’t, for, though I think I have the lines of allegiance sussed out, I’m not about to bet my credibility on a half-baked plot synopsis) – from the ubiquitous trailer as you probably need to know. But in case you don’t watch TV (and good for you if you don’t) then Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA agent who is suspected of being a Russian spy. She runs to clear her name. I think.

But I kid Salt mostly ’cause I like it, more than I maybe should, because it’s the kind of movie I remember they used to make. You could get snarky and call it sub-Bourne, or drive a grand cru metaphor through its plot holes, but you gotta love a movie that so wholeheartedly embraces the inherent artifice of the medium. Nothing in Salt is the way it is on our planet.

It seems obligatory that I mention that the script – assuming this thing had a script and the fine actors involved (spoiler alert: Liev Schreiber is in it) weren’t simply making it up as they went along – was originally conceived with Tom Cruise in mind for the lead. That it was so easily transposed into the key of Jolie seems surprising to some, though to be honest there are probably only two people in the world who could have made anything this bizarre and this entertaining. Jolie is one of them. And she used to be married to the other one.