
 
 Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant in ""Did You Hear About the Morgans?"View more photos HERE. 
 
 Pure, communal silence can be a wonderful thing, and if you haven't experienced any lately, I commend you to see the first available screening of the new romantic comedy "Did You Hear About the Morgans?" Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second or two of dead air, followed by the jokelike "payoff," guiltily delivered by one of its game cast members, followed by a longer awkward pause. It's not just the sound of crickets you hear watching this movie. It's the sound of dead crickets. 
 
 Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play the Morgans, a Manhattan power couple on the outs and the brink of divorce. He cheated on her, citing reasons of infertility-related stress; she is not in the forgiving vein and has already begun thinking about adoption on her own. He wants her back, and proposes a trial reconciliation dinner — after which they witness a murder, which makes them targets themselves.So, it's off to FishOutOfWaterville. Plonk, they're plonked into the federal witness protection program and these liberal blue-state weenies are mixing it up with the red-state, red-meat, red-blooded folk of Ray, Wyo. Grant's character is confronted by a grizzly and by a rodeo; Parker's character learns she's a dead-eye with a rifle. (Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen, dignity intact, portray their temporary hosts.) At one point the Morgans share a bull costume, otherwise known as writer-director Marc Lawrence's script.Rooting interest? Couldn't be lower. I like Parker and, even though Grant looks genuinely pained in "Morgans," I like him. For the premise to work, though, the Morgans' pathetic dependency on their BlackBerrys and general sense of privilege would have to be funny, so that we enjoy seeing them knocked down a few pegs. Lawrence made a respectably entertaining rom-com for Grant opposite Drew Barrymore, "Music and Lyrics." But when so many films in this battered genre make money, from "Bride Wars" to "The Proposal" to "The Ugly Truth," Hollywood really has no meaningful incentive to do better. 
 
 mjphillips@tribune.com 
 
 Related: 
 
 11 more zero-star movies of the last decade 
 
 PG-13 (for some sexual references and momentary violence)Hugh Grant (Paul); Sarah Jessica Parker (Meryl); Sam Elliott (Clay); Mary Steenburgen (Emma); Elisabeth Moss (Jackie); Jesse Liebman (Adam); Michael Kelly (Vincent); Wilford Brimley (Earl)Written and directed by Marc Lawrence; produced by Martin Shafer and Liz Glotzer. A Columbia Pictures release. Running time: 1 43 ||||| Jeff Bridges and his Crazy Heart 
 
 Under the Eightball 
 
 GO CRAZY HEART Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-paying, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the Greatest Hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout — with the chorus, “Funny how falling feels like flying ... for a little while.” Bad’s not flying these days; he’s dying slowly on a bourbon diet, holed up in motels, watching Spanish-language smut. Actor-turned-writer-director Scott Cooper adapted Crazy Heart from Thomas Cobb’s 1987 novel (the title is a Hank Williams B-Side). Cobb wanted Waylon Jennings for Bad Blake; Jeff Bridges got the part, though the now-deceased Jennings and Bad’s other inspirations hang over it. It’s easy to forget, as Billboard’s Country charts fill with faintly twangy pop and lazy paeans to dogs and trucks, that this music has an atavistic darkness. Bad has just about bottomed out when a small-time journalist, Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), meets him for a rare interview — and sticks around. Crazy Heart follows the slow recovery of atrophied emotional responses, which starts when Bad gets involved with Jean and her young son. The subject, rehabilitation, is old and resonant. (Says Waylon: “We’ve been the same way for years/We need to change.”) No scene feels obligatory, and Crazy Heart shows a pragmatic but tender understanding of the relationship between physical breakdown and the discovery of morality. It’s merely a well-done, adult American movie — that is to say, a rarity. (ArcLight Hollywood; AMC Century City) 
 
 GO DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? Let’s be honest here: Did You Hear About the Morgans? is multiplex meringue compared to the meat-and-potatoes cinema at this most award-whoring time of year. Which is fine. Better than fine, frankly, as Hugh Grant yet again proves he’s the most reliable deadpan smart-ass this or that side of the Atlantic — and the actor Paul Rudd should aspire to be once he grows out of his bromantic period. Grant’s Paul Morgan is a Manhattan attorney who, along with his estranged wife (Sarah Jessica Parker as New York’s real estate goddess), witnesses a murder, is forced by U.S. Marshals into a relocation program, and learns how to love again. Their destination: Ray, Wyoming, where they share a log cabin with the sheriff (Sam Elliott and his mustache) and his deputy missus (Mary Steenburgen). At which point the comedy turns blue — as in, blue state versus red state, “real America” versus the one populated by liberal vegetarian New Yorkers and Brits who are probably real Jewish, too. While the story never strays from its formula (how will these battling Bickersons find love again after all that betrayal and ... oh, look, a bear’s chasing Grant!), it’s a thoroughly delightful throwaway — the kind of movie for which cable TV was made. Marc Lawrence writes and directs — as he did for Grant’s Music and Lyrics — and he sure knows his way ’round a snappy tune. (Citywide) (Robert Wilonsky) 
 
 DON’T FADE AWAY was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found online at laweekly.com/movies. (Music Hall) 
 
 FALL DOWN DEAD A straightforward, old-fashioned exploitation movie, replete with the usual gratuitous sex scene featuring no-name actors, gory set pieces and some clever stunt casting, Fall Down Dead is reasonably entertaining if unexceptional. Dominique Swain is the damsel in distress, Udo Kier the art-crazy serial killer, and the late David Carradine a comic-relief security guard; if this movie receives any notoriety at all, it will likely be for the fact that Carradine’s character meets his demise in a manner that’s uncomfortably similar to real life. Shooting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (which apparently has a Figueroa Street — who knew?), director John Keeyes (an Oscar nominee for the short Angela’s Body, and a maker of direct-to-DVD thrillers ever since) swiftly traps us in a downtown building during rolling blackouts, as a madman with a straight razor and love of Picasso corners a group of unlikely stragglers, none of whom — not even the plainclothes cops — seems to know how to use a gun properly. An unsatisfactory ending setting up for a sequel that will never happen is the most significant sour note; otherwise, there’s little here worth paying full price for or getting too upset about — unless you’ve read the press kit that tries to compare this schlock to Hitchcock. (Music Hall) (Luke Y. Thompson) 
 
 GO HOME The opening scenes of Home — a nighttime game of street hockey, a bathing session that turns into a five-way splash fight — establish the anarchic sense of play that defines the interactions of the film’s central family, while the casual nudity on display hints at the vaguely incestuous tensions in this uniquely insular clan. The rest of Ursula Meier’s confident, appealingly bizarre debut feature subjects these tensions to the hothouse environment of a self-willed isolation. When the five members of the family find their remote domestic paradise invaded by the reopening of the abandoned highway adjacent to their house, they resort to increasingly lunatic measures to block out the noise — it’s but a small step from earplugs to bricking up their house entirely. Eventually, paranoia and open hostility set in as a family defined from the start by too great a sense of closeness is forced into even closer proximity. Working with all-star DP Agnès Godard, Meier effectively communicates the sense of upended privacy, moving easily from the nighttime intrusion of brightly clad construction workers (the eye-straining oranges and yellows of their uniforms registering as a truly alien presence) to the incongruous sight of Isabelle Huppert tending her garden as blurry streaks of traffic zip by. (Monica 4-Plex) (Andrew Schenker)
– The highlight of Did You Hear About the Morgans? for most critics is their own joke that Sam Elliott's mustache deserves separate billing. Some reactions: The film is so "lumpish and crude" that Colin Covert saves most of his ire for a geographical offense. "The landscape around Yellowstone, where the film is supposedly set, is one of America's great scenic wonders," he writes in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "The movie was actually filmed in tax-break haven New Mexico, and it looks blah. Inexcusable." If you enjoy silence, Michael Phillips writes in the Chicago Tribune, then this is for you. "Each of its theoretical punch lines is preceded by an eerie second or two of dead air, followed by the jokelike 'payoff,' guiltily delivered by one of its game cast members, followed by a longer awkward pause." Oh, come on, Robert Wilonsky writes in LA Weekly. This "multiplex meringue" is a "thoroughly delightful throwaway," and Hugh Grant is "the most reliable deadpan smart-ass this or that side of the Atlantic." No, really, this is unbearable. Sarah Jessica Parker wears a look of "Dostoevskian unhappiness," while Grant acts as though "he just pulled an all-nighter in an emergency room," Michael O'Sullivan writes in the Washington Post. "If they're not having fun, how the heck are we supposed to?"