Two recent pieces of Hollywood product

If all you expect from movies is an hour and a half of entertainment that doesn’t insult your intelligence, here are two plausible alternatives from the past year. I yoke them together because they hardly warrant comment on their own, and because of a coincidence of ratings. Each got a rather high Metacritic score of 71, and I would give both a grudging *6-* after thinking *5+* at first.

I’m not a Wes Craven maven -- have not seen Scream or anything that followed or preceded -- but he is obviously a practiced hand at cinematic scare tactics, and Red Eye is quite a successful genre exercise, moving the traditional woman in jeopardy from a haunted house to the “friendly” skies. Rachel McAdams is more than all right as the cheerleader/field hockey player turned efficient hotel executive, who meets Cillian Murphy on the eponymous late flight into Miami. Murphy successfully negotiates the transition from teasingly romantic to seriously menacing, though the film itself is less satisfying as it transitions from promising character study to standard chase-&-stalk. Still, Craven knows how to make you jump when he says jump, and he fills in just enough atmosphere and detail to keep you watching.

Thank You for Smoking is a satire on spin, not too bland but not too biting either -- call it filtered. Aaron Eckhart is perfect for the charming scoundrel role of a PR professional for the cigarette industry, and receives effective support from Rob Lowe as a Hollywood agent, William Macy as an anti-smoking Senator from Vermont, and among others, Maria Bello as a fellow lobbyist from the “Mod Squad,” the “merchants of death” representing alcohol and guns as well as tobacco. Writer/director Jason Reitman (son of the Ivan of Ghostbusters, etc.) veers toward the middle of the road in adapting the novel of Christopher Buckley (son of William F.), making Eckhart a good divorced dad who explains to his son the moral flexibility and argumentative success of his career. But frankly you can get most of the effective jokes from the trailer, and the film itself does not fill them out or deepen the characterizations. The implicit libertarian critique of camps on both left and right is diluted enough to offend no one, but not to engage anyone particularly. A mild amusement, with barely a buzz and no aftertaste.