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The ugly public revelations that husband Jesse James cheated on Bullock are painful but not fatal for the couple's reeling relationship.
"Sandra would have to get to a place where she could give her husband the gift of trust," said Dr. Flo Rosoff, a marriage counselor.
"That can only happen if she is based in a relationship where they have a high regard for each other as people, not as simply an attractive man and attractive woman."
Rosoff is a contributor to Ladies Home Journal's "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" column, as is fellow Long Island counselor Dr. Robin Newman.
Newman echoes her colleague's prognosis that the celebrity couple can salvage their relationship, despite James' reported affair with ink-stained wench Michelle (Bombshell) McGee.
"Fight for your marriage, fight for it," Newman advised. "And look at what your part in it was. I'm not saying Sandra was all at fault, but there's something going on there that she needs to address herself."
The Oscar-winning star of "The Blind Side" remained out of the public eye Friday, offering no response to her husband's apology after garish tattoo model McGee claimed the two had an affair.
Bullock has canceled an appearance at the London premiere of her hit film and reportedly moved out of the couple's Southern California home.
Beleaguered husband James surfaced to walk his kids to school Friday morning, his wedding ring still visible on his left hand.
His inked-up inamorata surfaced, too, in a far-less flattering series of Nazi-themed photos.
The raven-haired McGee sported a black officer's cap, bra, panties and a Nazi armband in the shots unearthed by TMZ.com.
In one picture, McGee suggestively licks the tip of a knife.
McGee was also denounced by her ex-husband, who hopes to regain custody of their 5-year-old son.
Ronald Modica charged in court papers that McGee was an unfit mom who exposed little Avery to X-rated antics, Us Magazine reported.
"I need protection for my son," Modica said. "I will not continue to expose him to the kind of life Michelle desires and seeks: full on, pornographic, party all the time."
According to McGee, the affair started while Bullock was filming her Academy Award-winning role in "The Blind Side."
James had been married twice, including a two-year union with porn star Janine Lindemulder, before landing America's sweetheart in 2005.
The actors may be pretty, but the film is about as dull as a doorknob. That's the consensus from critics regarding The Bounty Hunter, starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, which opens this weekend.
The new romantic comedy has been blasted by 9 out of ten film critics, with most agreeing the script is at best unfunny and at worst cringe-inducing.
As the story goes, Milo Boyd (Butler) is having a rough go of things as a bounty hunter. But his luck appears to change when his next job places him on the trail of his ex-wife, the bail-jumping reporter Nicole Hurly (Aniston).
The old flames play a game of cat-and-mouse, only to find themselves back together and running for their lives.
Of course, critics could care less.
Roger Ebert said he "stared with glazed eyes at The Bounty Hunter. Here is a film with no need to exist."
Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe said the movie's title was similar to A&E's show Dog The Bounty Hunter. "Is it wrong to find that show funnier and more romantic?" he asked.
And the film's two stars, Butler and Aniston, who have been deflecting rumors of off-screen romance for months now, can't seem to muster enough on-screen romance to satisfy critics.
Claudia Puig from USA Today said they don't "muster any believable chemistry. A lot of mugging happens, but no magic."
Still, regardless of what the critics say, if you're a fan of Aniston and/or Butler you should probably run out and see The Bounty Hunter. Just don't say we didn't warn you.
Their thriller about the futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a visual and visceral knockout that's utterly deflated by a story as common, coarse and unappetizing as Army field rations.
The movie pales further by arriving in theaters just days after the Academy Awards triumph of the vastly superior Iraq war story "The Hurt Locker," a film many people have yet to see. For the price of a couple of tickets to "Green Zone," you can own the DVD of a truly great war film in "The Hurt Locker." "Green Zone" emulates the let's-build-a-democracy-just-like-ours intent of the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003, as chronicled in Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," a book cited in the credits as the inspiration for the movie.
Greengrass and screenwriter Brian Helgeland have taken a setting rich with novel dramatic possibilities and made up a fictional action tale just like any other, with the same lame plot contrivances and the same stiff, artificial characters.
You've got the incorruptible working-class patriot in Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon), who leads a WMD team frustrated that detailed intelligence reports continually fail to turn up any traces of Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenals.
You've got the sniveling, scheming bureaucrat in Pentagon intelligence man Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) and an internecine clash with his honorable nemesis in CIA man Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson). OK, so the CIA good guy thing is kind of new. You've got the cliched journalist in Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), who seems incapable of piecing together a story unless it's handed to her in a neat folder marked "top secret."
And you've got the Special Forces thug in Lt. Col. Briggs (Jason Isaacs).
We all know now the weapons that prompted the invasion of Iraq did not exist. The filmmakers concoct a simple-minded WMD conspiracy to explain the bad intelligence reports, then lob Miller into the middle of it.
Miller's encounter with well-meaning Iraqi "Freddy" (Khalid Abdalla, who played one of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Greengrass' "United 93") leads him to one of Saddam's top aides, who holds the key to exposing the conspiracy.
Other than Abdalla, who captures a sense of Iraqis' conflicted emotions over Saddam's overthrow and the U.S. occupation, Damon and his co-stars deliver nothing more than serviceable performances. The roles do not call for much more, Ryan in particular stuck trying to make her few shallow lines sound meaningful. The WMD debacle was a colossal intelligence failure that Greengrass and company dilute to a base Hollywood plot device so they can turn the boys loose in Baghdad with all the firepower a big studio budget can muster.
There's barely a story to hold "Green Zone" together, the movie just hurtling through firefights and chases, pausing for breath with the occasional revelation to prod Miller on in his quest.
For pure ambiance, "Green Zone" is a marvel. Though shot in Morocco, Spain and England, the action feels as though it takes place in the heart of Baghdad.
Greengrass, who directed Damon in "The Bourne Ultimatum" and "The Bourne Supremacy," applies similar techniques — darting camera work, quick cutting, haphazard framing — to create the same sense of documentary immediacy in "Green Zone."
For as much as "The Hurt Locker" was the critics' darling, it had three major strikes against it in its battle against the mighty James Cameron's "Avatar."
First, the box office was paltry — it's taken in just $14.7 million domestically, compared to an amazing $720.6 million for "Avatar." That makes "The Hurt Locker" the lowest-grossing best picture winner since accurate records have been kept.
Second, it had no big acting names, usually an important factor in Oscar victory.
And third, it was about the Iraq war, a subject moviegoers traditionally just don't want to deal with. "Iraq is usually the kiss of death at the Oscars," says Tom O'Neil, blogger for the Los Angeles Times' Envelope, an awards site.
But even with 10 nominees in the running for this year's best picture Oscar, the two films — whose directors were once married — were quickly pitted against each other in the race for Hollywood's highest honor.
How did "The Hurt Locker" win out? Theories abound:
Finally a non-political film about Iraq
Many films about the Iraq war have fallen into a trap of appearing preachy or at least having a strong point of view. Viewers may or may not agree with that view — that still doesn't mean they want to get it at the movies.
But "The Hurt Locker," a story of three technicians on a bomb-defusing team in Baghdad, is at heart an action movie — a documentary-style close-up of the men, their relationships, their missteps and the almost unbearable tension inherent in their exhausting, terrifying, tedious work.
"This isn't that kind of muckraking film aiming to show torture or violation of rules of war," says Robert Sklar, film professor at New York University. "This is a film about men trying to save lives rather than take them. It's also a buddy story. It has classic war-movie themes."
Oscar likes films with an important message
Often the Academy honors big, sweeping films, which "The Hurt Locker" is certainly not. But it also looks for films with a substantial message. "Oscar likes films of importance, with a capital I," says film historian Leonard Maltin. "Often they're big films, but this is a small film that dealt with a really important subject."
Oscar voters don't care about box office
Who says Oscar cares about box office? "The Oscars don't pay attention to that at all, and nor should they," Maltin says. In fact, he adds, they've often been accused of being too elitist, favoring independent movies over big films favored by the broader public.
Yes, they do!
Nonsense, says O'Neil, of The Envelope: "The Academy wants their movies to do well. Then they anoint them." Even last year's "Slumdog Millionaire," which originally almost went straight to DVD, had made $40 million before the nominations, then rode to $70 million by the time of the awards, he says.
It's about the campaigning
All of "Hurt Locker's" technical merit aside, "it would be naive to think Oscar campaigning had nothing to do with it," says O'Neil. He credits Cynthia Swartz, whose public relations firm was given the Oscar campaigning job by Summit, the film's distributor, which was looking for industry respect and had plenty of money to fund the campaign, having already cashed in with the "Twilight" vampire movies.
"It was a very savvy campaign," says O'Neil. "Full force, and highly aggressive."
The woman factor
As compelling as her movie was, director Kathryn Bigelow had a compelling story of her own. This director who specializes not in female-oriented films but in big action thrillers had a real shot at becoming the first woman in Oscar history to win the best director prize, with her film winning best picture, too.
Yet Bigelow tried to downplay that element of her story, saying in interviews that she just wanted to be seen as a filmmaker, not a female one.
"Bigelow refused to capitalize on the woman factor, and to her credit," says Maltin. Everyone else wanted to make it a story but her. Still, you can't deny it had some impact."
The ex factor
Nor did Bigelow have any desire to capitalize on the "Ex Factor" — in case you're way behind on your Oscar gossip, she was married to Cameron from 1989-91. Were there some voters who were secretly rooting for her to leave him in the dust? No way of knowing, and the two seemed amicable through the awards season, with him standing and cheering as she won her Oscar. Still, there's no doubt that the "battle of the exes" (ok, we're done with the puns) added to the hype.