You can only go so far with Oliver Stone’s antics behind the camera.  But sometimes, it gets you 3/4 through a movie.  Watchable, occasionally engaging, and always stupid, anything of value from this movie comes from Stone’s eye on the speed and madness of professional football.  His frenetic editing and jump-cuts to varying film stocks keeps you watching, plus the fact that it is football, it is glitzy, it is steamy, sultry Miami, and Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx and James Woods provide some surprises to their hackneyed personas.

All of which helps you forget that Al Pacino, as the gruff ole’ coach, is mailing in his 76th lousy post-Tony Montana performance; Stone’s tried-and-true preachy and over-the-top screenplay of (you guessed it) man stuff and redemption; Stone’s excesses, borne of a director who simply won’t take “Um, Oliver, isn’t that a little much?” for a question; a high cheesiness factor, as Stone (unlike Cameron Crowe in Jerry Maguire) apparently wouldn’t pony up to pay for NFL rights, so we are left with the Dallas Knights and the Miami Sharks; and, an embarrassing turn by wide-mouth bass-headed Cameron Diaz, as a supposed ball-busting owner of the Sharks (it appears she just misses her Daddy, the former owner, who wanted a boy).

Boys Don’t Cry is a picture about an unfortunate Lincoln, Nebraska woman (Hillary Swank) with gender identity issues.  She wants to be a boy, so she crops her hair short and poses as a boy.  In those moments, where she has “passed” and tasted affection from the vantage point of a male, the film works.  We see the fearful life Swank leads, how her surroundings and her gender conspire against her desire to express what she feels and who she thinks she is. Swank has you share her exhiliration as she ends an evening with a kiss from a unknowing date.  Her performance is justly praised.

Swank soon falls in with a motley crew of losers, including an ex-con, a self-mutilator who has burned his own family out of house and home, and a girl who aspires to leave her job canning broccoli so she can get paid as a karaoke singer (Chloe Sevigny).  Swank falls in love with Sevigny, and a white trash Romeo and Juliet ensues.

Director Kimberly Peirce has a firm grip on the picture when she is depicting Swank’s acceptance into this group.  It plays as a more rough-hewn American Graffiti where the gang eschews the strip for the highways of Nebraska, and malts become beers and bong hits.  Peirce shows a group moving fast (she uses the effect of fast speed highway lights, super slow-motion shots of the gang getting high in the back of a car, and a police chase off-road in the dust) and going nowhere.

Unfortunately, in real life, the Swank character was murdered, and the second half of the film grounds to the halt of numbing, repeated brutalization of Swank.  Director Peirce pours it on at the end, with 4 scenes of debasement and cruelty.  Swank is so dehumanized that any emotional power is drained from the film.   I suppose the end is defensible on grounds of reality, but it saps the early beauty of the film and worse, it blots out Swank’s singular character until she is just another unrecognizable victim of senseless American violence.

The Wrestler.  Depressing and not really much above a standard “I’m just a broke down piece of meat so I need to re engage with my daughter and dance with the stripper with a heart of gold” tale.  It’s gritty, bloody and dark, but not really all that interesting.  Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) has carved a real niche’ of making viewers physically uncomfortable.   That said, Mickey Rourke is excellent, and his performance was rightly lauded. He does the little things well.

State of Play.  A Russell Crowe Washington D.C. political potboiler. Crowe sports  impressive weight gain to flesh out his frumpy D.C. reporter, and there are very strong supporting turns by Jeff Daniels as a corrupt congressman and Jason Bateman as a slimy P.R. flack.  The film also moves like the wind, but dewy-eyed cub blogger reporter Rachel McAdams is horribly miscast (she looks like she belongs at the Lancome’ section at Macys), and Helen Mirren as the tough editor is loaded with too many hackneyed lines.  Finally, Ben Affleck plays the congressman in the middle of scandal and his quivering lip and waterworks are being worked much too hard.  Pretty pedestrian.