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• Get your Irish up in 'Walworth Farce'

Get your Irish up in 'Walworth Farce'

At first, The Walworth Farce looks like a routine the Three Stooges might have dreamed up -- if Larry, Curly and Moe had been Irish, that is.

The extended bit, accompanied by the liltingly sentimental An Irish Lullaby , involves a dad in a bad wig, one grown son in a dress and another whose skull-top has been shaved so that he seems to be balding weirdly. The action is frenetically fast, as farces must be, but before long an unsettling darkness begins playing tug o' war with the comedy.

And that's how you know you're in for another wild ride with a contemporary Irish playwright.

'The Walworth Farce' at Carnival Studio Theater

If Quentin Tarantino wrote a play for the Three Stooges, the result might look a lot like Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce , a darkly comic play running Wednesday through Nov. 7 in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Raymond Scannell and Tadhg Murphy, part of the cast from Ireland's Druid Theater Company, play sons who ritualistically act out a version of their family's story for their demanding, housebound father. Performances are 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday at the Arsht, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. Tickets are $50. Call 305-949-6722 or visit www.arshtcenter.org.

Review | The Lovely Bones (PG-13) *½

As you watch The Lovely Bones , you wonder if Peter Jackson thought he was still remaking King Kong . Alice Sebold's beloved 2002 novel, about a 14-year-old girl who looks down from heaven as her family struggles with the aftermath of her murder, is the sort of delicate story that requires a light directorial touch and a careful balancing of emotional tones. But Jackson bears down on the material with every special effect and camera trick in his arsenal. The result is almost suffocating: a movie that has been tinkered and fussed with until there is no spontaneity left -- no warmth or life or messiness.

The Lovely Bones offers only directorial bombast and grandeur. I don't mean to sound flippant, but Jackson was a better director when he was shaggy, overweight and unknown. Now that he's a svelte, well-groomed Oscar winner, he's become vain and self-important. At one point, he gives himself a cameo (he's a customer in a photo shop peering through a video camera), the way Hitchcock famously did, except

Review | Did You Hear About the Morgans? (PG-13) **

In Did You Hear About the Morgans? , Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker are supposed to pass for a married couple, but they have all the chemistry of two actors who just met and shook hands moments before the cameras rolled. They don't even seem to like each other much -- I'm fairly certain I saw Parker's nostrils flaring in one scene -- which poses a bit of a problem for a movie that hinges on their characters working out their differences and living happily ever after.

Grant in particular looks bored and distracted and eager to get this silly movie finished. He can be an effortless, likable charmer -- his performance in the wonderful About a Boy is particularly underrated -- but in Did You Hear About the Morgans? , even his trademark stammering feels forced. When an actor's heart isn't in his work, you start noticing all the wrong things. Grant looks like he's been hitting the gym, he's had a little work done, and he seems utterly bored by acting -- or at least bored by the role of Paul Morgan,

Wolf Man' reflected writer's wartime Jewish experience

"Even a man who is pure in heart

And says his prayers by night

may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms