Elizabeth (Norah Jones) storms into a local café run by Jeremy (Jude Law) to find out that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. She ends the relationship and starts spending her time roaming the country to get over this recent loss in her life. Along the way she meets a broken hearted Café owner, Jeremy; the wife of a drunkard who is trying to divorce him, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz); and a female poker hopeful, Leslie (Natalie Portman).

The movie is directed by the Asian hopeful Kar Wai Wong (also did “2046” (2004), which I’ve heard good things of, but am yet to watch myself). I think that the direction in this movie is horrible. The camera movement/placement didn’t do one bit to help the story or your perception of these characters. The acting in the movie isn’t anything to write home about, even though I did like Natalie Portman’s character in the movie, and her acting (but I doubt he could make her deliver a horrid performance). The one thing that really annoyed me while watching this movie is the lights. Wong thought it would be cool that instead of having some great dialogue between all these characters that were all going through their own personal issues at the time that we meet them, he would have these pauses during possible character development and have some lights flash at me to make me feel more and more like an indie noir film or something.

Jude Law and Norah Jones are horrid in this movie. I just don’t believe Jude Law is whoever he is playing in these movies. I did like Jude Law in “I Heart Huckabees” but I cannot think of one other Jude Law movie in which he did well or even the individual film was good. Norah Jones makes her actorial debut in this movie and she just seems like the not too pretty and kind of cute girl that you throw into a crap movie so that you can get her to do some songs for the soundtrack and get some guys in the theatre who have a “Love Jones”. I hope this doesn’t mean that she is looking into a permanent switch from music to film, because I love her as a musician and hate her as an actress, so this is me pleading if you read this Ms. Jones, stick to music, you are awesome and I wouldn’t change a thing about you in the musical respect. Natalie Portman could be the only quarter of this movie that I enjoyed to a decent level. When she is on the screen you can never truly believe what she is saying (but not in the way I was talking about Jude Law) since she is playing a gambler this is a good thing for her character. Her job is to trick and fool people into believing what she says (poker face) so as to win. Rachel Weisz was another uneventful character, she didn’t seem to add much to the story other than another person in another place that our main character (Elizabeth) happens to be.

Maybe I’m just not mature enough to understand the deep feeling that this movie is trying to convey. I just didn’t get it, and it was nowhere near entertaining.

IMDB says 7.0/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 52%

I say 3.5/10