Who the hell is Thomas Bezucha? Until this evening I didn’t have a clue, but he’s the former fashion executive (ten years as creative services vp for Polo/Ralph Lauren) who’s come out of dead friggin’ nowhere to write and direct one of the best-written, most emotionally on-target and true-to-life family Christmas movies (okay, with a tidy commercial attitude…fine) ever made. It’s called The Family Stone (20th Century Fox, 11.11) and there’s no question it’s a hit. Don’t count on a rave from Armond White, but I’m telling you it’s going to go over big with educated blue-state Average Joes, at the very least. I’m not so sure about the family- values folks in Bubbaland…some of them might have qualms about a family that embraces a child-adopting gay-male couple, etc., but this movie is so relaxed and well-jiggered and human- tragedy funny…so half-dramatic and half-sitcom likable that you don’t even want to think about the red staters…screw ’em. The story’s about a large New England liberal family…all grown-up kids (Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Dermot Mulroney, Tyrone Giordano, Elizabeth Reaser) and mom-and-popped by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson..assembling for a snowy Christmas with an oddball apple floating in the punch. Her name is Meredith (Sara Jessica Parker), Mulroney’s uptight bring-home-date and (who knows?) possible fiance whom everyone hates because she’s so emotionally conservative and screwed down tight. Stunned by the disapproving vibe she incurs from this semi-mellow brood, Meredith pressures her sister Julie (Claire Danes) into joining her to provide emotional support, and this in turn lays the stage for all kinds of upheavals and complications. There’s a big plot point I’m not going to reveal that also throws everyone off-balance. Is The Family Stone an Ingmar Bergman dramedy-farce about a cultivated, semi-neurotic family coping with the emotional land mines that always seem to go off when families get together in late December? Yes…if you drop the “Ingmar Bergman.” This is a commercial movie, which isn’t always a punishable crime. It does this kind of thing as well as you can expect a smart commercial movie to do this kind of thing. That’s not meant as a diss. In its own realm of confection, Bezucha and his cast do a bang-up job. It’s a studio souflee that feels more prickly and chaotically realistic than any home-for-the-holidays movie I can think of right now. It’s not gnarly or snarly enough to compete with a certain 1942 wintertime movie called The Man Who Came to Dinner, but it’s almost as tonally assured and smartly written as that classic….really. Everyone says Keaton will be a Best Supporting Actress nomineee and okay, maybe…but Parker is the one who lays it out and goes whacko and takes the big character journey. Nelson is fantastic, and Wilson is the best he’s ever been since Bottle Rocket. There’s a SAG ensemble acting award, right? Settled…these guys own it. How do you pronounce Bezucha’s name, by the way? Like bazooka bubble gum?

I have to side with David Poland’s “stop, George, stop” plea about George Clooney’s plans to remake Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network for television. It was a cutting and wonderfully nervy film in ’76 because it was forecasting trends — reality TV, infotainment, cult-of-the-personality news anchors — that were starting to take shape but hadn’t quite happened. And of course, the fact that Network turned out to be prophetic has added to its reputation. But Clooney himself nailed the problem of a remake when he told the Associated Press that he was “briefly mystified when he screened it for a group of young people and none of them saw it as a dark satire. ‘I couldn’t understand it, (then) I realized that everything Chayefsky wrote about happened. And so, suddenly, the idea that the anchor is more important that the news story, and that you’d be doing sort of reality-based shows with heads of gangs and Sybil the Soothsayer all happened. And when you have that great speech with Ned Beatty sitting there going ‘There is no U.S.A. and Soviet Union, there is only Xerox and IBM,’ you realize all of those things were true, or came true.” Exactly, and the point of re-making a film that’s no longer forecasting but echoing today’s reality is….? Note: Scratch that thing I wrote about the Black Panthers and updating the terrorist gang element. I read the article too quickly and I’m always racing around, etc.

Two for the Money (Universal, 10.7) is about this hunky ex-college football player (Matthew McConaughey) with some kind of supernatural psychic ability to pick the winners of football games. Or who knows teams and their quirks and tendencies so well it seems like he’s got a crystal-ball thing going on. And he gets hired to work for a kind of high-end betting consultancy firm, run by this larger-than-life blowhard named Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), that sells information about which teams to bet on and…I can’t do this. I don’t mind gambling as long as it’s not my money on the table, and I dearly loved California Split, one of the hippest and sexiest loose-shoe gambling movies ever made. But this thing has no groove or heat. It plays loud and abrasive, and feels boorish and forced. It was directed by D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives, Salton Sea), but, being a Morgan Creek film, was almost certainly influenced in a hundred hair-on-the-back- of-your-neck ways by M.G. honcho James G. Robinson, who is known by anyone who’s worked in this town as the biggest bad-vibe producer around. Somehow, through force of will or obstinacy or what-have-you, just about every film Robinson has made has seemed a little bit icky or underwhelming or crude or less-than-cool. All I know is, Morgan Creek = caveat emptor. And I figure Robinson is probably at least partly to blame for the sand-draining-out-of-the-hourglass feeling that runs all through Two For the Money. It doesn’t figure that Caruso could have screwed up this badly. His last two films were second-tier but they were at least stylistically intriguing and had some good moves here and there, so something happened this time. Consider the following: when last night’s all-media screening at the Mann’s Chinese ended, a certain big-name critic came up to a colleague and expressed his feelings about Two for the Money by forming an imaginary pistol with his thumb and right forefinger, holding it to his head and then pulling the trigger. This was more entertaining than anything that had transpired on the screen. Plus it was enormously comforting to feel a sense of kinship.

I’m trying to imagine what I might find inviting about Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros., 11.18). Last year I suggested killing Rupert Grint’s Ron Weasley character because he never does anything except whine and wimper, but you know that’ll never happen. If they would only free Harry and Hermione (Emma Watson) from Hogwarts and set them loose upon the world. Send them on the road…send them up against real-world villains and adult situations. But no…we’re going to be stuck at Hogwarts again with the same old gang, and I can’t understand why everyone is so pleased with these films when they pull more or less the same levers and push the same buttons each and every time.