I didn’t even look at this Jimmy Kimmel Show-produced video when it popped up three or four days ago. Bush…blurp. But I finally caught it this morning and realized that it contains the most winning performance Mike Tyson has ever delivered. Easygoing, light-hearted, etc. Like he’s channelling Jamie Foxx or something. James Toback‘s Tyson, a superb doc, revealed the ex-fighter’s sad, soulful side, but this (starring a noticably thinner Tyson) shows mirth and merriment.

For nearly 20 years Matthew McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Now comes The Lincoln Lawyer (Lionsgate, 3.18), the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.

Lawyer doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s basically a high-intrigue trial drama with an unusual lead character — McConaughey’s Mickey Haller, a bottom-feeding LA criminal attorney who operates out of his gas-guzzler. The story is about Haller being hired by a big-money client and soon after finding himself in a difficult ethical spot. It’s not quite as surprising or jolting as Primal Fear, the 1996 Richard Gere-Edward Norton courtroom thriller that it resembles somewhat. So don’t go expecting a double-A powerhouse thing. But it moves along at a good pace and never bores and satisfies with the usual twists and turns and fake-outs and sharp dialogue.

It almost feels like a two-hour pilot for an HBO series about Haller. Which I would watch, by the way.

The Lincoln Lawyer has been very ably directed by Brad Furman from a script by John Romano, based on Michael Connelly‘s novel of the same name. The costarring roles are well-written, and very persuasively performed by Ryan Phillippe, Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, Michaela Conlin, Josh Lucas, Laurence Mason, Frances Fisher, John Leguizamo and Michael Pena.

Boiled down, The Adjustment Bureau (Universal, 3.4) is about a team of cosmic fate orchestrators doing all they can to prevent David Norris (Matt Damon), a rising New York politician, from marrying or committing to a longterm relationship with Elise Sallas (Emily Blunt), a gifted dancer. These two have met and fallen for each other in that dippy, lost-in-each-other’s-gaze sort of way, but they can’t partner up because this will somehow hinder or block each other’s progress in life (including a possible occupation of the White House by Damon).

This, at least, is how Thompson (Terrence Stamp), a top-dog orchestrator, explains the situation to Norris in Act Two. The “plan” must be adhered to, he declares, and here-today-gone-tomorrow spiritual connections can’t be allowed to get in the way. Variations on this theme are passed along by two other orchestrators, played by Anthony Mackie and John Slattery (the white-haired Mad Men guy), from time to time. And from time to time I was saying to myself, “Damon and Blunt are good together and it’s cool that this movie is using almost no special effects, but otherwise this is lame, man.”

Partly because it’s hard to take the orchestrator guys seriously, to be honest, because of a regrettable decision by director-writer George Nolti to have them wear small-brimmed businessman hats — the kind you see on Mad Men, or the kind that William F. Burroughs used to wear to poetry readings, or that FBI agents used to wear during the Eisenhower days. All I know is that I felt an urge to bail on this thing the second I saw those hats. Especially when Slattery showed up. They might as well have been wearing black-and-white Reservoir Dogs suits.

The main thing is that The Adjustment Bureau, for all its Mad Men tonalities and being based on a Phillip K. Dick short story (called “The Adjustment Team”), is selling the old swill about how nothing can get in the way of a perfect love match. In other words, it’s saying that even if Stamp and his cronies are correct about Damon and Blunt’s relationship getting in the way of their careers, it doesn’t matter. Live with it. Accept the fact Damon will never be elected U.S. President or that Blunt’s dancing career may not be as inspired as it might have been. Because finding the right lover/partner/mate is the most important thing there is.

That’s true to a large extent. If you can find someone of character who really cares for you and pulls his/her own weight and watches your back, you’re probably going to do a little better in life and be somewhat happier and maybe even live longer. But what Damon and Blunt show us in this film isn’t longterm compatibility or trust or the kind of loyalty you can take to the bank, but mutual interest and chemistry — mere delight with each other’s looks, personality and vibe. And that’s the kind of thing that always settles down sooner or later. Chemical attraction can lead to other things, of course, but it can just as easily fade away. The only kind of fluttery-heartstrings love that lasts is the unrequited kind.

My 13″ MacBook Pro froze this morning for the first time since I bought it about a year ago. There was nothing to do but to shut it down, and in so doing I lost a fairly good review of The Adjustment Bureau that I’d been writing for nearly three hours. (I’d have been okay if Movable Type 4.0 had an auto-save function.) And then HE crashed again, and the stooges at Softlayer/OrbitThePlanet told me I needed to double the site’s memory again, after doubling it from 2 gigs to 4 gigs on Monday (at their suggestion) after Sunday night’s Oscar crash. So now it’s at 8 gigs, and the site is back up. I’m not going to drive down to their offices in Dallas during my visit to South by Southwest in Austin and do something stupid, but boy, I’d really love to. Their incompetence has been infuriating. Remember these guys and don’t ever, ever do business with them.

Over the last four days two director pals have told me the same thing: “I have to make an action film next.” To make some money and keep their cred up with the bottom-liners, they mean. If two guys are saying this you can bet plenty of others have the same strategy. We all have to make a piece-of-shit, Eloi-friendly sequel/action/CG ComicCon popcorn confetti-fart movie. Because if the word gets around that we’re mostly into original and/or “quality” material, we may never work in this town again.

Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff had an L.A. screening on 2.23, which I missed. There’s a press day with Reichardt on 4.15. Screenings are set for 4.6 and 4.12, but according to a 42West rep there are no screenings scheduled for the entire month of March. I asked, “Do you guys have a screener I can watch?” No, I was told. That’s Oscilloscope Pictures for you — big spenders.

I couldn’t go back to my 36″ Sony analog, so yesterday I sucked it in and paid $575 for a 50″ Vizio plasma. Vizio makes fairly well respected lower-priced plasmas, LCDs and LEDs, but the price seemed a little cheap. The seller, a guy from East LA named Marcus Lopez, said his units cost a bit less because they’ve been judged as discards due to some minor shipping dents. He also said plasmas are cheaper because no wants them — everyone wants LEDs and LCDs.

So I liked the price but I was nervous because I hadn’t really done the homework. Not extensively, I mean, and you can always get flim-flammed. But the hell with it. I rolled the dice and bought the beast (which Marcus delivered, by the way), and i have to say that it’s looking pretty damn wonderful so far. Much better — sharper, pizazzier, more radiant with delicate gradations — than the Panasonic 42″ plasma back at the Brooklyn place. I also bought a Sony Buray (BDP-S380/BX38) with online download capability. Everything looks great — Blurays, DVDs, cable. I have this idea that plasmas delivers a slightly more organic image than LEDs or LCDs. which have always looked more video-gamey. (Or they do in Best Buy stores, at least.)

Cameron Crowe‘s The Union, a doc about how Elton John nursed and goaded Leon Russell out of obscurity and back to recording and performing, will open the Tribeca Film Festival on 4.20. John will perform live after the free outdoor screening. Is it worth it to spend $400 or $500 bills to fly back, not to mention lodging, food and cat-sitting costs, so I can catch this and the festival (which runs from 4.20 through 5.1) en masse? I fear not.

With all the Oscar hurly-burly and being back in LA I didn’t notice that Universal Home Video’s long-awaited Out of Sight Bluray is on the shelves. (Calling Evan Fong!) Those DVD Beaver captures of Clooney gave me a jolt. He looks 26. He was actually 36 when they shot it in ’97.

Capturing from livethesheendream.com. And here’s the new twitter page.

The grunt, I presume, is staring at an alien mother ship in the Battle: LA poster. Which looks to me like the same alien mother ship, with modifications, that appeared at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Which also inspired the industrial-spoke design of the mother ship in District 9. And to some extent the look of the super-tanker Nostromo in Ridley Scott‘s Alien. Would it kill production designers of these films to design spacecraft that looks like it came out of a 1936 Flash Gordon serial? Or out of Forbidden Planet?