What Just Happened

Directed with deadpan flair by Barry Levinson and based on a memoir by Hollywood producer Art Linson, it's a pitch-perfect sendup of the movie colony with a marvelous cast.

A story very much by, about and for middle-aged men, and with the commercial limitations that implies, this intermittently amusing outing is graced by one of Robert De Niro’s more engaging performances of recent vintage.

That it doesn’t have anything new to say about the coldly efficient Hollywood machine and its stratum of fearsome executives only hinders it further, leaving you with a film that feels every bit the product of its purportedly ruthless and artistically corrupting milieu.

The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with.

Generally, the film is a compelling portrait of Hollywood egoism, though it suffers from this very egoism itself. It’s hard to tell where the film is representing reality, and where it is representing a caricature of reality.

Levinson keeps the film locked into a sort of low-key middle-age depression.

Overall the biggest problem with What Just Happened is that its character studies and conflicts are so far inside the eye of Hollywood's celebrity-clad storm that its melancholy calm completely fails to interest anyone.