SnapJolt

It is important to note, on this weekend when "Thirteen" opens, that imagining sex is the only way Kelly experiences it. His bond with Tabby comes through their mutual love of art, about which Kelly knows a surprising amount (this is a bright kid who apparently knows everything known to anyone who worked on the movie).

Tabby, who has her own studio, produces paintings a step up from the assembly line at Kelly's house; her work is the kind that wins blue ribbons at fairs. She's heading to Yale in the fall, which means she has periods of ambivalence about her approaching marriage to her sometimes uncomprehending boyfriend, Miner (Anson Mount)--which leads, somewhat unconvincingly, to a makeout session between Tabby and Kelly in which the movie focuses on Kelly's emotions, which we can easily imagine, instead of on Tabby's, which exist entirely at the convenience of the screenplay.

LaBeouf makes his character a winning and charming kid, more believable than the movie deserves, and Henson, who I've been monitoring since "The Mighty" (1998), is kind of a junior Vincent D'Onofrio, able to play almost anybody, as you could see when he went to the teenage Shakespearean tragedy "O" to "Dumb and Dumberer." "The Battle of Shaker Heights" isn't bad so much as jumbled. One of the problems with "Project Greenlight" is that everybody tries to cross when the light turns green.

You get the sense of too much input, too many bright ideas, too many scenes that don't belong in the same movie. Odd, how overcrowded it seems, for 85 minutes. Here's an idea: Next year, Miramax picks the winning screenplay, gives the filmmakers $1 million and sends them off in total isolation to make a movie with absolutely no input from anybody. The HBO series could be about how the Miramax marketing department sees the result and figures out how to sell it.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lkpbBtbjEZqafZaOdrqyx0WafnqGXncG0eZFpZ2w%3D