Jude Law plays Will, a landscape architect going about the business of gentrifying London's King's Cross, a multiracial area teeming with crime and illegal immigrants. When Will's high-tech office is burgled, he tracks one of the teen thieves, Miro (Rafi Gavron), to the apartment the boy shares with his Bosnian mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche). The two indulge in an affair. For Will, floundering in a relationship with Liv (Robin Wright Penn), a Scandinavian whose melancholy rivals Hamlet's, Amira is a way into a world he barely comprehends. When Amira secretly films their sex to blackmail Will so he won't turn Miro over to the police, the issues come to a head. Or they would if director-writer Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley), in his first original script since his 1991 debut with Truly, Madly, Deeply, hadn't taken such a lethargic approach to the material. The actors, especially Binoche, do their damnedest to bring urgency to their roles. But despite Minghella's admirable attempt to tackle major themes on an intimate scale, the film goes down like weak tea. There's no kick in it.

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.