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In theaters today: License to Wed and Transformers.

Celebrity birthday: Patrick Wilson turns 34 today. Happy birthday, Pat. You know I never really bought you as a skater in Little Children. In fact, I never really got why your character left Jennifer Connelly for Kate Winslet, but with Valkyrie and Watchmen coming up, you’ve got two more chances to impress The Filter. Don’t blow it.

After watching George Washington, I rented another unconventional and downbeat summer film last weekend, the screen adaptation of John Irving’s A Widow for One Year, called The Door in the Floor. I’m a big fan of The World According To Garp, so this film had been on my list for a while. The rambling, episodic nature and epic scope of Irving’s work makes for engrossing characters you feel you’ve actually lived and grown up with. Yet, the best decision writer/director Tod Williams made was to focus only on the first third of A Widow For One Year for The Door in the Floor: the summer novelist Ted Cole hires an aspiring young writer to be his driver and separates from his wife, Marion.

Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger handle the Coles—playing up their desirable and undesirable traits to the hilt—and Jon Foster (Ben Foster’s little brother) and Elle Fanning (Dakota Fanning’s little sister) bring a lot to the film too, as the impressionable driver and the Cole’s young daughter.

The story really begins with Foster’s Eddie arriving on the Martha’s Vineyard-like island to "intern" with his favorite writer. What he doesn’t know is he’s stepping into a maelstrom of damaged lives and broken people. As is one of his trademarks, Irving writes the Coles as having lost two sons to an accident years earlier. To escape their past, Bridges and Basinger have moved to the island and started a new family together. But while they shoved their emotions away they’ve grown apart. Marion is so psychologically damaged she shuts down completely from time to time, and Ted drinks too much and sleeps with anything that walks. Eddie’s arrival for the summer has dire consequences for the Coles. He’s the match that lights the tinder sticks they’ve been collecting for a long, long time. Irving had some great insight to share about the nature of film adaptations of novels on the DVD special features. Guy’s got his head on straight. Other Irving adaptations include The Cider House Rules and Simon Birch.

I also rented If…. This surrealist 1968 Lindsay Anderson picture is set at a middle class British boarding school and centers on a trio of senior misfits who like to challenge authority in subtle and not so subtle ways. First, If…’s tone must have been a major influence on Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, one of my favorites. And second, there’s a fantastic moment when Malcolm McDowell’s subversive Mick Travis carefully opens and closes the door behind him like a pompous butler before receiving a beating from his superiors. The attitude on display in that brief scene served as the basis for McDowell’s entire performance in A Clockwork Orange, still his most famous role after an incredible career. If… was controversial when it premiered, and has been even further reviled since Columbine and other school shootings. But I found it an interesting portrait of classism and ageism in the era of the crumbling British empire (rather than an exploitation flick) with a great early performance from McDowell.

Here’s the teaser trailer for P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, based on the family drama by Upton Sinclair. The trailer looks good, even if Anderson seems to have lost his obsession with Robert Altman and been taken with Terence Malick instead. Seeing Daniel Day-Lewis again—in anything—is cool. The guy has only made seven movies since his break out role in Last of the Mohicans in 1993. He turned down the role of Aragorn in Lord of the Rings several times to concentrate on becoming a master shoemaker. Not kidding.