George Clooney, they say, is a movie star. Though many combine a social conscience with chops on both sides of the camera, Clooney's bountiful allure stems from his down-to-earth humility, the fact that he doesn't appear to take himself too seriously. Clooney could be your neighbor, if you lived next door to an unfairly sexy Oscar winner and UN Messenger of Peace whose saucy charms might lead a person to think that he'd be mad fun in bed. Or against tree, on hood of car, under table, behind Taco Bell, next to - um, what was I talking about?

The only thing more appealing to me than prepositions with Clooney is the notion of him tackling the screwball comedy, a genre sorely in need of a proper revival. The strategy sounds easy enough: Take two attractive wits who don't get along and invent slapsticky reasons to keep them chattering until they do. With a neo-Cary Grant like Clooney calling the plays, "Leatherheads," a gridiron romance pitting Clooney's aging athlete against Renée Zellweger's go-getting journalist, could have been "It Happened One Night" or "His Girl Friday" or "The Philadelphia Story" for the 21st century. A lofty goal, to be sure, but "Leatherheads" unfortunately - to use Western New York vernacular - goes wide right.

Back in 1925 college football thrived while pro football wallowed, so Dodge Connelly (a suitably grizzled Clooney) decides to lure Princeton star and WWI hero Carter Rutherford (huge-toothed and boring John Krasinski, "The Office") out to his scrappy Duluth Bulldogs to drum up both attention and attendance. Carter's baggage includes his slithery manager (an ill-used Jonathan Pryce) as well as Lexie Littleton (Zellweger), an investigative reporter assigned to scrape at the patina on Carter's golden combat record. Dodge and Carter are, of course, instantly smitten by Lexie, and "Leatherheads" unspools much as you would expect, with both men competing for Lexie's affections in between games (and sometimes during), while Lexie wrestles with her journalistic principles.

The success of the yummy screwball banter that defined the comedies of the 30's and 40's - essentially a substitute for the sex outlawed by the Hays Code - was dependent upon chemistry and timing, both of which are startlingly absent from "Leatherheads." Zellweger's heroine is rather unlikable, enjoying zero connection with her leading men (it's a bad sign when even Clooney looks like he's trying), and though the script by sportswriters Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly has sporadic crackle, the whole film seems off by a frustrating beat or two. Randy Newman's ragtime-influenced score is predictably obnoxious, but "Leatherheads" at least looks gorgeous, shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, who also filmed Clooney's directing debut, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

Last week Clooney withdrew from the Writers' Guild after being denied a screenplay credit on "Leatherheads" (he claims to have rewritten all but two scenes), but he ought to have been secretly thankful for the snub. Modern-day filmmakers - with the notable exception of the Coen brothers - just can't seem to get the screwball comedy right. If there were ever a time for Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor to become a mentoring posse of zombies, this is it.

There's something bittersweet about dissecting the artistic process, and "Lynch," an unenlightening peek behind the creativity curtain of filmmaker David Lynch, makes that depressingly obvious. Shot on video and Super-8, "Lynch" trails its subject over two years as he puts together what would be his most abstract film, "Inland Empire," depicting him by turns desperate, affected, calculating, and brilliant. Lynch is shown indulging his love of stark industrial photography, and we learn that he is a devout practitioner of transcendental meditation, which he credits for inspiration.

Too awed by Lynch to explore his idiosyncracies in any challenging way, the sycophantic filmmakers seemed to be aspiring to a David Lynch film about David Lynch. Now, only David Lynch makes David Lynch films, and as "Lynch" shows, even David Lynch is trying to figure out what that might mean nowadays. Like the more experimental artists, Lynch is interesting precisely because he can't be explained. But his flat Midwestern accent delivers a good story, and I'll think twice the next time I hope to puncture a dead, bloated cow with a pick axe. 

Leatherheads

(PG-13), directed by George Clooney

Now playing

Lynch

(NR), directed by blackANDwhite

Screens Tuesday, April 15, at the Dryden