Movie Review: The Ghost Writer ***

Wait, is Alfred Hitchcock still alive? Cuz I think he directed The Ghost Writer. They're telling us it's Roman Polanski but this film has a very retro feel to it, from the photography to the direction to the score, and truly feels very Hitchcockian to me. I haven't figured out yet if I like that about it or if it annoyed me.
A couple of odd things: in the first scene where Ewan McGregor's character is with his agent in a bar, his agent uses the word "fuck," at least that's what his mouth says, but it's been dubbed to use another word which I don't recall at the moment. It was very odd. Later it happens again with Pierce Brosnan but later still someone does actually use the word "fuck" and it's not dubbed so I don't know what that's all about.
Another interesting thing is that a completely bald and overweight Jim Belushi plays the publisher in an initial scene and I didn't recognize him except by his voice, and then I had to look really hard to be sure it was him.
Pierce Brosnan is mostly good as a former British Prime Minister. His assistant (and paramour) is played by Kim Cattrall who has a really bad British accent in the initial scenes but then (thankfully) the accent mostly disappears except for an occasional "he-ah" for "here." She looks great but she clearly just played herself on Sex and the City. She has no range as an actor and was obviously really lucky to have gotten the Samantha role and that the series was so wildly successful.
Meanwhile, back to The Ghost Writer, I guess the story is interesting and the style is intriguing; the acting is good, the direction is a bit over-done, but that's the genre. So I'm giving it three stars for "Liked It," although two and a half stars is probably closer to what I feel - somewhere between "Didn't Like It" and "Liked It."