Two films we abandoned

Started and abandoned two movies last night, for two different reasons. First tried "You Kill Me," a supposed mob comedy with a fairly elite cast (Ben Kingsley stars) - alcoholic mob enforcer in Buffalo screws up a job and the boss sends him to SF to dry out. Why San Francisco, he asks? Because I said so, boss replies, and that's about the level of dialog and credibility. Nothing (in the first half-hour) was believable in any way - it was just a script writer's lark, some guys trying to latch on to success of other mob comedies that actually had some wit and some characters you could believe in for 2 hours or even 20 seconds. Finally gave up when Kingsley takes a job in a funeral parlor (have we ever seen that before?) and comes on to a client maybe a third his age and she's pleased about that. A Hollywood, and the aged male titans of the realm! Second we started is the somewhat renowned Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnes Varda's best-known film, circa 1960. It's actually fun to watch some of the great sequences of Cleo walking along the streets of Paris, looking great (she's a pop star) as Paris looks poor and dirty, as it did then still recovering from the war. Varda's camera follows her in long takes, shot from above, to a jazzy soundtrack (also some Bizet?). Compared with movies of its era, it's much more documentary in look, filmed on location, almost improvisational at times, lots of rough edges, shot as if in real time (two hours), and focused on the woman's POV by a woman director - and yet, today, after a half-hour, it seemed tedious, the wit highly dated, the tension flaccid - an important film of its day and worth watching if you have a lot of time and patience, but not a film that stands up well today, sadly.