Michael Bloomberg, who is outspending opponent Bill Thompson $85 million to $6 million, said he doesn't need to win by a landslide tomorrow--he just wants to win.

Outside a bakery on Staten Island this morning, the mayor said, "Maybe a win's a win, but you'd always like to have more. But nobody is going to remember two days later how much you won by. You're only going to remember who the mayor is going to be for the next four years."

A new Quinnipiac poll shows Bloomberg leading Thompson by 12 points, but Bloomberg himself is only at 50 percent. That's down slightly from the October 26 poll which had Bloomberg at 53 percent.

Bloomberg, so far, has had a busy day and said he's not taking anything for granted. He took the 7:30 a.m. ferry to Staten Island and greeted voters there along with Borough President Jim Molinaro. Then the two visited a bakery on the Island where they shared coffee and Yankee-decorated corn muffins. (Molinaro paid). Outside, Bloomberg was confronted (politely) by a local resident who complained that the mayor's office has been unresponsive to his complaints about problems with the building he owns in Brooklyn. The mayor promised the man he'd look into it.

Then it was off to Fort Greene, where the mayor visited the Cake Man Raven, a small business owner who gave Bloomberg a signature chef coat and top hat. The two iced a cake (which sells for more than $75), and then he was out the door on a five-borough swing.

When Amelia Earhart, the world’s most famous aviatrix, disappeared in midair on July 2, 1937, somewhere over the Pacific between New Guinea and a Howland Island refueling station, 22,000 miles into the first equatorial flight around the world, she became the greatest unsolved mystery in aviation history. Why has it taken so long to get her story on the screen? Shirley MacLaine tried in vain for years, and others experienced the kind of daunting challenges that could only be equaled by Amelia herself. Here, at last, is the biopic we’ve been waiting for, neatly wrapped up in a broad but sketchy screenplay by Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan, directed by India’s Mira Nair and starring diligent, indefatigable two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. It has beautiful cinematography, a star performance that is shocking in its authenticity, a careful eye for nuance and detail and an irresistible blend of action and romance that should spell automatic success. I am sad to report that the one thing Amelia doesn’t have is excitement. The real Amelia had gonads. Amelia has none. It’s a respectable film that is too meticulous to be dull, but the way Ms. Swank plays her, she’s an icon so aware of her self-important image that she couldn’t be blasted out of her complacency with a hydrogen bomb.

This Amelia is a spirited, dauntless, reckless woman with blinders on, but curiously unemotional even in the face of the ultimate crisis. When she runs out of fuel and faces her own mortality, her tough, heavy-drinking and basically unshakable navigator, Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston), sweats, shakes and starts praying. But Amelia is as stoic as Lincoln. You want to pinch her. The light dawns. Maybe it’s this sense of marble-faced, dispassionate tranquility that made a cinematic dossier on the life of Amelia Earhart so resistant to adaptation in the past. There is evidence here that despite her heroics, she just wasn’t the stuff of movie heroines. You don’t really learn much about her growing up in Kansas. You just know she’s in love with the freedom of flying (cut to birds), the independence of the sky (cut to clouds) and the beauty of airplanes (other girls were attracted to boys; Amelia hung out in hangars). Following the success of Lindbergh, she finds the key to fame in a man’s profession when she is sponsored by eccentric publishing tycoon George Putnam (Richard Gere) to become the first lady pilot to cross the Atlantic, but gets no further than a segment from Boston to Newfoundland. The movie chronicles the weather problems and near-death escapes from open doors that would have sent other women to the nearest secretarial school for safety. Not Amelia. On her first solo Atlantic crossing, in 1932, from Boston to Ireland, she lands by mistake in a sheep pasture in Wales, but it results in worldwide publicity, dinner at the White House, endorsements for Eastman Kodak, a series of best-selling books, her own brand of Amelia Earhart luggage, a line of fashion styles at Macy’s and a close, lasting friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt (Cherry Jones), whom she takes for midnight rides in the cockpit. Idolized, celebrated and toasted as “Lady Lindy,” she makes enough money to finance her flying expeditions and purchase the love of her life—the famed twin-engine, orange and silver Lockheed L-10 Electra airplane in which she eventually disappears in 1937. She believes in herself to the exclusion of sex, marriage and the distraction of human relationships, but finally manages to have two affairs—with the controversial Putnam, whom she reluctantly marries in 1931, and with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), aeronautics executive and the father of Gore Vidal. Both affairs have to be predicated on the promise of independence and a minimum of emotion. (Amelia loves her Electra more than her husband or her lover.) She won’t rest until she’s flown around the globe, although many women pilots had died trying it. Despite faulty landing gear, electrical storms, sleep deprivation and other health risks, she and Fred Noonan leave Miami in June 1937, backed by Putnam’s love, loyalty and money. Driven and determined to prove something to the world—and to herself—Amelia almost makes it, ignoring Noonan’s advice, taking off from Calcutta in a monsoon and shrugging off her detractors’ accusations of being a crazy, irresponsible, foolish, fame-seeking celebrity. Based on this movie’s research, you begin to agree. Halfway between New Guinea and California, the radio transmitter goes dead, cutting off all signals, and a dead battery in the U.S. Navy signal transmitter makes it impossible for her to receive any incoming instructions. It was the last anyone heard of Amelia Earhart. They’ve been looking for her ever since.

Lots of facts, lots of calendar entries and a collage of information from aeronautical files provides the necessary tools for a documentary, but not enough heart-pounding adrenaline for a tragic historical film biography. There is so little warmth in the character of Amelia that I’m not sure I like her very much. I liked the movie a great deal more, in spite of its shortcomings, but the most amazing thing about it is Hilary Swank. With short russet hair, a nose covered with freckles and a total abstention from makeup, she looks exactly like the subject. Then, miraculously, when you see actual newsreel footage of Amelia Earhart, she looks so astoundingly like Hilary Swank you’ll think you’re seeing double.

rreed@observer.com

There is—to borrow a word from Mr. Friel about his own tortured hero—a magnificence about the play. Yet such are his storytelling gifts that we too easily label him another—yet another!—example of that tourist trap widely acclaimed as ‘‘splendid Irish eloquence.” His soul is more divided than that, and his poetic gifts cry out not to be glibly categorized or their point will be missed.

It’s often said that Faith Healer is a parable about a suffering artist, for its story concerns a man possessed by “a feud between himself and his talent.” The Irish faith healer Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes), who might be a con man, speaks of his inner demons and cursed self-doubt as well as those rare, God-given moments when life works wholly for him and becomes an exultation.

“And occasionally it worked—oh, yes, occasionally it did work … ,” he says of the times when he healed the sick and the miraculous appeared to happen. “I knew that for those few hours I had become whole in myself, and perfect in myself, and in a manner of speaking, an aristocrat, if the term doesn’t offend you.”

No offense taken. We worship aristocrats of talent every day of our lives—provided their talent is authentic. If Faith Healer is a metaphor for the tortured artist as playwright, however, Mr. Friel has some staggering, original thoughts about audiences.

“And the people who came—what is there to say about them?” the faith healer asks about the sick and the needy who came to him for a cure, an answer—some consolation. “They just sat there, very still, assuming that I divined their complaints … . Longing to open themselves and at the same time fearfully herding the anguish they contained against disturbance. And they hated me—oh, yes, yes, yes, they hated me. Because by coming to me they exposed, publicly acknowledged, their desperation.”

Who else writes like this? We listen to a Friel play as no other and at the Booth Theatre, where Faith Healer is playing to packed, awed houses, it’s a powerful testimony to Jonathan Kent’s production that you can scarcely hear a pin drop the entire evening. Then what were we all listening to so intently in our private, self-contained “disturbance” and “desperation”?

Not a parable of a tortured artist alone, surely! Not that old chestnut! If the lot of the poor artist were all Faith Healer is about, it would be a lesser, peculiar play and we wouldn’t be so rapt by it. It is about many things—the ravages of memory, the nature of fictional, hard lives, the Ireland that dreams beautiful romantic dreams and the Ireland that kills itself. But, above all, the play is about Mr. Friel’s most recurring theme. It’s about exile and exile from yourself, and therefore their reverse—the illusory shelter of home.

If you will, Faith Healer is about us—the self-doubt within us all and the yearning for consolation. As Seamus Deane pointed out aptly about the play, “The mediating agency is, as always, disappointment, but it is a disappointment all the more profound because it is haunted by the possibility of miracle and of Utopia.”

Unusually, the play is four monologues—the first and last spoken by the faith healer Frank—or “The Fantastic Frank Hardy,” as he’s billed like a traveling vaudevillian—his wife, Grace (Cherry Jones), and his cockney manager Teddy (Ian McDiarmid, who steals the show). In the usual way, I tend to run a mile from monologues. Yet all is mysteriously complete here, and epic.

The stories Mr. Friel weaves are terrible and even comic as each version of the events that led up to Frank’s return to Ballybeg and his preordained, brutal killing are told. The prodigal son foresees his own death when he realizes that his powers will fail him and the mob will tear him apart, and he “saw him and recognised our meeting: an open space, a walled yard, trees, orange skies, warm wind. And knew, knew with cold certainty that nothing was going to happen. Nothing at all.”

When Ralph Fiennes delivered those lines, his haggard face took on the hue of a death mask and I went cold. Yet I had been concerned at first that he would be too refined, too elegantly “poetic,” for the role of God’s soiled savior and con man who sleeps in ditches and dies nightly drenched in whisky. Since we’re all authors of our own fictions, I imagined an earthier version of Frank, with nicotine stains on his chewed fingers and a crumpled, stained suit. But I remembered that when Faith Healer was first produced in New York, James Mason—of all suave actors—played the role.

Mr. Fiennes proved excellent and furious in his terror, and his performance has stayed with me. He is nowhere more moving than when he ultimately embraces death like a welcoming shroud and Mr. Friel’s words conjure up an image of a world decomposing.

I regret that I felt Cherry Jones sentimentalized the role of the distraught, abused wife or mistress of the man “with such a talent for hurting.” I know this middle-aged woman, named Grace: She is bone tired, and tired of life. But these exceptionally demanding monologues need only to drop a fraction in temperature for even the finest of actors to go off the boil. Though the audience adored Ms. Jones just the same, she was a little below par at the performance I saw.

Described in the script as “indifferent to her appearance,” it didn’t help at all that she was costumed like a neat (and pretty) bank manager. The only general criticism I have of Mr. Kent’s admirably spare production is of the glamorized costumes. These characters who traveled on the road like renegades lived in a van or local dump! Their clothes were never new.

No matter that the smoking jacket the manager Teddy wears ought to be beaten with years and years of hanging alone in damp doss houses and fields. With Ian McDiarmid wearing it, we have a performance as good as one could possibly get. Mr. McDiarmid, whose yeoman work I know from England, has found a role that fits him like a glove.

“I’ll tell you something, dear heart,” Teddy confides with irresistible chirpiness. “Spend your life in show business and you become a philosopher.” At one point, Teddy mentions Laurence Olivier with a certain apt awe, and I would say that the veteran actor who’s playing him with the careful comb-over equals Olivier in one of his legendary character parts.

In his nimbleness, good humor and vast despair, Ian McDiarmid touches greatness. So does the play.

There is—to borrow a word from Mr. Friel about his own tortured hero—a magnificence about the play. Yet such are his storytelling gifts that we too easily label him another—yet another!—example of that tourist trap widely acclaimed as ‘‘splendid Irish eloquence.” His soul is more divided than that, and his poetic gifts cry out not to be glibly categorized or their point will be missed.

It’s often said that Faith Healer is a parable about a suffering artist, for its story concerns a man possessed by “a feud between himself and his talent.” The Irish faith healer Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes), who might be a con man, speaks of his inner demons and cursed self-doubt as well as those rare, God-given moments when life works wholly for him and becomes an exultation.

“And occasionally it worked—oh, yes, occasionally it did work … ,” he says of the times when he healed the sick and the miraculous appeared to happen. “I knew that for those few hours I had become whole in myself, and perfect in myself, and in a manner of speaking, an aristocrat, if the term doesn’t offend you.”

No offense taken. We worship aristocrats of talent every day of our lives—provided their talent is authentic. If Faith Healer is a metaphor for the tortured artist as playwright, however, Mr. Friel has some staggering, original thoughts about audiences.

“And the people who came—what is there to say about them?” the faith healer asks about the sick and the needy who came to him for a cure, an answer—some consolation. “They just sat there, very still, assuming that I divined their complaints … . Longing to open themselves and at the same time fearfully herding the anguish they contained against disturbance. And they hated me—oh, yes, yes, yes, they hated me. Because by coming to me they exposed, publicly acknowledged, their desperation.”

Who else writes like this? We listen to a Friel play as no other and at the Booth Theatre, where Faith Healer is playing to packed, awed houses, it’s a powerful testimony to Jonathan Kent’s production that you can scarcely hear a pin drop the entire evening. Then what were we all listening to so intently in our private, self-contained “disturbance” and “desperation”?

Not a parable of a tortured artist alone, surely! Not that old chestnut! If the lot of the poor artist were all Faith Healer is about, it would be a lesser, peculiar play and we wouldn’t be so rapt by it. It is about many things—the ravages of memory, the nature of fictional, hard lives, the Ireland that dreams beautiful romantic dreams and the Ireland that kills itself. But, above all, the play is about Mr. Friel’s most recurring theme. It’s about exile and exile from yourself, and therefore their reverse—the illusory shelter of home.

If you will, Faith Healer is about us—the self-doubt within us all and the yearning for consolation. As Seamus Deane pointed out aptly about the play, “The mediating agency is, as always, disappointment, but it is a disappointment all the more profound because it is haunted by the possibility of miracle and of Utopia.”

Unusually, the play is four monologues—the first and last spoken by the faith healer Frank—or “The Fantastic Frank Hardy,” as he’s billed like a traveling vaudevillian—his wife, Grace (Cherry Jones), and his cockney manager Teddy (Ian McDiarmid, who steals the show). In the usual way, I tend to run a mile from monologues. Yet all is mysteriously complete here, and epic.

The stories Mr. Friel weaves are terrible and even comic as each version of the events that led up to Frank’s return to Ballybeg and his preordained, brutal killing are told. The prodigal son foresees his own death when he realizes that his powers will fail him and the mob will tear him apart, and he “saw him and recognised our meeting: an open space, a walled yard, trees, orange skies, warm wind. And knew, knew with cold certainty that nothing was going to happen. Nothing at all.”

When Ralph Fiennes delivered those lines, his haggard face took on the hue of a death mask and I went cold. Yet I had been concerned at first that he would be too refined, too elegantly “poetic,” for the role of God’s soiled savior and con man who sleeps in ditches and dies nightly drenched in whisky. Since we’re all authors of our own fictions, I imagined an earthier version of Frank, with nicotine stains on his chewed fingers and a crumpled, stained suit. But I remembered that when Faith Healer was first produced in New York, James Mason—of all suave actors—played the role.

Mr. Fiennes proved excellent and furious in his terror, and his performance has stayed with me. He is nowhere more moving than when he ultimately embraces death like a welcoming shroud and Mr. Friel’s words conjure up an image of a world decomposing.

I regret that I felt Cherry Jones sentimentalized the role of the distraught, abused wife or mistress of the man “with such a talent for hurting.” I know this middle-aged woman, named Grace: She is bone tired, and tired of life. But these exceptionally demanding monologues need only to drop a fraction in temperature for even the finest of actors to go off the boil. Though the audience adored Ms. Jones just the same, she was a little below par at the performance I saw.

Described in the script as “indifferent to her appearance,” it didn’t help at all that she was costumed like a neat (and pretty) bank manager. The only general criticism I have of Mr. Kent’s admirably spare production is of the glamorized costumes. These characters who traveled on the road like renegades lived in a van or local dump! Their clothes were never new.

No matter that the smoking jacket the manager Teddy wears ought to be beaten with years and years of hanging alone in damp doss houses and fields. With Ian McDiarmid wearing it, we have a performance as good as one could possibly get. Mr. McDiarmid, whose yeoman work I know from England, has found a role that fits him like a glove.

“I’ll tell you something, dear heart,” Teddy confides with irresistible chirpiness. “Spend your life in show business and you become a philosopher.” At one point, Teddy mentions Laurence Olivier with a certain apt awe, and I would say that the veteran actor who’s playing him with the careful comb-over equals Olivier in one of his legendary character parts.

In his nimbleness, good humor and vast despair, Ian McDiarmid touches greatness. So does the play.

Unless they aren't richly deserved. But let's not go into The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee quite so soon. It would spoil the atmosphere. Juth becauth it's a childlike muthical lithping its way to thuctheth. Personally, I still haven't got over its cute little girl played by an adult actress in fierce pigtails who can spell "thithtitith."

Nevertheless, I wish all the winners well. True, the televised Tonys have never been quite as glamorous as the Oscars. But watch out for a glimpse of Mayor Dinkins on the red carpet. Here are my tips for the major categories in the 2005 Tony Awards, being shown on CBS on June 5 at 8 p.m. And the envelope, please!

Though I prefer Martin McDonagh's weirdly disturbing The Pillowman, and some think it will take the Tony for Best Play, the winner will be John Patrick Shanley's Doubt. The gifted Mr. Shanley has had a wonderfully productive season, and the play has already won this year's Pulitzer. My doubts about Doubt when I reviewed it were that its outcome is never really in doubt. Mr. Shanley's unstoppably righteous nun fixes the truth about the priest she suspects is molesting a choirboy. Faith, the message appears to be, requires no evidence. Maybe so. Absolutely no doubt, however, that Mr. Shanley will take home the Tony.

This isn't going to be The Pillowman's night. I expect Doug Hughes of Doubt to win Best Director. But what odds as Best Actress on Doubt's Cherry Jones versus Kathleen Turner of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's almost too close to call.

The Best Actress category is already fierce enough, with Laura Linney ( Sight Unseen) and Mary-Louise Parker ( Reckless) also nominated. Ms. Jones is a critics' darling, giving a flawless performance as the nun lying to herself in righteous certitude. But Ms. Turner as Edward Albee's mythic man-eater drinking herself into goading oblivion has been almost unanimously raved over. Hmm … Ms. Turner's unafraid, unembarrassed performance is the more challenging role. But my hunch is the Tony will go to Cherry Jones.

The category for Best Actor in a Play includes such brilliant actors as Brian F. O'Byrne for his dedicated priest under suspicion in Doubt and Billy Crudup's amateur storyteller on nightmare trial for his life in Pillowman. But the sentimental favorite, James Earl Jones as crusty old Norman Thayer in musty old On Golden Pond, will win.

Look at the nominees for Featured Actor in a Play! Three of the five are from the terrific all-male ensemble of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross-Alan Alda, Liev Schreiber and Gordon Clapp. I think Mr. Alda's washed-up salesman begging for his livelihood could just about win, but the split vote hands an opportunity to the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg of The Pillowman.

The melodramatic Roundabout production of Twelve Angry Men was peculiarly popular. But the Tony of Best Play Revival ought to go to Glengarry Glen Ross, which actually gives revivals a good name.

Best Musical is between the underdog Spelling Bee versus the big rich guy, Monty Python's Spamalot. The innate English dopiness of Spamalot is far superior to the manufactured American dopiness of another nominee, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The Italianate musical The Light in the Piazza is much too serious at this level, although its old-fashioned theme about a retarded American girl who falls for a gorgeous Italian in Florence is come se dice-'ow you sayz?-lika beega pizza pie. The whole world loves an underdog, or a puppet, as last year's surprise Best Musical, Avenue Q, proves. Cute lispers or the rampant joys of English schoolboy silliness? Monty Python's Spamalot takes the Tony.

Mike Nichols-for it is he-wins so many awards they should ban him from all awards ceremonies, except as a presenter. If necessary, he could present himself with another Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Nichols of Spamalot will surely win for Best Director of a Musical.

I think Eric Idle of Spamalot will win for Best Book of a Musical. None of the four nominations for Best Original Score, however, are exactly "original": They're derivative or pastiche. Adam Guettel's Sondheimean Light in the Piazza is the most original of the bunch. But I think Spamalot will be on a roll and the Tony will go to John Du Prez and Eric Idle.

The neophyte Christina Applegate of Sweet Charity has achieved a dogged miracle by receiving a nomination for Best Actress in a Musical, and some showbiz sentimentalists, including Ms. Applegate, are hoping her dream will come true. Sherie René Scott is great fun in Rotten Scoundrels. The winner will be Victoria Clark for her outstandingly dignified performance in The Light in the Piazza.

Best Actor in a Musical is a tougher choice. Hank Azaria and Tim Curry of Spamalot are both very appealing, but they split their votes. Gary Beach wasn't universally admired in the revival of La Cage aux Folles. Nor was the mannered John Lithgow in Rotten Scoundrels. Norbert Leo Butz of Rotten Scoundrels gave one of the most over-the-top performances I've seen in a musical, or anywhere, and Mr. Butz will win.

I see that along with three other solo shows, Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays has been nominated for a Tony for Special Theatrical Event. And the winner is … Mario Cantone for Laugh Whore!

But don't bet on it. Still, Mr. Cantone will be there proudly in his tux just the same. It's good, of course, that Edward Albee will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. (What kept them?) But I'm particularly thrilled that a Tony for Regional Theater is going to one of the finest troupes in America, the Theatre de la Jeune Lune of Minneapolis.

A decade or more ago, I caught a masterpiece of theirs on tour in Los Angeles. Their stage version of Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise counts vividly as among the best experiences of my theatergoing life. And I remember how, at the end of the performance, the cast members lined up as mere mortals and innocents in the foyer to shake our hands, if that's what we wanted to do. I was so thankful I embraced them, and wrote about their astonishing achievement, and for the only time in my life I pleaded with theater producers here to bring a great production to New York.

Well, they're here at last! Perhaps the Theatre de la Jeune Lune no longer performs their Children of Paradise. It seems like a fantastic dream now. But in theater, it's never too late to make amends, never too late to give thanks for work so wonderfully done.

Pride's Crossing is cleverly staged, with pristine sets and the versatile performances of a six-member supporting cast, who alternate ages, genders and periods in a succession of roles. But Ms. Jones is the centerpiece-portraying a starchy, New England matriarch who once broke a world record for swimming the English Channel-and without makeup she grows from a dreamy child obsessed with becoming somebody, to an awkward, moody teenager crashing about under the kitchen table, to a 90-year-old survivor hardened and gnarled by arthritis. She makes every transformation with body language that is awesome. As an old woman, her speech is fuzzy, her mouth is crooked with what looks like the remnants of a stroke, her voice cracks like Katharine Hepburn's. Minutes later, in a flashback, she's diaphanous in Roaring 20's lemon chiffon. These transitions seem effortless, yet she embraces every age and attitude with staggering honesty and a heart the size of Texas. From her alcoholic husband's suicide at age 67 to the botching of the one great love of her life, a Jewish obstetrician whom she lacked the courage to marry (wonderfully played by David Lansbury), she makes you feel and share every emotion. This is a majestic, hypnotic and truthful performance in the tradition of Laurette Taylor, Kim Stanley, and Julie Harris at the height of their powers, the kind of consummate artistry seldom encountered in the New York theater in the 1990's. Cherry Jones is overwhelming, and you are in for the treat of your life.

The Dude? Big Deal!

Question: What will the Coen brothers come up with to equal the cult status of Fargo ? Answer: nothing. The Big Lebowski , their new and eagerly anticipated follow-up film, is part slapstick Hollywood farce, part kidnap caper in the Raymond Chandler tradition, and all hooey. The whole thing is like a filmed acid trip, a cornball stew of frenetic head-bangers that defy interpretation or analysis. What a mess, and there is vomiting throughout.

To the strains of "Tumbling Tumbleweed," Jeff Bridges plays a 70's dropout with grungy beard, ugly sandals, a gray bathrobe and bermuda shorts called Jeff Lebowski, alias the Dude. One day, on his way home from drinking milk out of cartons at the supermarket, this bonehead's creepy apartment at the beach is invaded and ransacked by thugs who mistake him for a Pasadena millionaire, also named Jeff Lebowski, peeing on his rug when they exit. John Goodman, who makes more bad movies than Bridget Fonda and Eric Stoltz put together, plays the Dude's moronic, oafish, obnoxious, loudmouthed bowling buddy, Walter. Walter convinces the Dude to confront the other Lebowski and collect damages for his urine-soaked rug, but the old geezer turns out to be a mean-spirited Scrooge in a wheelchair (David Huddleston) who first throws the Dude out on his Ray-Bans, then employs him to deliver a cool million-dollar ransom for his kidnapped nymphet wife Bunny (Tara Reid).

The Dude and Walter, who couldn't add up a combined I.Q. of 12, turn into a scuzzy version of Abbott and Costello, and when they decide to keep the million for themselves, the lunacy begins to escalate. What happens from that point on is a crazy quilt of interminable plot twists involving extortion, deception, embezzlement, sex and dope that demonstrate what happens when an unemployed doofus tries to outwit the felonious California upper crust. Everyone would be better off bowling, including the audience.

As the demented, convoluted plot careens out of control, a cast of thousands stampedes the camera, including a man in an iron lung, a landlord dancing in a tutu, a giggling video artist (David Thewlis), the Big Lebowski's bizarre daughter (Julianne Moore) who accuses her father of stealing the ransom money from his own foundation for "miniature urban achievers," a lurid Latin pederast who molests children (John Turturro, replete with purple spandex jumpsuit and a hairnet) and a flashy porno filmmaker (Ben Gazzara), knocking themselves unconscious in an effort to stir up some laughs in a plot that can't even be described. Meanwhile, Mr. Bridges goes through the motions of playing slapstick as though he's just been handed revised pages of dialogue before each scene commences. Comedy is not his forte, which he makes uncomfortably clear.

But the Coens (Joel directed and wrote the lumpy script with brother Ethan) seem oblivious to logic and reason, plunging on through sight gags, montages, dream sequences and even a Busby Berkeley production number with Mr. Bridges club-footing it through a line of chorus girls wearing bowling-pin headresses, sending up Hollywood and its films in the process. While the Dude leaps from Malibu to Pasadena, the Coens poke fun at everything and everyone along the way-neo-Nazi skinheads who cut off a woman's toe, fatal heart attacks, cremations-all set for some inexplicable reason during the Persian Gulf War. Tasteless, vulgar and desperately unfunny, it's a labored, asinine farce that finally crashes head-first into a brick wall, knocking its brains out. What were they on? It wasn't Snapple.

Mr. Bridges has played this kind of beleaguered Everyman pothead before, but his gifts for idiosyncratic characterization are wasted here. Ramming into the scenery, choking on joints and spitting up an endless succession of nauseating White Russians, he's not human enough to be real, or metaphorical enough to be a comic caricature. The Big Lebowski is loopier and livelier than Fargo, but the Coens have provided no emotional history to make the central character of the Dude sympathetic instead of a cardboard buffoon, so Mr. Bridges is just a small black hole at the center of an even bigger black hole. In their growing repertoire of offbeat work, the Coens have finally come up with a thumping catastrophe.

Modine Outwits Ambitious Blonde

Can two bright, attractive people surrounded by career anxiety and sexual temptation find true happiness and old-fashioned virtues in the contemporary chaos of New York's fashion and entertainment industries? This is the dilemma faced by a sharp, witty cast in The Real Blonde , a charming second cousin to As Good as It Gets . Matthew Modine, an underrated, charismatic actor from the same "can't find a good script" school as Michael Keaton, finally gets a chance to shine as Joe Finnegan, a penniless but dedicated actor with no agent and no connections who wants to do Arthur Miller plays but never gets any closer to art than stripping down for a Madonna music video.

Joe is in a long-term relationship with his girlfriend Mary (Catherine Keener), a makeup artist who is tired of paying the bills with the money she earns from fashion shoots. While Joe slaves away waiting on tables, his carefree pal Bob (Maxwell Caulfield) lands the lead in a soap opera and sleeps around in his search for a "real blonde" who doesn't come out of a Clairol bottle. In their widening circle of friends, everyone knows frustration of one sort or another, including an oversexed soap star (Daryl Hannah); a curvaceous underwear model on every billboard in town (Bridgette Wilson); a tough casting agent (Kathleen Turner); a neurotic, temperamental fashion photographer (Marlo Thomas); and a horny shrink (Buck Henry). Joe almost succumbs to the Devil in the arms of Madonna's body double (Elizabeth Berkley) and Mary is tempted by Denis Leary, an instructor in a self-defense class designed to release stress, rage and hostility toward men.

Somehow the alternatives to routine life with all of its worries never are as perfect as they seem in the movies. Even happy, hedonistic Bob discovers humiliation when he finally finds a real blonde and becomes a famous stud muffin with erection problems. Somehow, in a frantic world of bogus values, bad priorities and screwed-up ideals, everyone rediscovers the root definition of happily ever after. And all in the heart of little old New York. I'm not sure what the point of The Real Blonde is-or if it even makes one-but it's nice to see loyalty and commitment pay off in a modern comedy, instead of the usual avarice and greed, and the first-rate writing and direction (both by Tom DeCillo) as well as the subtle, underplayed ensemble work by a swell, gifted cast add up to two sophisticated, highly enjoyable hours indeed.

Cross-dressing has a noble lineage though it isn't as easy as it may seem. It isn't the dress but the spirit that fills it. So Daniel Shore's Juliet at the John Houseman Studio Theater is a theatrical gem because he somehow captures the spirit of a young woman in love in "the two-hour traffic of our stage" with complete, un-camp naturalness. Mr. Shore's Juliet is so convincing, he changes sex.

That is, he does and he doesn't. He is not RuPaul, thank goodness. (One is enough.) He remains himself throughout the performance. He remains a young man, for all to see. Mr. Shore, in his early 20's, plays the 14-year-old Juliet without the usual disguises-a frock, say, or long blond tresses of boundless feminine allure. Along with the three other young male actors who also play female roles in this thrillingly successful new production of Romeo and Juliet , Mr. Shore is dressed in the uniform of a prep-school boy.

Here's something fresh and surprising: A four-man version of Romeo and Juliet set in a prep school of horny boys that works! I feared it wouldn't, to be honest. There's too much gender-bending going on, which often makes an easy avant-garde "statement" for its own draggy sake. An experimental Romeo and Juliet in which four male actors play all the parts stood a fair chance, too, of turning out to be an act of lunacy. But the Expanded Arts' R&J (as it's known) has been directed by Joe Calarco with enormous integrity, and the outcome is a triumph.

On one intriguing level, the production actually takes us to the very heart of acting, which is the mysterious art of pretending to be someone else-or telling a magnificent lie truthfully. Mr. Shore's Juliet is a direct link to the Elizabethan stage of Shakespeare in which, of course, all the female roles were played by boys. Or, more likely, by young men. It's difficult to imagine a boy playing Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra. It's scarcely easier to imagine Cleopatra as a young man. But in Puritan England, that's the way it was-and no one had a problem with it. If there had been a problem, we would know .

In the irreplaceable bastardized tradition of British pantomime, the old affectionate crone known as the Dame is played to this day by a man, and her daughter, the young romantic lead known as the Principal Boy, is invariably a girl with strapping thighs. So we have a boy who's a girl whose mother is a man. Is it any wonder the British get confused?

Gender-swapping has a noble theater lineage, as I say. After all, for hundreds of years, men have performed all female roles in Japanese kabuki (and in such an astonishing way it's theorized that femininity can only be truly acted by a man). The ultimate achievement of Mr. Shore's Juliet is to convince us that his gender doesn't matter. To the contrary, his Juliet isn't stereotypically demure or winsomely flushed with love. His Juliet is all too real-and dangerous-precisely because Juliet's passionate love for Romeo is illicit.

R&J's imaginative director has made it clear that his concept of students in a private school first reading the play, then acting it, was created to mirror Shakespeare's Verona and the stifling, repressive world that Romeo and Juliet inhabit. It's a brilliantly simple concept that works in remarkable ways. The prep-school boys themselves at first sniggeringly dismiss the play, only to be seduced by it, which is nice. Juliet's first entrance stifles their laughter. She is serious-and seriously in love. Love, when spoken as beautifully as this, is no laughing matter.

So the well-known story of Romeo and Juliet's forbidden love is made new, as if told for the first time. The testosterone youth and vitality of the prep-school kids themselves makes the action come alive. Using minimum means in the small black box of a stage, the four performers effortlessly conjure up maximum effect. But more than any other production of Romeo and Juliet I've seen, the danger of the star-crossed young lovers' sexual awakening is real rather than "romantic." It's as real and as secret as the first kiss between two schoolboys.

Mr. Shore's wonderful Juliet (with Danny Gurwin's witty, disciplined Nurse; Mr. Gurwin is another fine young actor) give gender-bending a very good name. They make formidable women. Compare them, if you will, to the self-conscious, phony cross-dressers in Tina Howe's homage to faded haute WASPdom, Pride's Crossing , at Lincoln Center. Ms. Howe, proud feminist that she is, has it both ways-women play men and men play women-in what otherwise struck me as an unsurprising, pretty conventional drama about, of all things, a Boston Brahmin named Mabel who swam the English Channel in 1928.

Cherry Jones, in beatific mood again, plays Mabel (and Katharine Hepburn) at age 90-crotchety and adorable, of course-who looks back over her long life of triumphant liberation (the Channel swim) and conventional class-ridden cowardice (the night she married the alcoholic Boston blueblood instead of running off with the Jewish obstetrician and champion swimmer). "Face it, darling," says the drunk husband, the rotten stinker, in one of Ms. Howe's melodramatic showdown scenes out of a romance novel. "You're still in love with him!"

Ms. Jones also plays Mabel as a giddy 10-year-old (all 10-year-olds played by adults are giddy ), and several other ages of Mabel, including a giddy 20-year-old, a polished 35-year-old socialite and a wise middle-aged widow, in random order as the 90-year-old's memories come and go. Ms. Jones' powerful performance has been acclaimed. She can change character with a hairpin, true. But that's what accomplished actors do. I saw her admired Mabel as too much of a turn-a carefully constructed, calculated and admirable performance in an overpraised play. And the evening left me grumpy, as you can tell.

But why the unlikely cross-dressers in Pride's Crossing sticking out like sore buns? It's a fashionable thing to do-a little bit unconventional and "naughty," so as not to frighten the Lincoln Center subscribers. Ms. Howe's idea, I assume, is that Mabel's Bostonian world is bound by social and sexual borders. Hence the woolly notion that an actress playing Mabel's brother-and playing him badly in an ill-fitting suit and stuck-on mustache-will somehow make the point. It's an obvious point. But why is the Irish cook, dear old Mary O'Neill, played by a man in drag? Don't tell me the man within Mary wants to swim free! But again, the male actor playing her doesn't do too well. Heck, we might as well bring on Milton Berle.

The gender-bending in Pride's Crossing is foolish; it's artificial. But in R&J , it astonishes. Because it's so natural. The gifted cast of the new version of Romeo and Juliet is asking in all simplicity: "Will you pretend with us?" And so we do.