Myers and Michielli. (Patrick McMullan)

In the listing photos, Roberta Myers and Frank Michielli’s new co-op at 924 West End Avenue looks a little fuddy duddy. But the place, as they say, has great bones, bones that we're sure its new owners—two souls uniquely suited to sussing out the aesthetically pleasing—will be able to take full advantage of.

And while Ms. Myers, the longtime editor of Elle, and Mr. Michelli, a partner at Michielli + Wyetzner Architects, are certainly well-equipped to dispense of the great-aunt paint job and floral wallpaper, they aren't the only ones who saw potential in the two-bedroom, two-bath apartment.

The co-op, which came on the market for $1.85 million in June with Fenwick Keats brokers Will Rogers (no, not that Will Rogers) and Kinnaird Fox, sold for more than ask at $1.92 million, according to city records. Sellers Donald Sutherland (no, not that Donald Sutherland) and Ruth Lawyer must be pleased.

Very Upper West Side.

After all, great aunts sometimes happen to have exquisite jewelry and valuable art. And if you can look beyond the overstuffed furniture in the listing photos, you notice parquet floods, oversized windows, wood-paneled walls and Arts and Crafts detailing. And the kitchen sounds flawless: oak glass-front cabinets, an Italian marble center island, Viking range and oversized windows with double arches.

No word on the closet situation, but we guess Mr. Michielli can probably draw up some designs. Or Ms. Myers could follow Jenna Lyons's lead and transform one of the bedrooms into storage? (Probably not going to work, given the couple's two children and the apartment's two bedrooms.)

It will be a short move uptown for the couple, who city records show previously owned an apartment at 639 West End Avenue.

The only question is whether Elle can help us find the budget version of a West End two-bedroom. Can the magazine please do a Shop the Trend on Upper West Side co-ops?

kvelsey@observer.com

Per Deadline, Donald Sutherland has signed on to a comedy pilot at Fox set in the rollicking world of NPR. While it's purportedly a pilot focused on a father-son relationship, we're sure the setting will have some impact upon the plotlines, especially since Fox's corporate cousins at Fox News have had a few things to say about NPR recently!

• “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive," Fox News chief Roger Ailes on NPR, 11/17/2011
• "I am not yet convinced that the NPR national operation in Washington has been able to rid itself of the elite liberal orthodoxy that made me into their whipping boy." --Juan Williams, Fox News commentator, 10/25/2011
• "Why should conservatives’ taxes pay for this?," from FoxNews.com article "NPR Admits It's Packed With Liberals," 03/16/2011
• "This shake-up at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster should not be soon forgotten. It shows the degree to which off-base and twisted Tea Party opposition can be, and how high the fanaticism reaches," 03/11/2011
• "NPR Executive Goes on Bigoted Rant," post syndicated from the Daily Caller, 03/08/2011
• "[NPR] throw[s] out propaganda in violation of the First Amendment... Terrorists want to create terror. Well, what does NPR want to create? They're intimidating, too," Bill O'Reilly's on-air comments, 10/2010

We eagerly await the show, as we love to laugh!

In the winter of 2006, Dr. Kate Forster (Ms. Bullock) finishes her residency, leaves her beloved Illinois lake house and moves to an important job in a major Chicago hospital. Back at the tranquil sanctuary she left behind, the new occupant is budding architect Alex Wyler (Mr. Reeves), who finds a note asking that he forward the mail to her new address. He goes to the city to deliver it, but there’s nothing there but a construction site. In the odd exchange of letters that follows, the postmarks on his envelopes are two years old. They fall in love. They have the same dog, a female mutt called Jack, who plays chess with her paws and likes being read to from the works of Dostoevsky. (I do not lie. Who could make these things up?)

But as the movie drags on, it becomes clear that either he’s living in the past while she’s living in the future, or one of them doesn’t exist at all. When they first meet, it may be 2004. They make a date to meet on Valentine’s Day in 2006, but while she’s sitting on a bench in front of the hospital, he may or may not be the man who gets killed in a trucking accident. Wafting between whimsical and lugubriously romantic, the movie finally reaches the assigned day of the appointed year in time for a happy ending at—you guessed it—the bizarre lake house with the mailbox that raises its own flag and delivers its own mail without the aid of a postman. Excuse me, but none of this makes any kind of logical sense. I mean, if they are living two years apart and he finally meets the girl of his dreams on Valentine’s Day, 2006, wouldn’t the day for her really be Valentine’s Day, 2008? And if he’s the man struck dead in front of the hospital, what is he doing at the lake house two years later in the first place?

Obviously aimed at a youth market with no perception, The Lake House is a potboiler about meeting the right person in the wrong time and space and not giving up until time stops forever. But for anyone with a bit of life experience, the pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together to form a coherent or satisfying narrative, and all you’re left with is a big, dumb “Huh?”

Like most bad movies today, the real actors are the ones who fill the supporting slots. The marvelous and enchanting Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who made a powerful impact as Ben Kingsley’s tragic wife in House of Sand and Fog, plays a wise and sympathetic doctor colleague that I cared more about than Ms. Bullock. Dylan Walsh, the impossibly handsome star of TV’s controversial series Nip/Tuck, plays the sexy boyfriend that Ms. Bullock incomprehensibly sacrifices for Mr. Reeves. And Christopher Plummer delivers a long, pointless lecture on the relationship between architecture and the nature that reflects it, which explains why the structures in Barcelona are different from the buildings in Tokyo. The writer is David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer for his play Proof, but this speech seems to belong to another movie, like almost everything else in the movie, including the limp direction by Argentina’s Alejandro Agresti. In their first collaboration since the 1994 action hit Speed, the Bullock-Reeves team has learned nothing. She can act, but she rarely appears in anything worth acting in. Like Bill Murray, he always appears to be waking from a nap—or looking for a cozy cot to catch one.

Leading Blind

If satire is the thing that closes on Saturday night, then political satire is usually doomed to close one night earlier. In the case of a pretentious monstrosity called Land of the Blind, it’s a miracle it ever opened at all. If this is the winner of the 2001 Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screenwriting competition, one can only assume the judges locked in their Hollywood hotel rooms with scoring pencils were sniffing something besides room service.

An admirable cast headed by Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland trash their talents big time in this futuristic political drivel about dictators, terrorists and corruption in an unnamed country with overloaded similarities and not-so-subtle references to Iraq, Chile, Nazi Germany and the good old U.S. of A. For 20 years, the insane son and heir of a President-for-Life who condemned all dissenters to the gallows has become a dictator even more vicious, brutal and evil than his father. Generalissimo Maximillian II, known as “Junior,” specializes in murder, rape and torture—in addition to which, he runs the country’s film industry. (An inside joke, for as we all know, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.) Tom Hollander (Gosford Park) gives the most colorful performance in the movie as the mincing, pouty-mouthed Führer who conducts cabinet meetings during his bowel movements. The always-exotic Lara Flynn Boyle matches his perversions as the orgiastic First Lady, dressed like a Cher imitator in a drag revue.

For two decades, they have massacred all opponents, but now a revolution is hatching, masterminded by a political prisoner named Thorne (Sutherland), a liberal intellectual sentenced to 13 years for writing a play critical of the dictatorship, and head of the underground movement called “Citizens for Justice and Democracy.” While he writes revolutionary slogans on the walls of his cell with his own excrement, an idealistic guard named Joe (Fiennes) can’t resist his philosophy, let alone the smell. Ignoring Junior’s savage threats, Joe springs Thorne and organizes the assassination of the dictator and his wife while they are crawling around naked on all fours, oinking like pigs.

Thorne becomes the new liberation leader, and for his brave heroics in guiding him to power, Joe becomes his reluctant poster boy for democracy, although with the new vegetarian laws, book burnings and martyrs hanging from every rooftop, Joe sees through the sham and turns cynical, suspecting Thorne of becoming the same kind of fiend as the one he just dethroned. Barristers, attorneys, teachers, religious leaders and other loyal supporters of the new regime are shipped to “re-education classes” that are nothing more than New Age concentration camps. After refusing to sign a loyalty oath, Joe ends up locked in the same kind of prison-cell predicament Thorne was in when they first met. Having outlived his usefulness as a political puppet, he enrages his mentor by becoming a counterrevolutionary. After Thorne is silently executed in a bathtub by one of his deluded female followers (Marat stabbed by Charlotte Corday), it is clear that the time has come for a new leader. You don’t have be a political-science major to figure out who the next dictator will be.

Subtle as a hydrogen bomb, the messages in Land of the Blind are (Excelsior!) threefold: Change can only come about through a coup d’état of blood and gore; every new society succeeds by violently annihilating all traces of the old one; and after every revolution, the idealists end up ruled by another criminal tyranny worse than the one they had before. (For starters, see Cuba, Afghanistan, Russia and North Korea.)

How this naïve script by a former soldier in Iraq and nightclub doorman named Robert Edwards ever won a literary contest is a head-scratcher for the muses. Sample dialogue: “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy”; “If I catch you talking to that prisoner again, I’ll beat you like a red-headed stepchild, and skull-fuck your corpse!” Worse yet, he is also the director. Among the multitude of lessons he must learn if his career moves forward are the following: how to frame a shot, how to control actors from eating the sets, and where to place the camera in order to get more than two people in the same set-up. Everything else about Land of the Blind is as big a mystery to me as crib death.

In the winter of 2006, Dr. Kate Forster (Ms. Bullock) finishes her residency, leaves her beloved Illinois lake house and moves to an important job in a major Chicago hospital. Back at the tranquil sanctuary she left behind, the new occupant is budding architect Alex Wyler (Mr. Reeves), who finds a note asking that he forward the mail to her new address. He goes to the city to deliver it, but there’s nothing there but a construction site. In the odd exchange of letters that follows, the postmarks on his envelopes are two years old. They fall in love. They have the same dog, a female mutt called Jack, who plays chess with her paws and likes being read to from the works of Dostoevsky. (I do not lie. Who could make these things up?)

But as the movie drags on, it becomes clear that either he’s living in the past while she’s living in the future, or one of them doesn’t exist at all. When they first meet, it may be 2004. They make a date to meet on Valentine’s Day in 2006, but while she’s sitting on a bench in front of the hospital, he may or may not be the man who gets killed in a trucking accident. Wafting between whimsical and lugubriously romantic, the movie finally reaches the assigned day of the appointed year in time for a happy ending at—you guessed it—the bizarre lake house with the mailbox that raises its own flag and delivers its own mail without the aid of a postman. Excuse me, but none of this makes any kind of logical sense. I mean, if they are living two years apart and he finally meets the girl of his dreams on Valentine’s Day, 2006, wouldn’t the day for her really be Valentine’s Day, 2008? And if he’s the man struck dead in front of the hospital, what is he doing at the lake house two years later in the first place?

Obviously aimed at a youth market with no perception, The Lake House is a potboiler about meeting the right person in the wrong time and space and not giving up until time stops forever. But for anyone with a bit of life experience, the pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together to form a coherent or satisfying narrative, and all you’re left with is a big, dumb “Huh?”

Like most bad movies today, the real actors are the ones who fill the supporting slots. The marvelous and enchanting Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who made a powerful impact as Ben Kingsley’s tragic wife in House of Sand and Fog, plays a wise and sympathetic doctor colleague that I cared more about than Ms. Bullock. Dylan Walsh, the impossibly handsome star of TV’s controversial series Nip/Tuck, plays the sexy boyfriend that Ms. Bullock incomprehensibly sacrifices for Mr. Reeves. And Christopher Plummer delivers a long, pointless lecture on the relationship between architecture and the nature that reflects it, which explains why the structures in Barcelona are different from the buildings in Tokyo. The writer is David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer for his play Proof, but this speech seems to belong to another movie, like almost everything else in the movie, including the limp direction by Argentina’s Alejandro Agresti. In their first collaboration since the 1994 action hit Speed, the Bullock-Reeves team has learned nothing. She can act, but she rarely appears in anything worth acting in. Like Bill Murray, he always appears to be waking from a nap—or looking for a cozy cot to catch one.

Leading Blind

If satire is the thing that closes on Saturday night, then political satire is usually doomed to close one night earlier. In the case of a pretentious monstrosity called Land of the Blind, it’s a miracle it ever opened at all. If this is the winner of the 2001 Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screenwriting competition, one can only assume the judges locked in their Hollywood hotel rooms with scoring pencils were sniffing something besides room service.

An admirable cast headed by Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland trash their talents big time in this futuristic political drivel about dictators, terrorists and corruption in an unnamed country with overloaded similarities and not-so-subtle references to Iraq, Chile, Nazi Germany and the good old U.S. of A. For 20 years, the insane son and heir of a President-for-Life who condemned all dissenters to the gallows has become a dictator even more vicious, brutal and evil than his father. Generalissimo Maximillian II, known as “Junior,” specializes in murder, rape and torture—in addition to which, he runs the country’s film industry. (An inside joke, for as we all know, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.) Tom Hollander ( Gosford Park) gives the most colorful performance in the movie as the mincing, pouty-mouthed Führer who conducts cabinet meetings during his bowel movements. The always-exotic Lara Flynn Boyle matches his perversions as the orgiastic First Lady, dressed like a Cher imitator in a drag revue.

For two decades, they have massacred all opponents, but now a revolution is hatching, masterminded by a political prisoner named Thorne (Sutherland), a liberal intellectual sentenced to 13 years for writing a play critical of the dictatorship, and head of the underground movement called “Citizens for Justice and Democracy.” While he writes revolutionary slogans on the walls of his cell with his own excrement, an idealistic guard named Joe (Fiennes) can’t resist his philosophy, let alone the smell. Ignoring Junior’s savage threats, Joe springs Thorne and organizes the assassination of the dictator and his wife while they are crawling around naked on all fours, oinking like pigs.

Thorne becomes the new liberation leader, and for his brave heroics in guiding him to power, Joe becomes his reluctant poster boy for democracy, although with the new vegetarian laws, book burnings and martyrs hanging from every rooftop, Joe sees through the sham and turns cynical, suspecting Thorne of becoming the same kind of fiend as the one he just dethroned. Barristers, attorneys, teachers, religious leaders and other loyal supporters of the new regime are shipped to “re-education classes” that are nothing more than New Age concentration camps. After refusing to sign a loyalty oath, Joe ends up locked in the same kind of prison-cell predicament Thorne was in when they first met. Having outlived his usefulness as a political puppet, he enrages his mentor by becoming a counterrevolutionary. After Thorne is silently executed in a bathtub by one of his deluded female followers (Marat stabbed by Charlotte Corday), it is clear that the time has come for a new leader. You don’t have be a political-science major to figure out who the next dictator will be.

Subtle as a hydrogen bomb, the messages in Land of the Blind are (Excelsior!) threefold: Change can only come about through a coup d’état of blood and gore; every new society succeeds by violently annihilating all traces of the old one; and after every revolution, the idealists end up ruled by another criminal tyranny worse than the one they had before. (For starters, see Cuba, Afghanistan, Russia and North Korea.)

How this naïve script by a former soldier in Iraq and nightclub doorman named Robert Edwards ever won a literary contest is a head-scratcher for the muses. Sample dialogue: “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy”; “If I catch you talking to that prisoner again, I’ll beat you like a red-headed stepchild, and skull-fuck your corpse!” Worse yet, he is also the director. Among the multitude of lessons he must learn if his career moves forward are the following: how to frame a shot, how to control actors from eating the sets, and where to place the camera in order to get more than two people in the same set-up. Everything else about Land of the Blind is as big a mystery to me as crib death.

Baitz's new play Ten Unknowns at

Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre when a huge blank canvas seems to fill

the floor of the stage. The 72-year-old painter Malcolm Raphelson, a burnt-out

case, hovers over it poised to paint a portrait of his mother, as Judd, his

young, druggy assistant and fellow artist, looks over his shoulder.

"Christ! You're right over me, goddamnit!" Raphelson

explodes. "You're like some fucking vulture boy!"

Mr. Baitz's bitter point-or Raphelson's-is that the younger

generation of artists always feeds off the old like vultures, wiping out

reputations along the way. Fate, or self-destruction, turns the hard-drinking

Raphelson into an extinct species. But those intense and even frightening

moments between the artist and the canvas are immensely moving. Mr. Baitz and

all artists must surely know Raphelson's feeling of impotence and prayer. The

empty canvas, like the empty space of a stage, will either live or die.

So Raphelson (in a very fine performance from the

silver-haired Donald Sutherland) confronts the wrecked image of himself in the

terrors of bringing the canvas to imagined life and meaning and beauty. He's

been living in isolated exile in Mexico for 28 years, a figurative painter who

fled the tidal wave of abstract expressionism and seems to have been wasting

away ever since.

"Abstract expressionism," Raphelson says scornfully. "All you

had to do was make a little jump, a little child's leap, into shit-shaped

daubings and mealy-mouthed little splotches and batches of half-baked color,

you'd win a prize-you'd win a Crackerjack prize! And you had to do it, or you were out! You were expelled!"

Any man who announces, as Raphelson does, how hard he's

worked "not to be bitter" has already been consumed by bitterness. But when a

South African–born New York art dealer, Trevor Fabricant (the witheringly venal

and amusing Denis O'Hare), turns up to rediscover him for a major

retrospective, he's met by surprising indifference.

"Take some pleasure

in it. Trust it," craven Fabricant

argues for celebrity and fame (and himself). "Sometimes buying things-art or a

cashmere sweater or … sex, say-makes it all the more real. The money going out;

comfort comes in."

Judd (well-played by Justin Kirk) is the edgy, conflicted

assistant and potential rival who's described as "sort of smart, and spoilt,

and coasting." In truth, he's self-destructing as much as Raphelson. He's been

sent along to Mexico by Fabricant, his former boyfriend, to get Raphelson

painting again. "Calm down," he says coolly to his hyperventilating ex-lover.

"Nobody hates you. Even though it would be so easy."

Mr. Baitz's articulate defense of certain musty old values

in the teeth of phony culture has been a strength of his since the early days

of Substance of Fire . Ten Unknowns continues the righteous

battle for standards with its theme about the merchandising of art and the

bitter romance-perhaps it's a necessity-of dropping out. He has much to say,

too, about the corrosive nature of envy and failure, about empty shells lost in

the wilderness or unfashionable artists exiled from themselves in depression

and booze.

My disappointment in the piece, alas, stems from the

reluctant feeling that he's got much, much more

to say. This first-rate ensemble production directed by Daniel Sullivan, with

its messily authentic, lived-in artist's refuge by set designer Ralph

Funicello, is ultimately more atmospheric than meaty. Mr. Baitz is making a

plodding symbolic point with the introduction of Julia, a beautiful Berkeley

graduate student who's earnestly researching a species of potentially extinct

glass frog, if you please. The Tennessee Williams symbolism thuds the more when

Mr. Baitz goes on to explain it.

The quickening of Donald Sutherland's Raphelson-the new

spring in his defeated, ambling walk-when Julianna Margulies' Julia enters the

action is understandable. "Never too late to be poleaxed," he says enthusiastically.

But Julia is a little too convenient. The flaws and faux mystery of the second

act become transparent, the redemptive resolution is too neatly tied in a

pretty bow. It's more likely that the disillusioned Judd, who flees his fake

hero to bury himself on a heroin trip, would never have returned, and that

Raphelson, the empty shell, would have been left plastered on tequila, or

swimming with the glass frogs.

Why the need for a happy end (sort of)? Ten Unknowns , which is partly about artistic compromise, surely has

no need of one. David Auburn's otherwise refined Proof risks self-aborting by having one. And Kenneth Lonergan, of

all complicated humane people, has one in Lobby

Hero , too. The happy end, sort of, is the thinking man's answer to the beer

commercial. It's happy, but ….

I've no wish to add to Mr. Lonergan's woes in the week he

should have walked off with the Oscar for You

Can Count on Me . Besides, many people have the highest regard for his new

play Lobby Hero , directed by Mark

Brokaw at Playwrights Horizons. Only Mr. Lonergan would set a play and a hero in a lobby -and, at that, the lobby of an apartment building in Manhattan

that looks depressingly like my own, what with the wilting rubber plant and

all. I don't want to spend the night in my own lobby. But this is unfair to the

more generous Mr. Lonergan, who takes comfort in the weirdness of strangers

more or less anywhere.

The dramatist isn't driven by plot, however, but character.

His people ramble in their own appealing fashion, and we are glad. "Are you a

sports fan?" Jeff asks Dawn, the rookie cop who's waiting in the lobby for her

partner to finish a quickie with a girlfriend upstairs. "Come on. That's a

harmless question. What do you like, basketball? A lot of girls like basketball.

It's graceful. Well, a lot of sports are very graceful, actually …. What's your

feeling about the impending garbage strike? My name's Jeff. Twenty-seven, never

been married, never been in debt. Well, I have been in some debt actually, but

that's pretty much all cleared up now. I'm a different person now. Really. I've

turned over a new leaf."

"Would you shut up?" says Dawn.

But in Mr. Lonergan's cause of recreating real, apparently

mundane life, he's skirting the danger of creating the kind of quirky outsiders

who are fast turning into "The Lonergan Type." In Lobby Hero , it's the young, jokey loser Jeff, the lobby security

guard who must come to terms with himself. There's his black supervisor,

William, a stickler for rules who has to break the rules to get his brother off

a murder rap; the policeman and stud, Bill, who's both good cop and bad cop;

and Bill's rookie partner, the attractive Dawn, who's naïve and vulnerable (but

not necessarily).

For all its appeal and humanenesss, Lobby Hero seems overworked, overworried in a sense. The dramas-a

murder, a beating, an investigation-take place offstage. They have to. We're

stuck in the lobby . It's a static

piece with an old-fashioned giveaway. (Jeff clumsily gives a big secret away.)

But the play revolves round an interesting moral dilemma-lying in a good cause.

With Mr. Lonergan, all is never as simple as it seems and the good cause might

be yourself, your love life, your job or justice. Or getting the girl. Will

Jeff and Dawn end up happily ever after? Yes, but ….

A Drooping Dream Team

With so many irritating movies aimed for the horny teenage market in this summer of shameless schlock, it's a welcome relief to see a few liver spots. Space Cowboys , produced, directed by and starring the ruggedly perdurable Clint Eastwood, really mixes up the demographics, reminding us all that there is still a target audience of people in this world who are old enough for bus passes. Now let's see if they'll still take the bus to the movies. I hope so, because Space Cowboys is a hymn to the aging Hucks and Toms and all-American Joe Armstrongs who were once role models before the death of idealism in a dot-com world. Even in a capricious entertainment, it's good to have the good old boys back for some good old hully-chee.

In 1958, they were daredevil test pilots so reckless and crazy and gung-ho to be the first men in outer space they used to sing "Fly Me to the Moon" in the cockpit while their engines were exploding. Somehow, they never made it. The space program replaced them with a chimpanzee. Now, more than 40 years later, these mavericks get a second chance when a Russian satellite suffers a systems failure that plunges the country into a blackout unless somebody can get into space, capture the satellite and fix it. Naturally, the only guy who can understand the obsolete, archaic technology is the space cowboy who designed it (Big Clint, looking more like the new face on Mount Rushmore every day). Time to round up the old fossils-Jerry, Tank and Hawk-who were the rest of the team.

Jerry (Donald Sutherland), the structural engineer, is now an aging, oversexed hippie who builds roller coasters. Tank (James Garner), the robotics expert, is a Baptist preacher with a bad back and fallen arches. Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones), the team navigator, has been reduced to taking tourists on daredevil stunt rides. These geriatric flyboys have only got 34 days to solve the problem, but first they have to pass the physical. The group nude scene could set porno flicks back another 50 years. It's fun watching them drag their love handles, beer bellies, bifocals and dentures into NASA, and the four stars have a ball poking fun at each other. The first hour and 15 minutes is about prep (Mr. Garner can't do one sit-up without aid), romance (senior citizen or not, NASA physician Blair Brown takes a shine to Mr. Sutherland in the middle of his hernia exam) and human interest (one of the old geezers has cancer, but the rest of the team refuses to leave without him). Once they don their space helmets, the old-timers are soon shrugging off their creeping senility, and what might have been unseemly and embarrassing takes flight, thanks to the no-nonsense performances of a spunky cast of watchable veterans.

The second half is the actual mission, where the harmless satellite turns out to be a traveling hydrogen bomb with six nuclear Russian warheads aimed at planet Earth. What begins as a publicity stunt for NASA ends with the space cowboys saving the world from nuclear destruction. Then there's the problem of how to get home with only one engine. Which astronauts survive? I'd be a cad to tell you, but I will let you know that one of the old farts finally reaches the moon, in a finale reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove .

It's amazing how much excitement and suspense can be generated by such a preposterous idea, but the script (by Ken Kaufman and Howard Klausner) is taut and intelligent, Mr. Eastwood's direction is tense, and the rich supporting cast includes James Cromwell, Marcia Gay Harden, William Devane, Courtney B. Vance and Loren Dean. The special effects are splendid, the rigors of training follow to the letter the actual programs used to prepare today's astronauts for space travel, and the four stars are just about the toughest old coon dogs this side of a Texas cattle drive. Mr. Jones has the best role and does more than anyone else to prevent the film from lapsing into cringe territory, while Mr. Eastwood chews ice cubes and mutters "Put a sock in it, sonny." Old sawhorses never die; they just rocket-launch into new box office stratospheres. Juicy roles are hard to come by when the pecs won't flex and the apple won't bite, but Space Cowboys is the kind of high-tech spaceship western worth giving up your Medicare for.

Whole Town's Gone to Pot

Brenda Blethyn, the British actress who soared to international attention (and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress) in Mike Leigh's memorable Secrets and Lies , has cased the market looking for roles of equal stature. They haven't been easy to find. Her slatternly mother in Little Voice was overshadowed by the catatonically-shy-daughter role of co-star Jane Horrocks (who hasn't had much luck in movies, either). Employment (and stardom) is a sometime thing for women of maturity who have never known the meaning of the word "anorexia." Now comes a movie called Saving Grace . Well, I'll say this: It's a star vehicle. The movie is only intermittently enjoyable, but Ms. Blethyn's fans will be happy to know she is in almost every scene.

Grace is a bereft but enterprising widow who grows marijuana to make ends meet after discovering her late husband has left her penniless. She's not a criminal by nature. In fact, she's always led a secure, sheltered life growing prize orchids in a picturesque postcard village in Cornwall, where the Pirates of Penzance once reigned. But when her husband dies suddenly in a parachute jump, Grace's life is rudely interrupted. Not only has her late husband squandered her inheritance on bogus business deals, but he has left her beautiful 300-year-old manor house mortgaged to the max and his tarty mistress grieving among the funeral mourners. Grace has to make some money fast to save her home from the auction block. It's her dope-smoking Scottish gardener Matthew (delightfully played by Craig Ferguson) who comes up with the idea that money can indeed grow on trees.

Together, they hatch a desperate plan to turn Grace's greenhouse into a pot plantation. Overnight, a garden club attraction becomes a Frankenstein laboratory for drugs, fertilizing weeds into trees while the villagers, steeped in the Cornish traditions of illegal smuggling and contempt for the law, conspire to help in any way they can. So Grace moves from the breathtaking serenity of Cornwall to the heart-stopping danger of the London underworld, looking for drug dealers to trade her kilos of contraband for bundles of tax-free cash. We are encouraged to applaud while Grace turns penurious disaster into felonious fun and profit and falls in love with one of London's most glamorous drug traffickers on the side.

Like Shirley Valentine, her spirited new independence and enterprising new position as femme fatale make a new woman of Grace. Growing your own narcotics becomes a fun hobby, like stamp collecting, and I suppose it would be churlish to point out that what all of these charming people are doing could land them a 20-year stretch in jail. Not to worry. Saving Grace resolves its moral challenges faster than Madonna changes panties, Grace ends up with a man and a best-selling book, and the audience has a thoroughly rowdy time rooting for every gangster in sight.

Like The Full Monty and Waking Ned Devine , this is a film with a questionable premise that depends strongly on a cast of loopy eccentrics to keep it percolating. The most humorous scenes, inserted for the purpose of distracting from a threadbare plot, seem like satiric sketches from late-night British television. With great characters like bumbling vicars and addlepated old dragons from the Ladies League mistaking Grace's marijuana sprouts for herbs and getting stoned into gibbering hysterics on their tea, you have to laugh. And with great character actors like Leslie Phillips and Phyllida Law (Emma Thompson's mum) populating the cast, the laughs are guaranteed.

Craig Ferguson, last seen on movie screens as the gay Scottish hairdresser who invaded Hollywood in The Big Tease , co-produced and co-wrote the screenplay (with Mark Crowdy). As a hilarious hunk, he's just about cornered a market that doesn't exist in American films. The game and perky Ms. Blethyn, miscast in a role that once would have been perfect for Margaret Rutherford, is more attractive than the script intended, but she makes a convincingly canny and charming centerpiece. Nimbly directed by Nigel Cole, Saving Grace is not a great movie, but as a cheerful slice of British silliness in the tradition of the old Ealing comedies, it's a most agreeable one indeed.