In the maelstrom of muck that passes itself as filmmaking today, it is reassuring to come across the occasional gem made by genuine talents who still know how to tell a classic story with coherence and charm. The aura of William Faulkner lingers over Get Low, a chunk of down-home rural Southern folklore based on a real event in 1938, when a Tennessee hermit emerged after decades of hiding in the woods to hear the nearby townsfolk's opinion of him at a mock funeral. Moving the action back a few years to the Depression, this film, the debut feature by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Aaron Schneider, is a funny and tender retelling of that story, resonating with warmth and sardonic wit and containing a majestic performance by Robert Duvall.

In one of his rare screen appearances of late, the iconic actor plays Felix Bush, a grizzled old recluse who has cut himself off from society for 40 years, after a barn burning that made him a local legend, feared by men and children alike. (Some folks swear he kills his victims with his bare hands.) What a shock when Felix wanders into town one day in battered rags with his shotgun and his mule, his gnarled face buried behind a white beard. Fearing his imminent passing, he decides that "it's time to get low"-meaning time to make plans for dying, including the purchase of a plot, a casket and a eulogy. This is great news for Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), an undertaker with basset-hound eyes and the doleful owner of a failing funeral parlor, who goes after the business. Better still, his customer envisions a funeral party-one last hurrah that will draw friends and enemies alike to his shack in the woods for the final send-off, provided each guest has a story to tell about him, true or false. Chuckling with mischievous glee, he even decides to sell $5 raffle tickets. The lucky winner will get 300 acres of virgin timber land and a mule named Gracie. This Depression-era come-on draws crowds so big that they set up a tent city to house the turnout. One caveat: The celebration must take place while he is still alive to enjoy it!

From this modest premise comes characters rich with tradition (shades of everything from Tobacco Road to Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller) that extend their lives beyond the limitations of the log cabin settings. The film is enhanced by bluegrass music, and the beautifully composed camera setups serve as exquisite backdrops for a series of keenly calibrated performances. Mr. Murray is both sad and funny as the opportunistic mortician with a well-concealed conscience, and Lucas Black more than holds his own as his young sidekick. Sissy Spacek, always a minimalist, is a touching and terrifically matched counterpart for Mr. Duvall-a still lovely and radiant old flame whose sister's death in the fire that haunted their lives for so many wasted years forms the mystery at the heart of the film. It takes the whole movie to solve that mystery and discover what Felix did to become his own guilt-ridden jailer for 40 years, but while you wait, you have the rare pleasure of watching two seasoned pros interact with heart and sensitivity. While the acting is uniformly fine, it is the welcome return of Mr. Duvall that is worth a special round of applause. Odd and unpredictable, he perfectly embodies all the qualities of old age-breathing through his sinuses, hobbling left to right like a hobby horse with wheels that need oil, his expressions rising and falling with appropriate awe when he eyes a casket of solid pecan with steel handles and a satin lining or selects with trepidation a new blue suit to be buried in. The nuances with which he demonstrates the value of doing more with less for maximum effect makes every scene an acting lesson. I couldn't take my eyes off his face. With his mouth open and his tongue poised, it's like he's snoring wide awake.

Simple, straightforward and stirring without sentimentality, Get Low is a treasure.

GET LOW
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell
Directed by Aaron Schneider
Starring Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray, Lucas Black

3.5 Eyeballs out of 4

Jeff Bridges is not aging well, but when he stopped shaving, he started acting. The acting shows in Crazy Heart, an otherwise boring slice of country-fried steak with an exceptional performance by the gravel-voiced good old boy that raises the film several notches in the direction of unforgettable.

Bad Blake, a once-famous country western singing attraction now reduced to one-night gigs in bowling alleys, drives his truck into Santa Fe, pours out his urine from a gallon milk jug, slugs down enough whiskey to float a cargo ship and leaves the stage in the middle of his show to vomit into a garbage can. The next morning he rolls his gut out of bed and hits the road again, leaving a haggard fan behind in the motel sheets. It’s a routine he knows by heart. Moaning in an inaudible croak like a cross between Tom Waits and Harvey Fierstein, he’s a sort of first cousin to Robert Duvall’s Oscar-winning role in Tender Mercies, a 1983 movie that was also about a down-for-the-count country singer trying to put the broken pieces of his wasted life back together. (Mr. Duvall produced Crazy Heart and plays a Houston bartender in it.) But Tender Mercies was supported on the literary columns of an Oscar-winning screenplay by Horton Foote, who knew how to take his time and examine his characters with a flashlight to the soul. When Crazy Heart takes its time, it’s more like stretching a short story into a feature film. Well directed but sketchily written by actor Scott Cooper, the film relies a great deal on the star to flesh out what is only implied. It’s a lot of work, but Mr. Bridges is merely miraculous.

A 57-year-old has-been who is slowly killing himself with alcohol and cigarettes, Bad Blake is also a variation on the revolting creep Mr. Bridges played in The Big Lebowski, as well as the white bearded, pot-bellied version in The Men Who Stare at Goats. The once handsome, clean-cut embodiment of reliable Hollywood aristocracy has just about got a patent on stumble-bum reprobates. Bad Blake refuses to reveal his real name or discuss his four failed marriages, but he’s impressed enough with the pretty young reporter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who comes to interview him after one of his shows that he takes her to bed, befriends her little boy and thinks maybe he’s finally found the girl who could mean more to him than another meaningless one-night stand. But first, he’s got a trying gig in Las Vegas as the opening act for his arch-nemesis Tommy Sweet (a miscast, unconvincing Colin Farrell). A lot of guitar-plunking Nashville crooning ensues, followed by a potentially life-altering decision. What happens in the 111 minutes of Crazy Heart can be written on the head of a bobby pin, but there’s no arguing about the sweet impact of the central performance.

Whether you like the film depends on how much you like hillbilly music and Jeff Bridges. He’s pretty dog-eared and over the fence by now, but he sings the original songs with real conviction, and there’s something about him that’s as down-home as a bowl of grits with sawmill gravy. Anyone who remembers his father, Lloyd Bridges, with the legendary Kim Stanley in both The Goddess and John Frankenheimer’s Playhouse 90 production of Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night knows he comes from great acting genes. His performance as Bad Blake—lonely but aloof, talented but self-destructive, desperate for roots but a victim of his own addictive demon—leaves no shadowy corner of a complex life unexplored. He’s aging like a sweaty, chain-smoking King Lear.

rreed@observer.com

Welcome to the apocalypse. In The Road, the eagerly awaited movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, the end of the world is no longer on its way. It’s already here, bringing misery, desperation, death and no hope for the future. Adapted by Joe Penhall and directed by Australia’s John Hillcoat, it is sad, bleak and unbearably depressing. It is also gripping, shattering and brilliant. Throughout the screening I attended, I heard people murmur “a masterpiece.” I reluctantly agree.

An unnamed cataclysm has destroyed the earth and erased almost every trace of humanity with biblical fury. The cause of this decimation is unspecified—volcanic activity, contagious viruses, nuclear war, a meteorite? But the result is a post-apocalyptic planet of scorched devastation. Across a landscape of ash-covered snow, a father and son called only The Man and The Boy (Viggo Mortensen and young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) are somehow miraculously still alive and pushing a shopping cart on a wrenching journey to the sea. The movie, sparse and bleakly loyal to Mr. McCarthy’s prose, has the same narrative as the book—a grim chronicle of their horror, suffering and determination to survive. There are occasional respites—Robert Duvall as a half-blind old man they befriend in the forest, Guy Pearce as a fellow vagabond on the move, the ecstasy of long-forgotten taste when they discover an abandoned Coca-Cola—but more often they plod along in an existence that is pared to the bone, and it is the author’s poetic vision that must carry us through.

The Man once had a wife (played with terror and passion by Charlize Theron) with whom he debated the question of whether to end it all and save themselves and their son from the rape and cannibalism of wild gangs. In flashbacks, we see The Man cling to one last shred of optimism. “We will get out of this,” he says. But the wife eventually gives up, unable to last one more black, stormy winter of cold and starvation, and The Man is left with his son and only two bullets in his gun—one for each of them. Now, 10 years later, the days are gray as coffins, the crops long gone, cars and machines cracking with rust, farms and fields fallen to dust, the animals dead and the survivors either refugees looking for food and fuel or maniacs feasting on human flesh to stay alive. Dying would seem a luxury. As if their existence isn’t hopeless enough, there is also an earthquake that opens the ground and fells what remains of the barren trees. By the time they reach the sea, as dark and colorless as sewage, The Man is coughing up blood and The Boy is so ravaged with fever that you wonder not only how much more they can take, but how much more you can take.

And still, this is a magnificent picture—as unique and corrosive a view of 21st-century ruin as I have ever seen on the screen. The author has been quoted as saying, “In 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable,” and now, in his vision of the aftermath of cataclysm, he sets out to prove it. The chillingly realistic art direction and the Oscar-worthy cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe are dauntingly faithful to the blighted global catastrophe described so carefully in the book. To configure charred spaces where buildings once stood and the strange beauty of gutted cities, The Road was shot in post–Hurricane Katrina locations in the Louisiana backwash, and barren sections of Pittsburgh in winter, where remnants of the region’s once flourishing steel mills and coal mines lent to the atmosphere of desolation. The movie creates a bleak space that manages to be both anonymous and oppressively intimate at the same time. High-impact technological graphics and computer-generated effects are gratefully missing. The dramatic tension and narrative suspense come from silences that speak louder than words and explosions, and from the raw and powerful performances. There seems to be no end to Viggo Mortensen’s talents. His portrait of a man driven by spirited parental love, whose last act on earth is to prepare his son for the courage to live without his protection, is so touching that … well, all I can say is, prepare to be emotionally hammered. Young Smit-McPhee, who was only 11 at the time of filming, matches Mr. Mortensen scene for scene with a tenderness and a strength I found inspiring. (The fact that he also looks a lot like Charlize Theron makes him doubly believable.) In the end, it is the little boy’s generosity and caring that invest the story with its last sense of humanity.

But that’s stretching it. Make no mistake, as Nixon used to say. The Road is not an uplifting, feel-good night at the movies. It is savagely unpleasant, but you will not forget its impact. Mixed reviews aside, I will not ponder the box office prospects of a film this daring and original. In a year of relentless trash, I can only shower it with praise for its fearless integrity in creating a work of art that is very valuable indeed.

rreed@observer.com

O.K., go ahead and make fun of Christmas. Every year, somebody does. Like the people in Beverly Hills in the verse to Irving Berlin’s legendary song who gave up dreaming of a “White Christmas,” I long ago gave up hoping for another holiday classic in the same league as Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas in Connecticut and It’s a Wonderful Life. Instead of sugarplums, we now get nauseating holiday thorns like Four Christmases, and the only thing that comes down the chimney is a serial killer.

Four Christmases is four nightmares rolled into one, all masquerading as alleged comedies and featuring cameo appearances by a supporting cast of genuine talents whose 401(k)’s must be Wall Street casualties. How else can you explain the presence of Reese Witherspoon, Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight, to name a few. Either the lighting in this horror is dreadful, or they are all red-faced from trashing their integrity for money. Probably both. To say this movie is beneath their dignity is like saying Michael Jackson is an obvious choice for a recurring role on Nip/Tuck.

Brad and Kate (Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon) are a rich San Francisco couple who hate marriage, kids and family reunions. When you meet their families, you instantly understand why every year they mail their presents and head for the airport, destined for some exotic new port in the sun in a Christmas world that never heard of an economic recession and nobody serves turkey. This year their Ray-Bans and bikinis are packed for Burma and Fiji when the Bay Area gets fogged in; their flight is canceled; and a TV reporter corners them for an interview that reveals their dilemma to all of their assorted relatives. Trapped, they gird their loins for a marathon of homecomings with four divorced parents, jealous siblings, savage children, screaming babies and worse. (I haven’t got the stomach to tell you about the masturbating grandmother.) Since the entire movie takes place in one day, these people must all live within 10 minutes of each other. By the time it’s over, Christmas spirit turns rancid and 24 hours seems like 24 days.

First, there’s Brad’s vicious, white trash father, Howard (Robert Duvall), and two sub-mental Neanderthal brothers, Denver and Dallas (Jon Favreau and country singer Tim McGraw), who live in a collapsing tract house and spend their lives hunting and fighting. Brad gets insulted, beaten, knocked unconscious and nearly electrocuted before he falls off the roof, while Kate gags on Christmas “treats” of aerosol-can cheese spread and baloney sandwiches slathered with Miracle Whip. Next stop is Kate’s mother, Marilyn (Mary Steenburgen), a religious nut, and brainless, mean-spirited sister Courtney (Kristen Chenoweth), whose grotesque children vomit all over Kate’s black cocktail dress and steal her pregnancy test. Before their visit ends, Kate and Brad get dragged off to Marilyn’s church pageant and forced to play Mary and Joseph, wrecking the manger before the big finale, a ghastly rock ’n’ roll “Silent Night”.

Christmas number three finds them in the clutches of Brad’s mother, Paula (a criminally wasted Sissy Spacek), an aging hippie whose new lover is a guy Brad’s age who used to be his best friend in high school. Reluctantly, they all play a demented board game that makes no sense. Mercifully, this segment is short. By the time they reach Lake Tahoe (try making that drive in one day) and the beautiful home of Kate’s much-married father (Jon Voight) and his new girlfriend, with ex-wife Marilyn and the rest of Kate’s nutty relatives all joining in for the second time in one day, the idyllic couple is so mortified by the things they’ve discovered about each other, so estranged from arguing and so stressed out after wasting their entire Christmas with four of the most obnoxious families on the planet that Kate is the only one who gets out of the car; Brad drives away, leaving her in the driveway. But this movie isn’t over yet. Forced by the day’s events to reevaluate the importance of family (huh?), Brad and Kate decide it might not be such a bad thing to start one of their own—a decision made, like everything else in the movie, for all the wrong reasons. Kids, reasons Brad, “are little walking tax shelters—you can write a lot of things off.”

Although it took four writers to come up with this drivel, Four Christmases has the cohesion of an impromptu game played on a boring road trip in which each passenger in the car takes turns adding a scene. “Remember,” says the driver, “to drag it out until we get to the next gas station.” Reese Witherspoon is adorable as ever. Vince Vaughn has the charisma of a dead armadillo. Nobody gets much help from hack director Seth Gordon (King of Kong). It’s vulgar, embarrassing and (this is the good part) only about 80 minutes long, but the acid reflux is guaranteed to last through New Year’s Eve.

rreed@observer.com

Variety reports:

Now it's payback time. The pretty singer with the warm voice who has been married to Rosie's son Gabriel for 25 years is saluting and celebrating her mentor and mother-in-law with a brand-new cabaret act called Reflections of Rosemary, now through May 21 at Feinstein's at the Regency. The title says it all. It's all a big family affair in the nicest way possible. Get out your calculator and figure this out. Rosie had five children by the same marriage to José Ferrer. Five kids, 10 grandchildren, an army of musicians, singers, band leaders, friends and a nephew named George Clooney, and they all hung out day and night at Rosie's house on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills next-door to Ira Gershwin. Debby Boone fell in love with Gabriel, the middle son, when they were both teenagers, and married him when she was 22. They have four kids of their own. (This gang believes in longevity.) Feinstein's was Rosie's New York home. She opened the room. Now it seems fitting that her daughter-in-law is taking over the joint with some of Rosie's own loyal, longtime musicians, including her friend-arranger-pianist John Oddo. The pieces are falling into place. I'm dizzy from the math.

So the stage is set, the piano is tuned, and the audience has brought what you need at Feinstein's-plenty of checkbooks, cash and credit cards. Now how about the music? It is my happy duty to report that from somewhere above, next to that second star on the right, Rosemary Clooney is beaming approval and smiling proudly. This is Debby Boone's New York cabaret debut, but she's no novice, and all of her stage roles, concerts, music tours and CD's are paying off nicely. She doesn't sound like Rosie, but it's obvious that she's listened studiously to the family record collection, mastering the same timing, intonation and that laid-back, center-of-the-chart, straight-from-the-heart intimacy her mother-in-law perfected. Because the emphasis is on Rosie's vast repertoire, almost anything goes and all of the finest composers are represented. Not known as a jazz stylist, she nevertheless achieves an easy swing rhythm on "Time After Time" that enthralls, and with her six-piece band jamming wildly on "From This Moment On," she fractures the joint. If you snag a veteran rhythm section like Joe Cocuzzo on drums and Jay Leonhart on bass, there are no detours ahead on standards by André Previn, Cy Coleman, Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter. I love the imaginative way she weds "It Never Entered My Mind" with "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" until they sound like separate choruses of the same composition. This girl has taste.

She's full of surprises, too. Inserting a country-and-western ballad like Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" into the proceedings approaches blasphemy-until you realize that Debby's maternal grandfather was popular Grand Ole Opry star Red Foley and Rosie's own Kentucky bluegrass roots led to one of her biggest-selling record hits of all time, "Half as Much," which was also written by the same Hank Williams. Changing pace and style as fast as the flick of a manicured fingernail, she reduced the crowd to awe with "I Wish It So," one of the last compositions ever written by Marc Blitzstein, from the fabulous score of the Broadway musical Juno. This is an aria, not a pop tune, and it's a stretch, unlike anything she's done before. Another curious choice, you think, but wait: That show was directed by José Ferrer, Rosie fell in love with that song and recorded it on one of her best collections at a time when she was in the middle of an ill-fated affair with the album's arranger, Nelson Riddle. Who else would tell you these things?

From the State Fair classic "It Might as Well Be Spring" (Pat Boone starred in the movie remake) to a loving medley of ballads written for Bing Crosby (Rosie's best friend, and his son Harry Crosby was in the audience to prove it), the versatility of the material fits like the clef notes in a big-band chart. And Debby Boone sings it all with a voice that makes up for a lack of power with a sunny warmth that is smooth, honest and true. This engagement is a welcome relief from the noise all over town. Two questions remain: Where has she been? And what took her so long to get here?

Araki's Oz

Gregg Araki has been labeled the "Bad Boy of the Queer New Wave" for sexually explicit but gravely amateurish underground favorites like The Doom Generation and The Living End. But even though his latest, Mysterious Skin, is quirky and offbeat, there is no back-street home-movie self-indulgence about this cult sensation. Based on the acclaimed novel by the gifted writer Scott Heim, it tells parallel stories about two boys on the cusp of adulthood in rural Kansas who both experience a life-altering mystery they cannot explain. The only thing they have in common is that their parents have forced them both into Little League baseball, a sport for which neither boy is ideally suited, mentally or physically.

In the summer of 1981, Brian (George Webster) is a shy little 8-year-old introvert with thick glasses, red hair and freckles who passes out cold one night for five inexplicable hours that have disappeared from his life without a trace. He thinks he might have been abducted by a U.F.O. Meanwhile, a more worldly and fast-maturing 8-year-old named Neil (Chase Ellison) has a completely different experience that turns him into a sexually precocious teenager rented hourly by elderly truckers and traveling salesmen in a highway motel. As they embark on different journeys, the virginal Brian, terrified of sex, dedicates his life to seeking out oddballs who believe they've also been abducted by aliens; he also suffers from nosebleeds and has a grim experience with a dismembered cow. Jaded, promiscuous Neil, on the other hand, goes to New York with his best friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg) to master the tricks of male prostitution and explore the dark side of the lonely, sad and dangerous life of a street hustler. The trajectory of this bizarre but fascinating film is how they come to terms with the mysterious incident that has shaken their lives and which, to their surprise, links them in desperate pain. The two stories finally merge 10 years later, when 18-year-old Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)-spent, humiliated and almost dead-returns to Kansas and meets the tortured Brian (Brady Corbet) on Christmas Eve in 1991. When it's finally revealed, the shared experience that has impacted their lives and linked them together is pretty shocking. Both of them, it turns out, were sexually molested by their Little League coach, a handsome, friendly and trustworthy surrogate dad and symbol of all-American masculinity, who lured them to his home with chips and Marshmallow Fluff, turning Neil into a willing student, eager to learn the ropes of perversion, while seducing the unconscious Brian without his knowledge. Once they understand what happened to them, their accidental reunion results in an emotional release so devastating that the viewer is rattled to the core.

Mr. Araki doesn't shy away from graphic sexuality-Neil's brutal rape at the hands of a sadistic john is one of the most terrifying scenes in any movie this year-and much of the film is borderline raunchy. But he remains rooted in his characters' inner struggles and invests a lot of energy in the script's emotional crux: how two sexually debilitated young men begin the process of healing each other. He also guides his cast into fearless character investigations that make even the cruelest scenes coherent and three-dimensional. The boys are excellent, but the same painstaking care has been taken with Elizabeth Shue as Neil's slatternly mother and with Hal Hartley alumnus Bill Sage, cast against type as the twisted coach. The movie isn't about him; it's about what he did to the boys that ruined their lives-but by eschewing the easy portrayal of a pedophile as a monster, and making a sick predator seem almost normal (therefore doubly terrifying), he raises the caution level for this particular kind of criminal to new heights of awareness.

Mysterious Skin is sexy and provocative, but there's a subtle and unsettling political edge to this film: Its Dust Bowl setting (Kansas, after all, is what Dorothy escaped from on her way to Oz) and the details of its characters' dull lives speak to an authentic, broadly middle-class American experience. What we do to our children by leaving them to solve their own problems, and the effect that bad timing and indifference can have on their disturbing choices and conflicted lives, is enough to shake your confidence in the safety of the American social environment to its very foundations. This is like Almodóvar, with a tarnished American flag in his hand: controversial, illuminating, deeply affecting and highly recommended.

Ferrell's Footie

Most of the time, it's just one damned flop after another, and Will Ferrell seems to be starring in all of them. Mr. Ferrell's movies are like boxes of cereal fiber: Everything in them constitutes the same tasteless, predictable and boring ingredients. He seems to have picked up where Ben Stiller left off, and Chevy Chase before him: another in the overexposed army of graduates from Saturday Night Live who've worn out their welcome. Let's face it, some comics are just not meant to be stars. John Candy's limited appeal worked as long as he played second banana to Tom Hanks, but when Hollywood started manufacturing formulaic comedies to fit his girth, they tanked. Now we've got Will Ferrell, who even put everybody to sleep when he was directed by Woody Allen. His little SNL skits mimicking George Bush had a tonic effect, but they cannot carry an entire movie. I've suffered through at least a dozen Will Ferrell movies, and I couldn't tell you the difference, one from another, even at gunpoint.

In addition to his latest forgettable fluffball, Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Ferrell has four more movies coming out this year, and is currently shooting (would you believe it?) six more at the same time. The only person who must be thrilled by all of this apocalyptic career overkill is Mr. Ferrell's agent.

Another sour trend currently metastasizing in the brains of Hollywood hacks is the mistaken idea that mixing a contemporary mediocrity in generational opposition to an established icon will create automatic box-office boffo. The result is that the reputation of yesterday's legend usually gets demystified, the temporary fans of today's no-talent curio stay away in droves, and everybody loses. In Kicking and Screaming, the elements are Mr. Ferrell and Robert Duvall, who are teamed in the same way that J. Lo and Jane Fonda face off in Monster-in-Law. As dumb ideas go, it's nothing more than a third-rate ripoff of The Bad News Bears-no better than Monster-in-Law, but light years ahead of Dustin Hoffman meeting Mark Wahlberg in the moronic I € Huckabees.

Mr. Ferrell plays Phil Weston, a couch-potato vitamin salesman who has spent his life enduring the gung-ho antics of his athletically overbearing father (Mr. Duvall), a sports-equipment retailer and weekend soccer coach. In his formative years, Phil was humiliated by sitting out every game on the bench while his dad favored other team players. When Phil finds his own shy young son in the same abusive situation with his grandfather, his inner child rebels and, for reasons that make so little sense they needn't concern you any longer than it takes to refill your popcorn box, he becomes the coach for a team of rejects he soon whips into championship frenzy. Instead of hitting the ground running, this lame little film just lies there like limp lard.

The weak and predictable script is matched by the direction of Jesse Dylan ( American Wedding), which displays almost no comic style whatsoever. The gimmicky casting of football's Mike Ditka as himself in a major role instead of a cameo falls flat. He just can't act. But then, neither can Will Ferrell. Despite one funny bit where his caffeine addiction turns him into Knute Rockne on steroids, Mr. Ferrell is a washout going through the paces for money. Mr. Duvall is wasted, but like Ms. Fonda in Monster-in-Law, he survives with his dignity intact, in a cynical, flamboyant role reminiscent of The Great Santini. My advice to Will Ferrell is to take the money and run before he heads for the showers. Kicking and Screaming is a zero, but the title describes how the audience is likely to react, perfectly.

Boss (Mr. Duvall) and Charley (Mr. Costner) are the last of the free-range cowboys-a dying breed of callused cowpunchers on a cattle drive who hate fences, railroads and all signs of encroachment on what used to be the wide-open spaces of the American frontier. Although they've been partners on the trail for 10 years, both men have secrets in their past they have never revealed to anyone, including each other. Boss is also a kind of foster father to the other two members of their crew-Mose (Abraham Benrubi), a hulking lug with the power of an ox and the mind of a child, and an orphaned Mexican teenager they call Button (Diego Luna). When Mose and Charley's dog are killed, and Button is seriously injured and kidnapped, by a mean-spirited rancher named Denton Baxter (another unforgettable entry in his portrait gallery of villains by the intimidating British actor Michael Gambon), who uses his hatred of "free-grazing" cattle passing through his territorial boundary lines as a cover-up for his real plans to steal their herd, Boss and Charley invade the nearby town, where the local citizens are victimized by Baxter and the cowardly sheriff (James Russo). With the boy's life in the balance, no time to wire for a federal marshal and a tremendous storm coming, Boss and Charley are stranded in the hostile town with only the doctor's sister (Annette Bening, without a shred of makeup, in one of her most appealing roles) to help. The saloon showdown and the inevitable O.K. Corral shootout reminiscent of High Noon keep the pace focused in the barrels of the guns without much surprise, but Mr. Costner's strength as a director is the way he balances the violent action sequences with the kind of introspective character analysis that keeps the audience interested and concerned. Based on The Open Range Men , a novel by Lauran Paine, the screenplay by Craig Storper gives all of the participants plenty of time to develop and space to move around in. Boss hit the trail after his wife died, and Button is the son he never had; Charley has lived a life of guilt ever since he killed a man as a teenager and turned to a career as a gunslinger before finding inner peace on the "open range." Making plans after the storm to get revenge against the cattle thieves while the whole town scurries away, Boss and Charley's daunting, life-threatening crisis forces them to share their inner thoughts with each other in moments of piercing intimacy. Even when they are forced to fall back on the wisdom of their fists and their Winchesters, they never lose their sense of humanity and fair play. This may be the best example of male bonding since Butch and Sundance. Unlike the old stereotypes played by Jimmy Stewart in boots, they are reluctant heroes, warts and all. Out of the mud and the blood, the film is, above all, a love story between these two men, and between Charley and the pioneer woman he learns to trust. It's the kind of flick that makes grown men cry.

There's humor, too, watching these two horny toads try to get their fat, dirty fingers through Annette Bening's proper china tea cups, or Mr. Duvall, indulging his sweet tooth with a hankerin' for an expensive stick of chocolate "from Switzerland, Europe," and a good Cuban cigar. With his own horse sense and peculiar code of ethics, he's a perfect counterpart to Mr. Costner, whose inner rage hides a decent heart. I always thought this very contemporary filmmaker made a better baseball player than cowboy, but the way he wears his battered hat like a scar and spits between the crack in his two front teeth, he puts the Marlboro man to shame. No matter what you think of his films-and he's had some flops so noisy they sounded like the bombing of Hiroshima-you have to admit that his passion for movies always shows. He cares what they look like, how they play out for an audience, what they have to say on paper and on celluloid. He shows sensitivity for other actors and a great eye for composition: two horses struggling to cross a river upstream in a breathtaking long shot. A herd of cattle slugging through a field of bluebells. The Milky Way, from the point of view of a man sleeping on his saddle. The proud, silent looks on the faces of the local citizens as a whole town gets its dignity back. Mr. Costner knows more than most directors how to make a movie speak through the camera lens, and the excellent cinematographer James Muro makes a perfect collaborator. The test of any really great movie is how well it transports the viewer beyond the screen into its own aesthetic vision. With Open Range Mr. Costner makes Canada look like Montana and all of us feel like we're moving west with the wagons in 1882. It doesn't feel like make-believe at all. No paper moons in canvas skies. And danger lives behind every Indian sign.

People seem to like what Mr. Costner does. Since Dances with Wolves and Bull Durham , it's been easy to rush to judgment. I still get hives when I think of Waterworld , but even that critical massacre made a profit. Open Range was made for a more modest $23 million budget and figures to become an ever greater popular box-office success. I'm kind of larked up by all of this. Frankly, I've had it up to here with movies about computer technology, punk-rock bands and zit-faced teenagers trying to get laid. My own world-weary Stetson is off to Kevin Costner and Open Range , a rare sagebrush saga with the welcome kind of value, integrity, intelligence and old-fashioned cinematic artistry we could desperately use more of.

Teenage Wasteland

Heading for a badly needed vacation, I leave with a few parting words on two more movies you might want to see in the next few weeks. Evan Rachel Wood is a formidable actor of inestimable maturity with the patrician beauty of Grace Kelly and the emotional depth of Garbo, who-as fate, providence and Hollywood casting confusion would have it-just happens to be temporarily trapped in the body of a 13-year-old child. She became a guilty habit of mine during her dazzling run in my favorite, now-defunct television series Once and Again , and she has made the kind of small inroads in feature films that a few years ago were offered to the nubile Reese Witherspoon. This may change on Aug. 20, when the teeming masses get a look at Thirteen , a grim and harrowing look at uncontrollable urban teenagers making a brief mall stop near you on their way to Hell.

First-time director Catherine Hardwicke closes in on the angst and anger of adolescents jockeying for power and popularity in the pressure cooker called "Girl Culture"-a dangerous and self-destructive subculture fueled by cool, abstract experiments with sex, drugs, body piercings and crime. Ms. Wood plays Tracy, a normal, intelligent, pig-tailed kid who leaves her teddy bears and Barbie dolls behind when she enters junior high and hits the ground running. Peer-pressured into emulating the fastest girl in school, a lost cause named Evie (played by Nikki Reed, who co-authored the screenplay with director Hardwicke, based on her own true experiences in the Girl Culture scene). Desperate to fit in, Tracy becomes anorexic, snorts cocaine, steals pocketbooks, pierces her tongue and navel, and mutilates her body with scissors, needles and razor blades, right under the nose of her own mother, a chain-smoking, recovering alcoholic who is too self-involved to notice. The single mother, played by Holly Hunter with the gothic weirdness of a dying vampire, already shares her shotgun house with a live-in cokehead lover and a best friend whose mother is a crack whore. Since her home environment is already filled with people who are one step away from jail themselves, it's no wonder Tracy ends up in threesomes perfecting her technique for oral sex and goes from straight A's to flunking the seventh grade. It's the other side of the moon from Peggy Ann Garner in Junior Miss.

Thirteen is a new slant on the dysfunctional-family genre film. This time, the family is in a state of suspended psychosis. I have no idea what it all means. I'm not a parent, so I confess I am blissfully ignorant and out of touch on the subject of uncontrollable adolescent hysterics. I shudder to think any of this bleak despair is for real, but I'm told it doesn't address even half the horrors of today's teenage twilight zone by the long-suffering parents of modern American kids with credit cards and raging hormones who make the delinquents in Rebel Without a Cause seem like illustrations in Archie and Veronica comics. It must be irritatingly inconvenient for an accomplished talent like Evan Rachel Wood to be relegated to 13-year-old roles that are far from pretty in pink. She's still a marvel as the downwardly spiraling Tracy, and the only reason I can think of to suffer through the graphic sadism of this movie. As Tracy inevitably deteriorates, the color washes out of the film in a state of anemia very much like her own. Ms. Wood's vulnerability fuses the print with its only life force, but her cobalt blue eyes fade and the movie turns pretentiously black-and-white. Everyone in it needs a blood transfusion, and before it's over, so will you.

The Real Deal

Passionada (opening Aug. 15) is a charming and luxurious romantic interlude carefully constructed to cool the embers of a smoldering summer and briskly lead the way to the hopeful changes of autumn. Set in the Portuguese fishing community in New Bedford, Mass., it follows the lives of three generations of women in the Amonte family whose husbands, fathers and sons were lost at sea on a doomed vessel called the Azorean Blue . Grandma Angelica (the fabulous Lupe Ontiveros) is a pragmatic matriarch who doesn't want to see her own widowed daughter waste her life living in memories of the past. Daughter Celia (Sofia Milos, who plays a detective on CSI: Miami ) is a grief-stricken widow haunted by the sea and eternally devoted to her dead husband, singing love songs in a cabaret but eschewing the attention of every man in town. Celia's daughter Vicky (lovely Emmy Rossum, the Metropolitan Opera singer who played the young Audrey Hepburn in the ABC biography The Audrey Hepburn Story ) deplores the Old World traditions and tries to set Mom up with dates on the Internet. Into their lives boogies Charlie Beck (Jason Isaacs), a professional British gambler banned from U.S. casinos for card-counting. Vicky promises him a date with her mom if he'll teach her all the tricks of the gaming tables. Thus begins an elaborate, dishonorable seduction based entirely on lies, but greatly enhanced by fresh dialogue, solid performances and the realistic direction of the gifted Dan Ireland, who made an indelible mark with The Whole Wide World , an underrated film that also brought Renée Zellweger to prominence.

History repeats itself, because the best thing about Passionada (a title derived from the traditional Portuguese music called fado ) is Jason Isaacs. This is the dashing actor who stole The Patriot out from under Mel Gibson as the British military zealot who pursued Mr. Gibson's hero throughout the American Revolution, and whose unforgettable résumé of handsome villains now includes the dark and sinister Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series. In his first contemporary romantic leading role, he's as unique and charismatic as the young Cary Grant of 60 years ago. Working his way into a woman's heart under false pretenses, then as passionate about proving himself worthy of her trust as a coltish athlete on the way to his first Olympic competition, he is spectacularly appealing. Jason Isaacs is the real deal. Why isn't he a big star already?

Anthony LaPaglia plays Nick, a man of much action and few words who is struggling with the most difficult assignment of his career: how to bring comfort and closure to the grieving families of the courageous and dedicated firefighters who sacrificed their lives for their city. Ms. Weaver, in a no-frills performance that seems inspired by some greater power than the lines in a screenplay, plays the journalist-editor who meets the fire captain through a friend, at a time when everybody in New York wanted to contribute to the redemption of a decimated city. Out of 350 missing firemen, they found a way to celebrate eight guys in eight separate eulogies. As the words come tentatively to the surface and the stories come to life, constructing memories, you find yourself asking the piercing, penetrating question: "Is anyone O.K.?"

The Guys is a two-hander that never seems static. The stars are so natural and generous with their time and talent that the movie doesn't even seem scripted. It makes you think of firefighters in a different way. They cook. They take dance lessons. They ride bikes. Ms. Weaver's probing concern and intelligence brings out the best in Mr. LaPaglia, who shows the tight-lipped, burly, buzz-cut, emotionally reserved fear of a man secretly capable of great sensitivity, occasionally brushing away a tear. Through the portraits of "the guys" they paint with vivid words that are quirky, funny and true, they share an emotional center that helps them to examine their losses and redefine what getting back to normal is. How can you cut deals with God under these conditions? What happens next? And, most importantly, why did any of this happen in the first place? Articulating all the right universal responses, The Guys is one of those rare and exemplary motion pictures that is likely to make audiences of strangers want to hold hands. I usually distrust and avoid this kind of cinematic revival-meeting fervor, but in The Guys , pain and healing become one. In a great document of a unique time and place, film turns into the visual equivalent of all the right words put together.

Seedy Surprise

Remaking foreign-language films in English is always a mistake, but The Good Thief , written and directed by Neil Jordan, is a lovingly crafted update of Jean-Pierre Melville's romantically masculine caper flick, Bob le Flambeur , that jazzes up a French classic without losing any of its dark edge or bitter flavor. The story of a gambler reduced through addiction and penury to one last chance at underworld redemption with the spectacular robbery of a Paris casino worked better in black and white, staged in the neon-bruised hours between dusk and dawn, than it does in lush Technicolor and set on the French Riviera. Let's face it: In all of the Côte d'Azur, there is not a shred of the same mystery, danger or exotic sense of desperation you get in one single, descending camera pan from the heavenly heights of Sacré Coeur to the sleazy bowels of Pigalle. Still, Mr. Jordan has lovingly recreated much of what glittered in the hard French thrillers that once starred Delon and Belmondo, and provided a superbly customized vehicle for the salty charms of ashtray-voiced Nick Nolte, who delivers a performance of sliced Limburger light enough in tone to resemble an underworld comedy of manners.

Bob is an American thief and junkie who has been convicted so many times the French cops have practically become his pals. Now he's stranded in the South of France, out of luck, out of money and at the end of his rope, with one last chance to save his reputation by robbing the most impregnable casino in Monte Carlo of 80 million francs and its priceless art collection-on the night before the Grand Prix! One-third of the movie catalogs Bob's agonized attempts to kick drugs cold turkey by handcuffing himself to his headboard; one-third is about the pimps and fences and killers who form Bob's crew of partners in crime; and the final third centers on the heists themselves-one of which may be a red herring. In addition to the seedy atmosphere, double-crosses and surprise cameos (good work by Ralph Fiennes as a maniac who collects art), the film has the kind of jaded dialogue that doesn't mean anything but always sounds good. The title is from the biblical story of the "good thief," who was crucified next to Jesus and was promised a place in paradise. You wish the same fate for Bob, who is actually a man of principle underneath the scum. There's something wonderful about the fact that the main reason he comes back from the dead to risk his life robbing one more casino is for the chance, before he dies, to perform one last heist wearing a tuxedo. This is the movie I was hoping Ocean's Eleven would be, but so much better.

Dancing With Duvall

Going to fabulous Oscar parties, getting paid millions to lock lips with the planet's most beautiful women, perfecting your craft until you are the envy of the acting world and get photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair is more than enough for some actors-but not Robert Duvall. He wants to be Orson Welles. Spending more than a decade and more than $5 million of his own money to get his vanity project, The Apostle , on the screen in 1997 wasn't enough. Now he's challenging the Hollywood system again as the writer, director and star of Assassination Tango .

The film is a dud, but Mr. Duvall has earned respect through years of fine work, and watching him is never a waste of time; I always learn something. In Assassination Tango , he plays a middle-aged guy with a ponytail who lives with a nice girlfriend and her adoring daughter. A great neighborhood favorite with young and old, he cuts a dapper figure with the ladies on the dance floor. There's only one thing wrong with this picture: After dark, he's a cold-blooded freelance hit man whose naïve girl (Kathy Baker) hasn't got a clue why he's always leaving town on strange jobs. As long as he's on the dance floor, or spending time with the two girls in his life, he's a great family man-gentle, humorous, generous to a fault. When he's on a "job," he's a killing machine-fearless, tough and dangerous. His new and potentially final assignment is a three-day quickie that takes him to Argentina to kill a powerful retired general responsible for the torture and murder of political dissidents in the 1980's.

The job drags on for weeks. While he's passing the time, he gets distracted by the sensual pull of the tango and falls for a sexy young dance instructor (Luciana Pedraza), who teaches him the precision, control and exotic rituals of the dance. The picture drags when the lovers swoon once too often over the tango as a symbol of love, life and religion, and the reason Mr. Duvall went to Buenos Aires in the first place becomes secondary to the passion he experiences on the dance floor. The dance scenes are almost as lovely as the intoxicating tourist views of Buenos Aires, but the more Mr. Duvall imitates José Greco, the more he loses control of the film and sinks into a lot of naughty self-indulgence. The film takes on so many of the dance's abrupt right turns that by the time Mr. Duvall finally gets around to the darkness and violence of the assassination, it almost seems like an afterthought. It's a curious and unsatisfying lark, in which Robert Duvall the actor is rendered speechless by Robert Duvall the writer and sideswiped by Robert Duvall the director.

Amour Fou

Jeanne Moreau ages like Mr. Poe's amontillado. Properly cherished and handled with extreme caution and care, there seems to be no limit to her shelf life. In Cet Amour-là , the startling and still-vivacious Ms. Moreau, now in her mid-70's, plays French literary icon Marguerite Duras in the final years of her life, in a film that concentrates on the relationship between the aging Duras and a boy named Yann Andréa, less than half her age. It was a love affair that began in 1980, when Duras was 60 and her lover was in his early 20's, and lasted until her death in 1996 at the age of 76.

The film, directed by Josée Dayan, is an obvious labor of love. Ms. Moreau, the celebrated actress, and Duras, who wrote such classics as Hiroshima, Mon Amour , met in 1959 and became intimate friends with a lot in common-a love of art, literature, film, politics and men. Drinking to excess, chain-smoking endlessly and sleeping with young admirers was as natural to both women as inhaling one of their battered Gitanes. Playing Duras at the same age as the famous writer the year she died, Ms. Moreau's asymmetrical mouth, pockets under her eyes as deep as teacups, and the obvious fact that she couldn't care less, add up to an animal energy that makes the role and the film appear preordained. She's been whore, madonna and lover in so many films that it's unlikely she could reveal any new secrets surrounding the myth of women. Yet, as she catches the mercurial moods of Duras-a woman of great wit and charm who was equally capable of selfish egotism and tortured self-analysis-Ms. Moreau's whisky voice and full range of gestures, smiles, glances and looks are utilized to full effect. She is a wonder to behold, one difficult, willful and fascinating artist playing another artist of equal temperament and stature.

Too bad Yann Andréa, the young fan who arrived on her doorstep in Brittany after five years of fan letters, is such a dolt. Or maybe it's Aymeric Demarigny, the fuzzy actor who plays him, who makes the character such an egghead. The equation never balances. Duras was abusive, heaping the lover young enough to be her son with ridicule for hanging around while she grappled with writer's block, accusing him of being useless and talentless. She was strong-willed and opinionated to the exclusion of all others, a loner who enjoyed solitude and considered friendships intrusions. Ms. Moreau plays her with her usual intriguing mix of practicality, humor, haughty French snobbery, mystery and tenderness. But there are times when you wonder why the boy doesn't smack her across the face. Instead, he moved into her bed, drinking wine, talking with her, typing her manuscripts and keeping her old bones sexually charged for 16 years. Undeniably, the best thing about the affair was that Andréa, offering himself as amanuensis, was responsible for one of her most successful works, The Lover , which revived her literary reputation. The bad side was that he lured her back into alcoholism, which landed her in the hospital and hastened her death. She threw him out in fits of rebellion, but always took him back-bedraggled, cold, impoverished and badly in need of her nourishing soups. Their bittersweet amour fou was the stuff French writers have been thriving on since Colette. Warts and all, Cet Amour-là is an astoundingly intimate portrait of the love affair that kept all of France enthralled. Set against the beauty of the Breton seaside, it is also a film that revels in the insights of Duras' writing and the wisdom of Ms. Moreau's ripe experience as an actress-a perfectly observed hommage to two extraordinary women of distinction, alone but never lonely.

Like Ms. Orlean, much of the New York literary world seemed to be struggling with the reality that 32-year-old first-time novelist Amanda Davis was indeed gone-killed, along with both of her parents, when the Cessna that her father was piloting crashed 16 miles north of Asheville, N.C., on March 14. The cause of the crash is still under investigation.

And the circumstances surrounding her death only contributed to their disbelief and their anger.

Davis' parents, James and Francie Davis, both college professors, had been shuttling her around on a shoestring book tour to promote her first novel, Wonder When They'll Miss Me . The trio had started in Davis' hometown of Durham, N.C., proceeded to Asheville, and was headed to Pittboro, N.C., when they went missing late Friday. The crash site was discovered the following day.

Indeed, a number of Davis' friends told The Observer they were angry at her publisher, William Morrow, for its lack of support for her novel, which they said led the author to concoct her own scrappy tour with her father as pilot. Davis' last two editors at the publishing house-including the editor who acquired her work, Rob Weisbach-had both left Morrow in recent years, and friends said she had no champion in the company.

"She fucking knocked herself out to get this book out there," said Davis' friend, Susan Troy. "She did not get a lot of help."

"It's a familiar story-an orphaned book getting short shrift and poor to no marketing," said Elizabeth Gaffney, an editor at large at the Paris Review . "But Amanda suffered a consequence hideously out of proportion with the usual woes of the situation."

Davis' friends also took issue with a March 16 Publishers Weekly report in which William Morrow was portrayed as having a warm and supportive relationship with Davis-one in which her publicist called her "eight times a day."

Ayelet Waldman, a writer and the wife of Mysteries of Pittsburgh author Michael Chabon, said Davis had actually been sad and disappointed with her publisher. "It's not like she had this great idea and she wanted fly around in a Cessna," said Ms. Waldman. Though she said she didn't hold the publisher directly accountable for Davis' death, Ms. Waldman wished William Morrow had acknowledged some form of regret. "What bothered me was that they didn't just say it: 'We wished we'd toured her, and then she wouldn't have been on the damned plane.'

"I know I'm angry and I lost my best friend and that's part of what's going on," Ms. Waldman added. "But still …. "

Reached for comment, William Morrow publisher Michael Morrison expressed his sadness, but referred us to Davis' agent, Henry Dunow, with the explanation that he didn't think it was appropriate to talk about the situation.

Mr. Dunow said, "I wish William Morrow had had a greater publication plan for her-but I personally think it's a leap to make any causation in her death."

The agent also said, however, that he was having a hard time coming to terms with Davis' fate. "I came in this morning and on my desk were Amanda's name and number and various details we were talking about," said Mr. Dunow on Monday, March 17. "There's something about the nature of this death that is impossible to make any peace with."

Davis, who had recently been awarded a teaching fellowship at Mill's College in Oakland, Calif., was a fixture of the youngish New York writing community, instantly recognizable at parties by her mass of kinky auburn hair and funky tortoise-shell glasses. Colleagues recalled her spiky wit and den-mother affection for fellow writers. "I realize that if I hadn't met her in Brooklyn College," said Ms. Gaffney, "I would have met her six or 10 times in the coming years. She knew so many people."

In the late 90's, Davis worked as an assistant t o Esquire fiction editor Adrienne Miller, where she also became acquainted with Mr. Eggers, then an editor at large with the magazine. Ms. Miller said Davis was "unbelievably enthusiastic" and had "a very fine, sophisticated ear."

In 1999, with the publication of her first collection of short stories, Circling the Drain , she left Esquire to join a circus. "She traveled in this hilarious bus with all these crazy people and that's when she got those tattoos," recalled another friend, Elissa Schappell, the editor of the Hot Type column in Vanity Fair . "And she would say, 'Yeah, why wouldn't you be in a circus?' 'Why wouldn't you fly with your dad?'"

Davis' stories are populated with eccentric characters who struggle with bad luck and loss. Her novel is about a formerly fat girl named Faith who is recovering from a brutal sexual assault. She joins the circus and begins to heal. "She was a total sucker for a redemptive ending," said Ms. Gaffney. "I don't know what to do with her own ending. It wasn't redemptive."

But Ms. Gaffney tried to wriggle out of that conclusion. "Although in a weird way, it was like one of her stories," she said, recalling an early story entitled "Print." "It's about a girl who walks out into a field and you see these footprints and the girl just vanishes," she said. "It's like Amanda: She just jumped from the middle of a field and vanished, or was abducted by some fate."

Davis is survived by her brother Adam, 29, and sister, Joanna, 26. On Monday, March 17, the McSweeney's Web site erected a memorial that included remembrances by Mr. Chabon and Davis' close friend, Heidi Julavits. A memorial service is scheduled to be held at the Housing Works book store in Soho on Wednesday, March 26.

-Joe Hagan

Federal Oscar Incident

The March 12 press briefing held by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer covered such topics as President Bush's morning phone calls to Russian President Putin, United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed and the Philippines' President Arroyo. Mr. Fleischer expressed the President's condolences over the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, and took questions about the U.N. Security Council and the March 17 deadline for war.

According to a transcript of the briefing, he also fielded a question about the Oscar race.

As the press conference was winding down, talk-radio host Lester (Les) Kinsolving made his move.

"Ari," said Mr. Kinsolving, who has been covering the White House since the Nixon administration, "the Los Angeles district attorney's office has announced that if movie director Roman Polanski comes to the United States, even to receive an Academy Award [for The Pianist ], he will be arrested as a fugitive after his 1978 conviction for giving champagne and narcotics to a 13-year-old girl and then raping her."

Then Mr. Kinsolving got to the point. "Does the President believe that the L.A. district attorney's office is right, and that the federal government should move to get the extradition of this dope-pushing child molester?" he asked.

Mr. Fleischer, who hears off-topic questions from the enthusiastic Mr. Kinsolving almost every day, gave a slightly exasperated reply. According to the transcript, he said: "Lester, by now I would have hoped you'd have picked up the pattern that there are questions you need to address to other people, not the White House."

Mr. Kinsolving persisted, asking "how does the President feel" about the potential for Mr. Polanski's arrest.

"The President feels that you should have picked up the pattern of addressing questions to other people," said Mr. Fleischer.

"And who should I address it to, [since] he wants to duck it?" asked Mr. Kinsolving.

Mr. Fleischer finally laughed and admitted, "I really don't know, and I'm not sure I care."

In an Oscar voting week that included Academy executive administrator Ric Robertson warning that certain studios might be docked tickets to the awards for inappropriate campaigning, a dustup over a Miramax ad for Best Director nominee Martin Scorsese featuring a written endorsement by former Academy president Robert Wise, and the posting, by the Smoking Gun Web site, of the 1977 testimony of Mr. Polanski's then-13-year-old victim, Samantha Gailey, some Hollywood sources were betting that Mr. Kinsolving was being used as a stalking-horse to carry out some Oscar-nominated studio's dirty tricks.

Not so, said Mr. Kinsolving by phone.

"I wasn't even aware of [the Oscar campaigning uproar], even though I think I am the only talk-show host who is also a White House correspondent who is also in the Screen Actors Guild," said Mr. Kinsolving, who has appeared in the Civil War epics Gettysburg and Gods and Generals .

Asked what prompted his question about Mr. Polanski, Mr. Kinsolving replied: "Well, No. 1, I believe that the Constitution shows that the President shall see to it that the law is enforced.

"No. 2, I believe that using narcotics and champagne to rape a 13-year-old is simply horrible." Mr. Kinsolving was sort of yelling by the time he got to No. 3, which was that if the President could comment on the rescue of 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart in Utah, he should also be "concerned about the possibility of giving an Oscar to a dope-pushing child molester!"

Mr. Kinsolving added that he'd also read an editorial about Mr. Polanski's crime in The National Review .

"I don't care how good he was-and I hear the movie is very good!-if Benedict Arnold directed a play, would they honor him in New York?"

- Rebecca Traister

Grubman's Day in Court

Allen Grubman was in court on Tuesday, March 18, but not as an attorney.

The entertainment lawyer and father of publicist Lizzie Grubman was called for jury duty at the criminal courts building at 100 Centre Street, where he waited with the rest of the jury pool before being summoned and questioned by a judge.

According to a fellow potential juror, Mr. Grubman was dressed "rich but casual," in a powder-blue cashmere sweater and powder-blue shirt with its collar sticking out. The source said that he was "grumpy and preoccupied" and that he talked on his cell phone "the whole time he was out in the hall, on the way downstairs-he almost sat on my lap because he was so involved in his call."

When the group was summoned to Room 1301, the judge explained that they were being selected as jurors in the case of a man who was found in Manhattan with 135 pounds of cocaine in his car. When the Honorable Judge W. Wetzel asked twice if anyone had any "emotional or moral" reasons why they could not be impartial in this case, Mr. Grubman raised his hand.

According to the witness, Mr. Grubman told the judge, "Yes, I had a close family member involved in the civil justice system in the past year and I think this would be too hard for me."

Mr. Grubman was likely referring to his daughter, Lizzie, who in 2002 served a brief jail sentence after pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and criminally negligent assault after backing her father's Mercedes S.U.V. into 16 people at the Conscience Point club..

When the judge asked if this would interfere with his impartiality, Mr. Grubman said, "Yes." The judge then thanked and dismissed him.

Also in the pool, according to our inquisitive source, was a man who spent the morning fiddling with his BlackBerry, and was overheard identifying himself as a "good friend" of Mr. Grubman.

When called by the judge, Ronald Altbach told the judge that he was "the C.E.O. of a corporation under siege," by the Federal Trade Commission. Reached later by phone, Mr. Altbach said, "No, I said a besieged public company. Because all public companies are besieged." Mr Altbach is C.E.O. of Cross Media Marketing Communications, which has been involved in a recent legal battle with the F.T.C.

Additionally, Mr. Altbach wrote and performed "Dancing in the Moonlight" with pals from Cornell University as the band King Harvest, and later wrote, played keyboards and produced songs with the Beach Boys for five years. He also produced the 1987 TV-movie Nights in White Satin, before becoming an investment banker in New York and eventually heading up Cross Media.

Mr. Altbach was not selected for the jury. Mr. Grubman could not be reached for comment by press time.

-R.T.

Tangoing With Duvall

On the evening of March 17 at Soho's Cafe Novecento, Robert Duvall smoothed the remains of his gray hair over the back of his head and neck. In his rumpled gray suit, he looked like the city-slicker version of Gus McCrae, the aging cowboy he played in Lonesome Dove .

On this unseasonably warm evening, Mr. Duvall was attending the premiere party for Assassination Tango . The 72-year-old actor had not only written and directed the film, he incorporated two of his current passions into the plot: tango and his girlfriend of seven years, 31-year-old Luciana Pedraza, who sat to his right.

While Ms. Pedraza chatted with other guests at the table, Mr. Duvall told The Transom her story. She had once been voted "Miss Elegant" in a beauty pageant, he said, glancing over at his leading lady. And though Ms. Pedraza hails from Argentina-land of the tango-Mr. Duvall said she had yet to learn the dance when he met her "on the street" seven years ago. The tango-obsessed actor arranged for lessons for her and then made her his leading lady on and off the screen.

Ms. Pedraza wore black-on-black patterned pants and a backless halter top. When she posed for photos with the pale and leathery Mr. Duvall, each muscle in her tiny back flexed visibly under her toffee skin.

"When I get off the plane [in Argentina], her father says, 'You're in the same jacket you wore last year,'" Mr. Duvall said with a wry smile. "Over there, they are very concerned about that: your face, your beauty, your psychiatrist. I'm not into all that stuff." He chuckled, and the creases at the edges of his eyes deepened. "But I love Argentina. I've been there 38 times. They are arrogant but warm. The French are arrogant but arrogant."

That was the only hint that Mr. Duvall gave of his political leanings. Given that the premiere took place on the day that President George W. Bush delivered his 48-hour ultimatum to Iraq, The Transom asked him about his reaction to what was going on in the world. But Mr. Duvall just looked at the table and gave a brief wave of his hand. "Sure, I've got my opinions, but I try to keep them to myself. I know some people like to talk about it, but I get embarrassed. I get embarrassed when I hear them sometimes."

He and Ms. Pedraza, along with United Artists chief Bingham Ray, had skipped the Angelika screening of Assassination Tango , but it wasn't to catch President Bush's televised speech. Rather, the group had noshed at the arrogant but arrogant Bouley Bakery, where Ms. Pedraza chatted with singer Lyle Lovett about a documentary she plans to make about country singer Billy Joe Shaver. "We had some very nice dishes there," said Mr. Duvall, who proudly reported that Ms. Pedraza is also at work on a documentary about Texas playwright Horton Foote.

It seemed that Mr. Duvall was interested in talking about anything but politics-including the likelihood of late fatherhood. "I have two stepdaughters [from previous marriages], but that's it," he said as he looked warmly across the table at Ms. Pedraza. (She was chatting with producer Rob Carliner.) "No, I don't have any of my own." Mr. Duvall glanced back at The Transom, gave a rueful smile and pulled close to whisper in our ear.

"I shoot blanks, actually," said the cowboy.

- R.T.

Sigourney and The Guys

It was after 5 p.m. on March 13, and actress Sigourney Weaver was still selling The Guys , her current movie, about a journalist who helps a fire captain write eulogies for eight of his firefighters, all of whom perished on 9/11.

Ms. Weaver was sitting at a table in Room 1931 of the Regency Hotel, from which the bed had been removed. She was wearing tight shoes, busy neon socks, striped pants and a gray Michael Kors sweater. She'd done a dozen TV interviews, roundtables and one-on-ones, and there were several more to go. This was no problem for her: Once, she did 158 interviews in a day.

So The Transom decided to make things a little interesting for her. We told Ms. Weaver we'd get back to The Guys after a little word association.

Ms. Weaver didn't seem particularly eager to play our little game, but she agreed, more or less.

George W. Bush, we began.

"Determined," she said.

Anything else?

"Slogans."

One more?

"Agenda."

Republicans?

"In power."

Democrats?

"Silent."

Clinton/Gore?

"The good old days."

Dick Cheney?

"Hmmmm."

Rumsfeld?

"Hmmm-mmmm."

Condi Rice?

Ms. Weaver had had enough . The Guys , she explained, "was not a political movie." Still, she kept a polite, patient cool, and even laughed several times despite our repeated attempts to change the subject.

But Ms. Weaver always managed to steer the interview back to its intended purpose: to promote The Guys , which was directed and co-written by her husband Jim Simpson. He even acts in it.

"You know, so little good has come out of 9/11," Ms. Weaver said. "And this [ The Guys ] is one of the few things that has come out that shows how people have reconnected with each other."

Then, later in the interview: "I think the movie-you know, The Guys -puts a human face on who the victims were," Ms. Weaver said. "And I think one of the things it shows is that this happened not just to the firemen, but to New York as a city of families, not just New York as a place where there are cops and witty single people. This, to me, is a very universal story, and someone in the Middle East could watch this story and realize that it was about a regular guy just like him …. Any culture could relate … and I think if there's anything to look toward, it's that our humanity is greater than this situation we're in with Iraq."

Was she able to turn off the subject of 9/11 and laugh uncontrollably-have a great time like it was 1999?

"I did last night. I had some dinner with friends of mine. We talked mostly about how geeky we were as adolescents and how we finally outgrew that."

There in the hotel room, Ms. Weaver sure didn't seem geeky or giddy. She looked a bit grim.

Time to change the subject. Her father, Pat Weaver, was president of NBC and created the Today Show and the Tonight Show . Who did Ms. Weaver like in the media these days?

"I like Jeff Greenfield."

Who didn't she like?

Ms. Weaver squinted at The Transom. "What's your assignment?" she asked.

"Strong opinions."

"Listen, we're going to have a hard enough time getting people to see this movie. I'd rather spend the time we have getting people to see beyond 'Oh, 9/11-I don't want to see that .'" She admitted being "the reluctant interviewee."

We took one last shot at engaging Ms. Weaver. We asked her if these times were similar to the cynical, corporation-dominated culture that pervades much of the four Alien movies.

"No, I don't think so," Ms. Weaver said. "O.K.?"

"O.K." meant the half-hour was up. At that exact moment, there was a knock on the door. Time for another interview.

-George Gurley

Sharpton's B.I.G. Night

Has the Reverend Al Sharpton changed his mind about the political power of hip-hop? Mr. Sharpton's presence at B.I.G. Night Out, a black-tie event at the Metropolitan Pavilion that paid tribute to slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. (a.k.a. Christopher Wallace) and a number of other fallen hip-hop artists, was surprising in light of his past denunciations of hip-hop culture. In his latest book, Al on America , for instance, Mr. Sharpton wrote: "As far as I'm concerned, [rappers] are low-down devious things who aren't worth the millions of dollars young people spend to make them stars."

But there was Mr. Sharpton at the March 11 event, pressing the flesh and having his ego stroked in return. "Mr. Sharpton, thank you for running for President. I admire your bravery," a twentysomething woman said earnestly. "Thank you, dear, thank you!" Mr. Sharpton replied as he breezed by the young woman.

When The Transom asked Mr. Sharpton what had prompted this change in attitude, he told us: "I think there's a positive side to hip-hop." But he soon changed the subject to politics, citing the reasons for his Presidential candidacy: "There has to be someone out there against the war. I think that when the economy has gone bad, we need to focus on what's going on within the country rather than chasing bogeymen abroad." He said that he didn't have anyone in mind yet for his running mate. "We do that later," he shrugged.

- Noelle Hancock

The Transom Also Hears …

… If public-relations legend Sy Presten ever gets tired of pitching stories- not on your life, baby! -he could always carve out a second career performing at Edelweiss. On Feb. 6, Mr. Presten cross-dressed as real-estate mogul Barbara Corcoran's mother at the Feb. 6 publication party for Ms. Corcoran's book Use What You've Got & Other Business Lessons I Learned From My Mom , and on March 10-Ms. Corcoran's birthday-she sent him a present: a photo of her and the dolled-up publicist with a note: "Here's my token of thanks for going above and beyond my hopes and expectations."

-Frank DiGiacomo