If you weren't aware, Warner Bros. claimed that the new film couldn't make the Wicked Witch green, since that was something specific to their film, and not L. Frank Baum's children's books. So instead we get a Glinda-riffic Michelle Williams all in white, a fashionably red Mila Kunis, and a darkly chic Rachel Weisz (channeling Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman) as the hottest witchy witches since Idina Menzel took the stage as Elpheba in Wicked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yclgHQaAEJU

Oz centers on James Franco as a much younger wizard, who, as it appears in the previews, somehow lands in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (maybe the producers had some say in which way the wind blew), and befriends a red queen witch and a white queen witch. Though we haven't seen the film, we're hoping the rest of the plot revolves around the Wizard convincing his new friend to put on a magical art show at the Emerald City's Film Festival, culminating in a Marina Abramovic-style performance piece where a house falls on one--or preferably all--of them.

Also starring Zach Braff.

Alison Lohman (Getty Images)

We can’t believe they’re rebooting the Spider-Man franchise this year—the last one came out in 2007! For proof that, though the series had been in decline, director Sam Raimi still had some intriguing ideas, check out Drag Me To Hell, his 2009 horror film depicting the evils wrought upon a young loan officer who unwisely decides against issuing a loan to an old witch. Watching the film with yet more knowledge about banks’ practices than we even had in 2009, the witch grows yet more sympathetic. And Alison Lohman, a onetime almost-it girl who never quite popped (the most recent snaps of her on Getty Images are from this movie's promo cycle--come back to us, Alison!), is smashing here as the girl trying to drag herself out of Hell and rectify a mistake of her own making. Save this one for a chilly Friday evening, right after you check your bank statement.

Set your DVR for Syfy at 9pm.

1. Up: $68.2 million ($68.2 million total)

Before everyone gets too excited about the $68.2 million, some cold water: Up was seriously helped by 3-D showings, which accounted for a record-setting $35 million of this total gross, a number that tops the $32.6 million that Monsters vs. Aliens accrued from 3-D venues earlier this year. Of course that money is still green, but since 3-D tickets are more expensive (at Union Square, a 3-D ticket for Up costs $16.50), the Pixar film clearly wasn’t exactly the sensation that many people might want to believe. That splash of reality aside, this is a very impressive opening and with the 3-D gimmick, Up should at least reach the $223 million that Wall*E grossed last year.

2. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian: $25.5 million ($105.3 million total)

Faced with the mammoth opening of Up, a 52 percent tumble for the Ben Stiller family comedy in weekend two seems reasonable. Reaching the $250 million gross of the first film is totally out of the question, but, depending on how Battle of the Smithsonian fares next week against Land of the Lost, a $175 million total could be reached. If that happens, look for Night at the Museum: Tussle in the Louvre to hit theaters in 2011.

3. Drag Me to Hell: $16.6 million ($16.6 million total)

With due respect to Sam Raimi, this is not good. Despite universally strong reviews, Drag Me to Hell couldn’t even top the opening salvos of such immortal 2009 horror entries like The Unborn ($19.8 million) and The Haunting in Connecticut ($23 million). There is hope, of course: Drag Me to Hell is likely to have great word of mouth and the month of June is devoid of major scares, so a final domestic gross of around $60 million could be possible. That being said, we assume Universal was expecting a bit more here.

4. Terminator Salvation: $16.1 million ($90.6 million total)

Is it too early to call Terminator Salvation the first flop of the year? The second weekend of the McG-directed borefest plunged 62 percent and barely held off the fourth weekend of Star Trek to finish in a disappointing fourth place. At this rate of depreciation, Terminator Salvation will be lucky to pass $110 million overall. For a film with a budget reportedly as high as $200 million—and for a franchise that is beloved—a final tally in that range will border on epic failure.

5. Star Trek: $12.8 million ($209.5 million total)

The aforementioned fourth weekend of Star Trek ebbed just 44 percent to edge out Angels & Demons ($11.2 million/$104.7 million total) for fifth place at the box office. In the process, Star Trek became the first film of 2009 to cross the $200 million dollar barrier. Proof that franchise brands are only as viable as the movies they produce does not seem to be needed.

Highlights and Fangoria subscribers unite! The last weekend in May brings two movies to theaters: One to scare the life out of you; one to make you feel like a kid again. As we do every Friday, here’s a handy guide to the new releases.

Drag Me to Hell

What’s the story: After spending the better part of the last decade caught in the web of the Spider-Man franchise, director Sam Raimi returns to his low-budget horror roots with Drag Me to Hell, an old-fashioned schlocky horror film that appears to be heavy on both scares and fun. Alison Lohman—looking more and more like Jessica Lange with each passing movie—stars as an ambitious bank officer who makes the decision to deny an old gypsy a loan. Big mistake. Before you can say “whip zoom,” a curse is levied and the gates of hell are open for business. Drag Me to Hell has gotten some of the best reviews of the summer (though our Rex Reed wasn’t a fan) and could be one of the sleeper hits of the season. At the very least, horror fans tired of seeing posers like Eli Roth dominate the genre should welcome Mr. Raimi’s return.

Who should see it: All Bank of America employees.

Up

What’s the story: What is it about Pixar movies that make critics go so gaga? Up is the studios 10th picture, and, as usual, the reviews are breathlessly hyperbolic to an almost annoying degree (the lone exception obviously being Armond White). According to Rotten Tomatoes, Up has a higher Fresh rating than even Wall*E, which, if memory serves, was already hailed as the greatest Pixar movie ever. Which begs the question: Does that make Up the greatest greatest Pixar movie ever? That irritation aside, we have to give Pixar credit for being the only film company that could possibly make a kids movie out of the premise of Gran Torino: Up focuses on a 78-year-old widower named Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Ed Asner) who attaches hundreds of balloons to his house and floats off to a distant jungle for some alone time, only to wind up as steward to an 8-year-old stowaway. Note to parents: This film is in 3-D, so expect to have your senses overloaded.

Who should see it: Clint Eastwood.

The true test of any successful horror flick is how wretched it makes you feel. At the very least, it should inspire a banquet of dread or offer a canapé of anxiety. After Drag Me to Hell you won’t mind walking home alone. You might even welcome a dark, deserted alley. It could help alleviate the anger of knowing you’ve been had. This is surprising, since Drag Me to Hell is the creation of writer-director Sam Raimi, whose body of work has been dedicated to turning more than one viewer’s hair white with the Evil Dead and Spider-Man franchises. The only thing he’s likely to turn a viewer to this time is the door marked exit.

For God only knows what reason, it begins with a prelude staged in 1969 in Pasadena. A kid steals a necklace from a gypsy wagon and takes refuge in one of those old houses that look like W. C. Fields lived there. The doors slam open; people fall to their deaths; the floor opens and sucks the little thief into a cauldron of flames; and the house goes back to looking like a silent-film set. Forty years later, a pretty loan officer in a California bank named Christine Brown (Alison Lohman, sometimes unfairly confused with Lindsay Lohan) refuses to extend a delinquent loan to an ancient hag with one eye and a mouth full of black incisors who has an epileptic fit in the middle of the bank and puts a curse on the young career girl. The nightmare begins. The crone attacks her in the underground parking garage, wrecks her car and rips a button from her coat. Soon she hears the same voices the little boy heard back in 1969. A bug crawls into her nose in the middle of the night. The next day at work she spews blood all over the bank. Her boyfriend (Justin Long) pooh-poohs the whole thing, until she bakes a harvest cake to impress his snobby parents and a human eye pops out of the batter with the kind of ensuing dinner-table chaos that guarantees a short engagement with no need for the bridal registry at Bloomingdale’s.

Seeking the help of a loopy carnival medium, Christine finds herself up to her pierced ears in corpse vomit, animal sacrifice, violent séances and open graves. Nothing stops the curse. The road to deliverance leads to the same old house in Pasadena containing the doorway to hell, but the movie doesn’t end there. There’s still a preposterous finale in a grotesque cemetery that tickles the funny bone more than it assaults the nervous system. Sound effects play an important part in the superficial mechanics (pots and pans rattle, glass shatters, powerful forces knock people to the floor), and to Mr. Raimi’s credit, there is no happy ending. Still, the first rule in spook films is “If you want to hold the audience’s attention, make them believe the horror could really happen”—a rule Drag Me to Hell ignores at its own peril. Nobody in the movie knows anything about gypsy witchcraft. Didn’t they see Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man?

rreed@observer.com

Before The Dark Knight eviscerated all the competition last July, Spider-Man 3 had the honor of owning the largest opening weekend ever, grossing $151 million dollars during its initial weekend in May of 2007. But whereas The Dark Knight has taken its huge opening salvo and gone on to gross over $530 million, Spider-man 3 topped out at only $336 million, most likely because it was clearly the worst of the three Spider-Man films. And while the assumption is that most of the original gang will return for another sequel, one of the biggest potential problems for the film is that the original gang will return for another sequel. By the time Spider-Man 4 hits theaters, star Tobey Maguire will be just shy of his 36th birthday; not too old to be an excellent actor for many years to come, but certainly too old to be donning the teenage tights of Peter Parker. Call us crazy, but it might be time to reboot the entire series and start from scratch.

Meanwhile, MTV (there goes that news van again!)  spoke with director Spike Lee about his proposed Inside Man sequel. The film is back on track somewhat, after an initial script by original writer Russell Gewirtz was scrapped—we can only assume that Mr. Lee saw Mr. Gewirtz's work on Righteous Kill and changed his mind about the entire thing. Now writer-director Terry George has taken over scripting duties and, according to Mr. Lee, he is close to completing the sequel. The director didn't offer any word on plot specifics, but he's hopeful that scheduling will allow most of the original cast to return. As major fans of the first Inside Man, consider us a tad weary about the prospects of a sequel, if only because while Terry George has hit home runs with his scripts for Hotel Rwanda and In the Name of the Father, he's also responsible for the outrageously bad Reservation Road. It is unclear which Terry George will show up here. Mr. Lee expects to start shooting in the early fall, so we could have our answers about Inside Man 2 sometime in 2010.

Clocking in at up to $350 million, depending on which moguls you ask and how secure their jobs are prior to the end of the fiscal year, Spider-Man 3 is the most expensive movie ever made. Translated from the kind of language Hollywood accountants use before they doctor the books, this means Spider-Man 3 represents the most money ever wasted on a single piece of Hollywood junk. Bloated and stupid, this movie is so bad you can’t even review it. Over-produced, over-publicized, over-designed, over-computerized and just plain over the moon, it’s so preposterously overwrought with so many bewildering plots juggling simultaneously for over-emphasis, there’s no entry point for criticism. You just stare at it, as you might a great big exploding pile of cow manure.

In its third spit-and-paste retread, the most boring of the Marvel Comics series runs out of octane before it steps on the pedal and just skids along on desperation and ethanol. Just trying to make sense of its overlapping plots risks boring you to death, but duty calls. Deadlier than ever, Tobey Maguire is back and hardly able to keep his eyes open as Peter Parker, the dork from Queens who swings through the canyons of New York on spider webs, saving the world from evil. Apparently the job doesn’t pay very well, because he still lives in the same crummy room with the broken doorknob where he hides his Spider-Man suit. Mary Jane Watson (an anesthesized Kristen Dunst, slumming it up under a contract hike) is now starring on Broadway, singing “They Say It’s Wonderful,” an Irving Berlin song from Annie Get Your Gun, in a musical that has nothing to do with either. They spoon over Central Park watching shooting stars in a spider web the size of a parachute, until she get fired after one performance and sinks into a deep depression. But wait. There’s no time for Spider-Man to waste on that plot. He’s too busy fending off his former best friend Harry (James Franco), the millionaire who competes for Mary Jane’s affection, blames Peter for his father’s suicide, and goes over to the dark side to seek revenge, emerging as—duh!—Green Goblin Jr. In the most criminal waste of talent since Vivien Leigh danced the Charleston in a maid’s uniform in the doomed Broadway musical Tovarich, the great Rosemary Harris makes another brief appearance as Spidey’s widowed Aunt May. This stuff must pay like crazy.

But forget about the old standbys: Spider-Man has two new arch-enemies to battle. First, there’s Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), the escaped convict who killed Peter’s Uncle Ben. Running from the police, he gets buried in the sand machine of a scientific research lab, and emerges faster than you can say “Shazam!” as the notorious Sandman, a humongous behemoth of swirling dust and biceps that director Sam Raimi confuses with the centuries-old Jewish fable of the gruesome golem. Even the bodies in this movie are computer-generated. Since we saw Mr. Church—in fact, all of Mr. Church—in his birthday suit in Sideways, we know he does not look like the Incredible Hulk. Then there’s Topher Grace, trashing his usual charm as Eddie Brock, an ambitious photographer competing for Peter’s job at The Daily Bugle, where the snarling, two-faced editor (J.K. Simmons) promises him a raise if he can catch Spider-Man committing a crime. Suddenly something slimy falls from the sky that looks like an oil spill and attaches itself to Peter’s motor bike. When the axle grease from Mars wraps itself around Eddie like barbed wire, it turns him into—Whammo!—a lethal nemesis called Venom! Holy Spider-Man! The superhero is so busy bobbing from skyscrapers and bridges that he hardly has time to notice when Harry suffers a concussion that destroys the short-term memory in his brain, allowing him to forgive, forget and join his old buddy to fight the forces of villainy. This is a major mistake, since the monsters are the only fun guys in the entire movie. But there’s more. I forgot to mention that Spider-Man now has not only two new adversaries to battle, but a new Halloween costume to wear. When he dons the old Superman knockoff, he can save Mary Jane from a falling taxicab. (This is a Manhattan with elevated highways!) When he suits up in the black outfit that looks like poison seaweed, he turns into Black Spider-Man. This allows the blank-faced Tobey Maguire the opportunity to sport some racy mascara, comb an Adolf Hitler haircut over one eye, and look a lot more interesting than just another bland, miscast stud muffin. Harry wants to kill Spider-Man. Mr. Sandman wants to kill Spider-Man. Venom wants to kill Spider-Man. Hell, the snoring audience with an I.Q. over 25 wants to kill Spider-Man. But the damned thing drones on in a state of computerized testosterone until its hard drive crashes and you could get killed in the exodus toward the doors marked “Exit.”

Sam Raimi throws in not only the kitchen sink, but everything else on the wreckage meter. Family members do cameos. There is one long, irrelevant and disruptive sequence in which no-talent Raimi sidekick Bruce Campbell appears as a French waiter that makes you wonder what these people were swallowing besides designer water. As Nerdy Spidey, Tobey Maguire is goopier than ever. As Black Spidey, playing ragtime piano like Harry Connick Jr. and thrusting his pelvis like John Travolta, he has to be seen to be believed. The sets are cheesy. The actors are unconscious. The writing is barely legible. The digital effects are overwhelming, without a shred of freshness or originality. None of it makes sense. In summation, Spider-Man 3 consists of one swollen contrivance after another until they all fester and erupt in an incomprehensible blast of noise and gibberish.

Jeez. It’s not even summer yet, and the silly season has already arrived at the movies.

In an attempt to recoup its reputation-and, perhaps, the estimated $25 million deficit between the film's cost and its U.S. gross-MGM has repositioned the 1995 accidental monstrosity Show-girls as a celebration of badness. But can camp go corporate?

For those who missed Showgirls during its terrifying first run, former crack whore NomiMalone (Elizabeth Berk-ley) wants to turn over a new leaf as a regular whore. She becomes a stripper, a showgirl and queen of the Vegas strip. Her old strip-club boss visits Nomi at the big Vegas theater as she climbs the spit-slippery pole of success and says in wonderment, "It must be weird not having anybody come on you." Plot ensues, sort of.

David Schmader, a Seattle writer, provides succinct DVD commentary: "More than any other bad movie, Showgirls triumphs in that every single person involved in the making of the film is making the worst possible decision at every possible time."

The package extras-drinking games?-are pretty crappy, although in the "Showgirls Diary" videos one does get to see director Paul Verhoeven ( Basic Instinct , Starship Troopers ) instructing Elizabeth Berkley how to act, which is sort of like watching a terrorist assemble a pipe bomb.

The DVD has no additions, no rescued scenes. Doesn't matter: Unless they were filming with a laparoscope, it's unlikely that there's much more pornography Mr. Verhoeven could have added.

That being said, Showgirls outshines the repackaged bullshit. When Nomi spits on Vegas impresario and sleazebag ZackCarey(Kyle MacLachlan) near the end of the film, it's still decidedly satisfying to know that finally Nomi's not the one getting ejaculated on.

[ Showgirls VIP Edition (1995), NC-17, 131 min., $39.98.]

-Choire Sicha

Hell on Earth

Director Guillermo del Toro must have read the same New Age guide to the superhero psyche as Spider-Man 's Sam Raimi. With Hellboy , Mr. del Toro created a tortured comic-book character, played with wry panache by Ron Perlman (no, not the bald billionaire), whose battles with demonic foes pale in comparison to his awkward courtship of Liz Sherman, a fellow "freak" played by pouty Selma Blair who can spontaneously combust without igniting herself. Talk about symbolism! Since Hellboy is the Devil's spawn, he is impervious to heat, making these two-oh, the irony-a match made in heaven.

Mr. Del Toro, who also wrote the script, throws in a lot of mishegoss about Hitler's attempt to win World War II by retaining the services of Rasputin, the infamous, seemingly immortal occult adviser to the Romanov family. The Nazi plan is eventually thwarted-phew! (The movie, thank God, is not revisionist history.) But Rasputin still harbors the villain's garden-variety desire for world domination, and Hellboy-oscillating between chomping on a cigar and a Baby Ruth (paging Dr. Freud)-won't stand for it.

Mr. Del Toro, the director of Mimic and Blade II , serves the movie well by never taking any of this comic-book mumbo-jumbo too seriously, injecting a self-aware sense of humor whenever possible. When Rasputin shows Hellboy's surrogate father a glimpse of the superhero in the future, on a throne lording over an Earth decimated by fire, a Post -like headline reads in the foreground, "The Apocalypse!" When Hellboy unearths a skeleton to give him directions to the secret lair of Rasputin, he resurrects only the top half of the corpse, prompting the creature to threaten, "If I had legs, I'd kick your ass!"

Thanks to Hellboy saving the Earth and all (shoot, I just gave away the ending), you have time to check it out should you want to be in on the fun when the sequel arrives.

[ Hellboy (2004), PG-13, 122 minutes, $20.96.]

-Jake Brooks

From the beginning, Spider-Man the superhero has enjoyed an edge over his comic-book superhero predecessors, Superman and Batman. For one thing, Spider-Man is not nearly as forbiddingly omnipotent. Indeed, in the movie, he is strikingly vulnerable-we get to see him in a state of powerlessness and helplessness as he's tossed around like a rag doll by the octopus-like tentacles of arch-menace-to-civilization Dr. Octopus, a position of mortal jeopardy we don't really see Superman or Batman in.

As a child, I recall experiencing something akin to an erotic thrill whenever someone I liked onscreen was saved at the last minute from a dire fate. Both Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and the love of his life, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), find themselves occasionally on the edge of extinction, a fate they face with superheroic sangfroid. This is the grace note of their final union-Mary Jane Watson is found to be worthy as much as he is found brave enough to make a commitment to his sweetheart, despite the danger in which his crime-fighting prowess places her. We're back in the Middle Ages of knights and their lady loves, albeit with Spidey and his sweetheart displaying a romantic intensity few medieval movies ever attain.

There are several possible factors to explain why Spider-Man 2 took off so spectacularly from the unfulfilled premises and promises of the original Spider-Man . Mr. Raimi has clearly experienced a deepening vision of his subject, enhanced by the screenwriting prowess of Messrs. Sargent and Chabon. The maturing roles of Mr. Maguire and Ms. Dunst, and the electrifying expansion of the quasi-maternal Aunt May character by Rosemary Harris, has also added greater depth to the original comic-book characterizations. Perhaps the greatest boon to the Spider-Man sequel is the curiously masochistic pseudo-visionary villain, Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), with his dream of perpetual fusion, who becomes the tabloid-headlined "Doc Ock" with his diabolically energized steel tentacles. Add to this the throwaway pathos of Broadway superstar Donna Murphy as the ill-fated Rosalie Octavius and the sweetly old-fashioned B-picture ambitiousness of having Mary Jane Watson "star" in a small Greenwich Village production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (which Louis Kronenberger once brilliantly summarized as "everything counts and nothing matters").

I must confess, there was a stretch in the film when I felt a childish gee-whiz exasperation with the way Spider-Man was perpetually mistreated and misunderstood by the very people he was trying to save from criminal harm. As Peter Parker, he's unable to hold a job either as a pizza-delivery boy or as a photographer for nasty newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), whose malicious diatribes against Spider-Man make Charles Foster Kane look saintly by comparison.

Worst of all, Peter Parker continues standing up Mary Jane despite all her overtures and advances. She finally seems to give up on Peter and starts a whirlwind romance with a glamorous astronaut who just happens to be John Jameson (Daniel Gillies), the son of Spider-Man's bitter enemy. Here, the essential intelligence of the film is confirmed by its refusal to discredit Mary Jane's suitor in any way. Indeed, John Jameson is not only drop-dead gorgeous as a future husband for Mary Jane, but he even seems to have a sense of humor. If Mary Jane is to leave him at the altar (as so many of her Hollywood sisters did in the past), she'll have to do it on her own and without any encouragement from Peter or the scriptwriters. I wouldn't have thought that today's children would embrace Hollywood's elective affinities, but I seem to have been wrong.

I now think that I was far from being alone in my disappointments with Mr. Raimi's first Spider-Man film for not resolving the romance between Peter and Mary Jane. My more cynical friends assured me that the two had to be kept apart for the sake of the inevitable sequels. After all, does Clark Kent ever marry Lois Lane? Get real. Well, folks, Mr. Raimi and his collaborators have gone and done it, and I, for one, am happy they have. This may create a problem for Spider-Man 3 , but as a comparatively impoverished movie lover, I don't have to face any stockholders with explanations as to why I risked the commercial viability of a future production.

Lest I drown in my own euphoria, let me reassert my professional skepticism: I was less than ecstatic about the gimmicky metal appendages attached to the villainous Dr. Octopus, which my esteemed colleague, Gene Shalit, aptly described as an Erector Set. Fortunately, Mr. Molina is charismatically ambiguous enough to project complex feelings despite his ridiculous encumbrances. His not entirely unsympathetic monster is made to seem humanly redeemable by his recollections of how he'd once inspired Peter Parker, the science student, at Columbia.

Despite the emotional amplitude of the dialogue, what drives the love story most strongly is the overwhelming spirituality of the camera's love affair with Ms. Dunst. I haven't seen such luminous close-ups since the great screen stars of Hollywood's Golden Age. Who would have thought that Mr. Raimi, the director of horror films, would light up the screen with such a chaste depiction of love, and without a trace of lechery?

Cole's Cozy Closet

Irwin Winkler's De-Lovely , from a screenplay by Jay Cocks, gaily lives up to its giddy title as a stylized evocation of Cole Porter (1891-1964), his tangled, tortured life, and his by turns joyous and anguished music. It arrives on the screen at a time when movie musicals have been virtually outlawed by the industry because, according to the bigwigs, the genre doesn't "travel well" outside the U.S., where half or more of a movie's box-office receipts are garnered these days. Besides, Porter's melodious songs are as anachronistic in today's beat-obsessed hip-hop musical market as the glorious scores of Porter's contemporaries, Jerome Kern (1885-1945), George Gershwin (1898-1937), Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Irving Berlin (1888-1989), to name just a few of the most illustrious American songsmiths of the last century.

In a sense, Mr. Winkler and Mr. Cocks have "outed" Porter as the flamboyantly bisexual celebrity he was-Michael Curtiz's censor-ridden 1946 musical "biography," Night and Day , managed to conceal its subject's "perverted" tendencies. I was a Columbia College freshman at the time, and I recall my more cynically knowledgeable acquaintances chortling not at the suppression of Porter's "secret vice," but at the reportedly scandalous behavior of Cary Grant and Monty Woolley at a posh hotel (Woolley and Porter had reportedly been an item at Yale as well). In the more uninhibited De-Lovely , Alan Corduner plays Woolley.

The point is that, not so long ago, there was a pervasive tradition of whispered highbrow homophobia, before we were all "liberated" from our fears and prejudices in the 60's. One indication of this is Ring Lardner's wise-guy 1930's printed version of Porter's most passionate lyrics with lisping spellings. If for no other reason (and there are assuredly other reasons), I recommend De-Lovely to my readers for its honorable role in opening another door to our ridiculously repressed past.

But there are other, more hedonistic inducements to see the film as well, most notably in the emotional chemistry of Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd as the long-married Cole and Linda Porter. Biographical purists may quibble over the liberal inaccuracies in casting Mr. Kline as the much shorter and slighter Porter, and Ms. Judd as a much younger screen version of Linda Porter, who was eight years older than her husband in real life.

Still, when compared to the grotesque evasions and subterfuges of the 1946 film, De-Lovely provides a breath of much-needed fresh air on a subject that's still problematic for mainstream Hollywood movies-and for the body politic as well.

Nevertheless, it was probably wise for Mr. Winkler and Mr. Cocks to "stage" Porter's life as a continuously creative performance, highlighted by his signature songs. Jonathan Pryce winningly plays the congenial interlocutor, Gabe, who leads the grimly aging Porter from his living-room piano to the wider arena of both his triumphs and his defeats.

Mr. Kline is no stranger to the musical stage, and he's immersed himself impressively in Porter's music, thereby making it resonate as a projection of his character's deepest and most profound feelings. As for Ms. Judd, it is not hyperbolic to suggest that she and Mr. Kline make exquisitely beautiful music together.

As I listened to the lyrics of Porter's most intense love songs, I couldn't help thinking of Ella Fitzgerald's sublime recording of the Rodgers and Hart songbook. Larry Hart, like Porter, was notoriously gay, and his moving torch songs reveal the accumulated frustrations and agonies of too many one-night stands.

If I have delayed discussing the many contemporary singers who have bravely pitched in to resurrect the old Porter songs, it's because I have very mixed feelings about the convulsive changes in musical tastes within my own lifetime. I realize that Mr. Winkler and his backers had to think of audiences who have lost contact with the Porter heritage. I would've preferred recordings by Ethel Merman and Alfred Drake, as well as the other dearly departed luminaries of the Broadway music theater that I grew up on. But even here, there were more than glimmers of a great talent making little songs of great sorrows.

I suppose that Cole was thinking about Linda at least part of the time as he poured out his heart on the piano. But there is no doubt what the subject is in Porter's "Love for Sale"; nor is there any about Larry Hart's "Ten Cents a Dance." Yet there is a common bond that links us all together, straight and gay and, in Porter's case, something passionately in between.

Mr. Winkler and Mr. Cocks can be credited with a rousing recovery from the curse of all biographies-following the downward spiral from birth to death-when Mr. Pryce's suddenly joyous Gabe produces all the musical performers onstage for an immortalizing rendition of "Blow, Gabriel, Blow." So that's who "Gabe" really was …