Yes. Because when models want to quit smoking, it's backstage right before a show, wearing just a thong and a grimace while some queen rips their hair out, smackdab in the middle of fashion week. Can't wait!
— Choire Sicha

I went to see Thirteen the other day, and it's tough stuff. Like most people, I was shaken up by that scene where the girls punch each other in the face for laughs, and by the sequence where Tracy slices up her arm with a razor blade. The movie has, in fact, set off an alarm. In a string of recent articles, teenage girls have been criticized for everything from their social lives to their trashy taste in clothes.

You'd think, from all the attention the topic has received, that girls have never misbehaved before. Haven't they? Twenty-five years ago, I did similar things while growing up in Manhattan. Lately, I've been catapulted back in time, to the 1970's, because reporters have been interviewing me about Alice Duncan, the 11-year-old protagonist of my novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller . Alice is cared for, and eventually corrupted, by a promiscuous teenage cokehead. Readers are under the impression that the novel is autobiographical. But the shy, timid Alice is far more polite than I. My friends and I were bold and reckless at age 11. By the time we'd reached the ripe old age of 13, we were wild, nihilistic little hellions.

Substance abuse, shoplifting, underage sex: standard operating procedure in the 70's. Even the clothing was the same. Like Evie, we favored tube tops-those tiny snippets of strapless elasticized fabric that hug your bosom. My mom wouldn't have liked that outfit, so I carried a change of clothes in my school bag, and a stolen pair of high heels. Eyes ringed with black eyeliner, lips smeared with Vaseline, I teetered down Fifth Avenue in four-inch platforms. Dressing like a hooker got me a lot of male attention. I told guys I met that I was 16, and they believed me (or pretended to). Then as now, a girl's pubescent body was a source of hidden, forbidden, half-acknowledged power. In school, I was a social reject-taller than most of the kids, freakishly voluptuous. I was happier while parading around in my hooker gear. My clothes and makeup had a transformative effect, changing me into the person that, like it or not, I was becoming-no longer a mere child, but a young woman. The mask and costume reassured me. I wanted desperately to be in control of my body, my feelings and my image.

What's the cause of girls growing up too fast? The real culprit, of course, is not consumerism or MTV, but puberty. Girls today develop secondary sex characteristics earlier than they did a century ago. I'd had breasts since I was 9, and it had taken me a few years to decide that they were attractive assets, like glittering diamond earrings, rather than a pair of unwelcome moles. When men start staring at your tits, you may think you have only two choices: You can cower, or you can vamp. Girls test the waters, weigh their options. In the 1970's, the choice-as reinforced by the sultry, libidinous culture all around us-was obvious.

When I was 13, we, too, wore our low-rider jeans so tight we had to lie down on our backs and suck in our stomachs to zip them closed. It was with a sense of pride and duty that we wore those painfully small clothes. "Beauty hurts," my best friend's mom used to sigh whenever I complained that my trendy new boots gave me blisters.

Being permissive was the height of chic parenting. She was a stunning woman with bleached-blond hair and a walk-in wardrobe. Sitting in her elegant Park Avenue home, we'd have girl-to-girl chats. She told us what to do if a guy asked us to sleep with him. We should respond with enthusiasm, while being sure to insist upon birth control. We were 12 years old. It never occurred to any of us that, if pressed for sex, we could say no. Sex was in the very air we breathed, floating in the ether of the Zeitgeist . It was hopelessly unhip to regard intimate encounters as unwelcome or-perish the thought-potentially harmful. Thus, that same year (seventh grade), another friend's dad photographed his daughter and me lying on his rumpled bed, wearing only our underwear, handcuffed together at the ankle.

Though Britney Spears hadn't been born, it was much easier to get away with dressing like a tramp in the 70's than it is now. Our parents let us wander around without monitoring our every move, or packing us off to oboe lessons or soccer practice. The entire nation was becalmed, bewitched. In our quiet, affluent neighborhood, a drug dealer roamed the streets, dressed in suede-a Pied Piper offering free samples with a friendly smile and heavy eyelids. Some local parents were shooting up; some were popping Valium. The atmosphere was decadent. Yet the city felt safe to me, then, like a giant playground.

Many American parents became distressed by the thought of good girls going bad. Their panic was symbolized, in 1973, by another film, The Exorcist . Linda Blair played Regan, the daughter who came, literally, from hell. She grunted obscene propositions to her mother, masturbated with a crucifix and urinated on the expensive carpeting. With her baby face and foul mouth, Regan was the archetypal teenage girl. Unbalanced by raging hormones, seized with longing and revulsion for everything around her, she was a pint-sized Jack Nicholson in drag, snarling in the face of niceness. Following on the heels of "flower power" and free love, The Exorcist ushered in the jaded, spitting mood of punk. It tapped into prevailing cultural anxieties. What if America's children slip beyond control, disappearing into a dark, tarnished underworld? What if no parent can preserve a child's innocence? What if, one morning, your daughter metamorphosed into someone unrecognizable?

It's a fair question. About 15 percent of Caucasian girls and almost half of African-American girls are now beginning to develop sexually at the age of 8. Parents would like to help kids navigate adolescence, but the change is unavoidable. While I grew up fast, external cues were operating. I'd watched Brooke Shields, age 15, panty-free in her Calvins. In 1978, in Pretty Baby , she'd been a 12-year-old prostitute who married a disturbingly attractive pedophile played by Keith Carradine. Bad was good, it seemed to me. The counterculture had become a seductive presence that set mainstream morality spinning on its head. Girls barely out of grade school stalked rock stars. Iggy Pop, in a published interview, spoke wistfully of the 13-year-old who became his girlfriend with her parents' blessing. Girls routinely slept with three of the most popular teachers at my high school.

What a 13-year-old girl does battle with is desire-her own, and that of the individuals around her. She's at war with her physicality, her extreme makeover, by nature and society's design, into an erotic being. Young teenagers pose on billboards in Times Square, wearing very little besides their mascara, their come-hither expressions and their handbags. It's a confusing world, full of mixed signals, and I think girls of all ages understand it.

Lisa Dierbeck's first novel, One Pill Makes You Smaller , was published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

On the one hand, we see the intensely detailed contemplations of such modern-girlhood rites of passage as the piercing of tongues and navels-defiant displays of decorative self-mutilation. And then there's Tracy, played by Evan Rachel Wood, who slashes her wrists and arms in a bout of self-loathing that is hardly convincing compared to Maggie Gyllenhaal's obsessive self-harming in Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002). The protagonist in Secretary , an emotionally blocked young woman who gets a small measure of emotional relief by hurting herself in secret ways, is entirely believable. By contrast, Tracy expends so much energy screaming at her hapless mother, Melanie (Holly Hunter), that it's amazing she has any energy left to draw blood from her veins.

Indeed, I got the feeling that Tracy and her bad-influence gal pal, Evie (Nikki Reed), were putting on a show-less for their peers in the PG-13 audience (this R-rated vehicle is off limits for those impressionable teens) than for those middle-aged critics and parents alarmed by every well-publicized media manifestation of presumed juvenile joie de vivre . Certainly, the mature Upper West Side audience I sat with seemed a little bit baffled by all the critical hoopla for this aesthetically skimpy effort. When I asked one patron how she'd liked the movie, she made a face and confessed that she'd been led to expect a three-and-a-half-star picture, and all she'd gotten was a two-and-a-half-star effort instead.

Ms. Reed is also credited with the screenplay, which is reportedly based on her own experiences as a troubled teenager. Truth is stranger (and messier) than fiction and all that, but it also often lacks the artistic structure and logic of the best fiction.

To put it simply, Thirteen just didn't make much sense to me. Here you have Tracy, a quiet, sensitive A student with a budding writing talent, suddenly seized by an obsession to hang with the "in" crowd, a culturally mixed and mixed-up gang of shoplifters, druggies and vaguely defined sex-orgy types. To demonstrate her delinquent credentials, Tracy filches an older woman's handbag while its owner is talking on her cell phone, and then presents it like a trophy to Evie and her girlfriends. Their ill-gotten gains fund a reckless shopping spree; one vice leads to another, and soon Tracy is so zonked out in class that she fails her classes and is left back in school.

Meanwhile, we're granted hallucinatory glimpses of the chaotic home lives of Tracy and Evie, whose two divorced mothers seem to be teetering on the brink of simultaneous nervous breakdowns. Tracy's father pops up intermittently full of guilt and futile good intentions, while Melanie's current lover is too busy battling his own drug addiction to be of much help. With schools, houses and neighborhoods lacking any structural sociological consistency, there is simply no there there, as Gertrude Stein once said-and she was talking about Oakland, Calif., not La-La Land.

This is Ms. Hardwicke's directorial debut, and her cinematographer, Elliot Davis, photographs almost everything in a swirling, subjective haze to evoke Tracy's descent into near-delirium. Then, in a bizarre plot twist, Evie the "bad girl" turns golden as she runs sobbing to her heretofore catty mother Brooke (played by the almost unrecognizable, usually strong character type, the redoubtable Deborah Kara Unger). Mysteriously, Brooke is abruptly transformed into a concerned parent as she warns Tracy to stop corrupting Evie with her dissolute ways. This touch of melodramatic contrivance struck me as a tad amateurish in the context of all the feigned "realism" that preceded it.

I can't see the point of a movie like Thirteen . The subculture to which it refers would never accept all the gloom-and-doom about ultimate consequences, and the rest of us are not given enough sociological information to make any judgment on the various characters. By making everyone muddled and distracted, it's hard to see any alternative to all the confusion. There's a kind of expressive fallacy at work here that seems to be designed to exploit the prevailing paranoia of our debauched, media-polluted times. And behind all the playacting in this film is the unspoken suggestion that we're all responsible for causing this kind of adolescent self-destruction in the first place.

Of course, Thirteen wouldn't have been taken half so seriously if it had drifted into genre territory by bringing mortal violence into the not-so-pretty picture. I'm not saying that the movie would have been improved by dragging in death and the gendarmes, but as it stands, Thirteen is neither one thing or the other-neither an in-depth, dialogue-driven character study nor an enjoyable teen-noir melodrama. Instead, it's a pretentious piece of Valley Girl vileness masquerading as social commentary. Finally, I wasn't much impressed by the highly touted performance of Ms. Wood, whose portrayal of Tracy starts out much too nice and ends up much too shrill, with very little gradation in between. As the bad girl Evie, Ms. Reed is too one-note all the way through, while Ms. Hunter, as the stressed-out Melanie, does a fine job of demonstrating why it's so wrong to try to look as young as your teenage children.

The Band Played On

Iztván Szabó's Taking Sides , from the play and subsequent screenplay by Ronald Harwood, tries to go against the polemical tendencies of its after-the-Holocaust theme through the character of Major Steve Arnold, played by Harvey Keitel. Major Arnold is an interrogator for the American De-Nazification Committee, on the hunt for evidence of pro-Nazi complicity against Wilhelm Furtwängler, the world-famous conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra during the Third Reich. But Mr. Keitel's character is so abrasive in manner that he functions more as an inquisitor than an official investigator: In fact, Major Arnold has been given instructions to prosecute "Hitler's bandleader" ruthlessly. True to his mandate, he treats Furtwängler (Stellån Skarsgard) as if he were guilty until proven even guiltier.

The theatrical origin of Taking Sides is obvious. Major Arnold's relentlessly dialectical rhetoric intends to transmute facts into truths, and Furtwängler's alleged inaction in the face of evil translates into criminal culpability for all the corpses in the death camps. The paradoxes of Mr. Harwood's allegorical arguments are embodied in Arnold's assistants: David (Moritz Bleibtreu), a German Jew whose parents died in the Holocaust, and Emmi (Birgit Minichmayr), whose father was executed for plotting against Hitler. Despite their real grievances against the Nazis, these two witnesses to horror are driven by the American's self-righteousness to be more tolerant of Furtwängler.

Taking Sides has been kicking around the film-festival circuit for a couple of years, and rumor has it that it's finally been released now only because Mr. Harwood recently won an Oscar for the screenplay of Roman Polanski's The Pianist . Whatever the case, the complexities of the subject matter are deftly and intelligently handled.

Kate and Bob's Big Adventure

I never met either Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) or Bob Hope (1903-2003) face-to-face, although I did catch a glimpse of Hepburn late in her life, through an illuminated window in her Turtle Bay townhouse, as she ate a solitary dinner. Still, I felt closer to Hope: He was a welcome guest in our house on the radio from early childhood on. The only Hepburn movies I saw back then were Mary of Scotland (1936), in which she was woefully miscast in the title role, and Stage Door (1937), in which she was less appealing than Ginger Rogers. Over the years, she was never my favorite actress, which is to say that I didn't love her as I have loved some others. But I liked, respected and even admired her. She was somewhat underrated as an actress until she got older and less threatening to her detractors. Who remembers Morning Glory (1933), but who is allowed to forget The African Queen (1951)? In her memory, here's my list of her 10 best pictures:

1. Holiday (1938)

2. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

3. Woman of the Year (1942)

4. Alice Adams (1935)

5. Little Women (1933)

6. Morning Glory (1933)

7. Love Among the Ruins (TV, 1975)

8. Summertime (1955)

9. Stage Door (1937)

10. Pat and Mike (1952).

Among my guilty Hepburn pleasures are the somewhat underrated Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Break of Hearts (1935) and Keeper of the Flame (1942). Her most overrated vehicles are The Philadelphia Story (1940), The African Queen (1951) and On Golden Pond (1981).

As for Bob Hope, he was a man for all media. Movies were only one arrow in his quiver. I know it's fashionable to say that he outlived his vogue, and even at the time of the Vietnam War, he was reportedly booed by some of the troops he had come to entertain. Still, it's hard to imagine anyone in showbiz today choosing to get in harm's way in Iraq to entertain the troops; it's hard enough to get the current breed of celebrities to a film festival when the terrorists are growling. Yet Hope's marginal movie career was always hampered by the tendency to stereotype him as a laughable-coward type. He was among the rare comedians who, like the very talented Red Skelton, could project a serious straight-man quality when given half a chance.

The fact remains that Hope didn't enter feature films from the Broadway stage until he was in his mid-30's. Alongside Shirley Ross in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938), he warbled "Thanks for the Memory," a rueful ode to a failed marriage. From that still-memorable beginning, he went on to make more than 50 movies (not counting cameo appearances), until he was pushing 70. His film career is a mixed bag at most, but it had more than a few interesting moments here and there: The Cat and the Canary (1939), Never Say Die (co-written by Preston Sturges, 1939), The Paleface (1948), Sorrowful Jones (a Damon Runyon subject, 1949), My Favorite Blonde (with Madeleine Carroll, 1942), Son of Paleface (a second comic turn with Jane Russell, 1952), Beau James (with a leggy Vera Miles, 1957) and The Facts of Life (with comic equal Lucille Ball, 1960). Road to Utopia (1946) is the best of the Road series, followed by Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Singapore (1940) and Road to Zanzibar (1941). Thanks for the memories, Bob.

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?

"Somebody–I think it was me–threw a bottle against the wall and everybody thought, 'Oh, what a witty thing to do,'" said the six-foot-tall, 260-pound Mr. Westmoreland. "So we had about five cases of beer, we were just throwing cases, slamming bottles against the wall. Then somebody walks in with, like, 150 dollars' worth of bacon, like you get in the deli, a foot-and-a-half-tall stack of bacon. That was it. I remember eating a lot of bacon and drinking a lot." The sun was coming up when he returned to his studio apartment a block away, where he lives with his wife and three young children.

No one threw Mr. Westmoreland out of the bar that night, because it's his bar.

At least for now. A year ago his landlord, the Mitsubishi Estate Co.-owned Rockefeller Group Development Corporation, decided to evict Siberia and its 44-year-old proprietor, despite several years left on Mr. Westmoreland's lease. They were tearing down the building, they told him. They turned off his heat and hot water. Mr. Westmoreland says he signed something agreeing to be out by last October. But then he learned that some other tenants–a barbershop, a Blimpie's–had renewed their leases. He decided the Rockefeller Group was bluffing about razing the building, that they just wanted him out to raise the rent. So he hired a real-estate lawyer.

Vince Silvestri, a spokesman for the Rockefeller Group, disputed Mr. Westmoreland's account and called the charges that the heat and hot water were turned off "total bullshit." Mr. Silvestri said that there was a new space available for Siberia in Rockefeller Center. Mr. Westmoreland confirmed that he was thinking about relocating to Rockefeller Center, but that he prefers to stay where he is.

What's Siberia like? It's skanky in there. Walking in, you wonder how the place exists. It's as if Mr. Westmoreland found a big closet, set up a bar and no one ever asked whether he was allowed to be in there. Yes, you feel the rumble of the subway trains. There is graffiti on the walls. It reeks of Manhattan circa 1976, not the new, clean, well-lit version. Look up at the ceiling: all kinds of exposed wires. And a pair of red panties.

Siberia has rules that are strictly enforced. If you curse, you have to leave. If you hit on a girl or bother anyone , you are ejected. If you are a meathead or too loud, you are gone.

The main ingredient of Siberia, according to Mr. Westmoreland, is something intangible. After a recent night of cavorting at the city's current trendy clubs–Spa,Suite16, Merc Bar, the Park and Lotus–he said, "They're just nice, clean places. They have no soul . That's the problem with them–they're not bad, they're just soulless. Imagine seeing a person without a soul–how horrible would that be? Every bar in New York that I've been to, every club, has no soul, has no life, no love, and they're all probably going to be closed in six months."

Mr. Westmoreland has been fighting to save Siberia in court and in the press. He has friends at the New York Post who frequent the bar. The Associated Press, CNN, Fox News and Court TV have run stories about Siberia, like the time Mr. Westmoreland, his wife Melissa, their kids and a priest chained themselves outside of the place for a day.

"If you're in a fight, you put everything into it," he said. "These are two of the biggest companies in the world trying to throw me out. We've already won. If they throw us out tomorrow, we've fought these two multinational corporations for over a year."

Plus, he says, he has New York's new junior Senator on his side. Mr. Westmoreland buttonholed Hillary Clinton at a St. Patrick's Day fund-raiser in the neighborhood and said, "You gotta help me save Siberia." She looked scared; she thought he meant the region. He explained. Then he said, "Can I call you on that?" She replied that she thought he would be successful. Again, he asked, "Can I call you on that?" With reporters and photographers present, Mrs. Clinton said, "Yes, yes, you may." Thanks to his friends at the Post , the encounter appeared on Page Six.

"I was given her word, by Hillary Rodham Clinton, that I could call her office and she knew the problem," he said. "They called me and they told my attorney they were going to help. I have no reason to doubt these people."

Mr. Westmoreland mocks the Rockefeller Group's inability to dislodge him. "One of the reasons America is viewed as weak in the world is because a corporation like that can't get some fat guy in the subway out," he said.

"I never said they didn't have a legal right to get me out," he continued. "I said they have a moral right to keep me in there."

I first met Mr. Westmoreland a few weeks ago at Bellevue, a bar he co-owns on 40th Street and Ninth Avenue, across the street from the Port Authority. It was very late on a Saturday night; the place was packed. Two women in plaid skirts and T-shirts which read "Go Satan" were running around, spanking people. There were four cops there, friends of Mr. Westmoreland, who was shirtless and had over 20 drinks in him. A pretty bartender was pouring shots down his throat. I motioned that I wanted a drink. From 20 feet away, Mr. Westmoreland heaved a Heineken my way. The wet bottle slid off my hand and shattered. I missed the next two. Then I noticed that my hand was covered in blood. Just before I left for the emergency room, Mr. Westmoreland stood up on the bar and ran the full length of it, breaking glasses and sending stuff flying.

"I had a flashback, playing football when I was in high school," he told me later. "I just knew I could make that whole thing, full blast, knock everything down on the bar, not hurt anybody, still be standing–and dive, boom, off the bar and crash into two guys and a girl. It was beautiful . Her top fell off when I hit her, which is pretty cool."

One late night at Siberia, I met Amesia Doles, a 24-year-old travel agent who said she would like to be a midwife specializing in Chinese medicine. Last Halloween–the day the Rockefeller Group wanted Siberia to fold up shop–she and three friends dressed up as Kiss. They were in Siberia's photo booth at 2 a.m.

"We were like, 'We gotta get our pictures as Kiss,'" said Ms. Doles. "My girls and I are always taking our shirts off because we love to be naked, because we're from California.

"I have not had sex in Siberia," she said. "Tops off, bottoms–you know, a little this and that. A little good lovin' . Till I sobered up enough to get in a cab and go home.

"Pretty much if you hang out here, you'll probably see any one of us naked," she said, gesturing to her friends.

A cute girl was humping the jukebox as "Louie, Louie" played.

Over by the Addams Family pinball machine, Lisa Russell, a 31-year-old journalist, said that the first time she was at Siberia, Mr. Westmoreland hoisted her up to dance on the bar. She fell and got a gash on her leg. Mr. Westmoreland poured beer on it. On the subway back to Brooklyn, Ms. Russell got sick in her handbag, fell asleep and woke up far from her stop. She hailed a cab and when they got to her place, the driver wanted $7.50. "I have to dig into my bag to get the money," she said. "It's absolutely soaking wet and I only have $6.

"Everyone who comes to Siberia has these kind of stories," she said. "This is not just me. It's such a Siberia story. You can't come here and mingle. You've got to come here and be really belligerent and kind of obnoxious, and not really have a purpose of why you're here, but you soak it in. It's a dysfunctional family."

It was after 3 a.m., and there were a dozen dudes Mr. Westmoreland wasn't happy about. "They're meatheads," he said. He turned down the music and announced that the bar was closing. "It's a purging," he told me. "They're not bad people, they just don't belong . We're weeding out the riffraff; now the real party begins."

So Siberia "closed"–and then, five minutes later, Siberia reopened.

"It's such a scam," said Ms. Russell. "People leave here thinking, 'Oh, I had a great time!' They walk out, like, 'Yeah!' Little do they know, they've been booted and they didn't even know it."

Meeting Yuri

Tracy Westmoreland was born in Wheeling, W.Va. His father was a truck driver and state heavyweight boxing champion who spent 18 years in prison for armed robbery and transporting liquor across state lines. Tracy's family moved to Rockaway Beach when his mother got a job preparing food for United Airlines flights. He said he had the "best" childhood: His dad had a Cadillac convertible and an Aristocraft boat. At 6, Tracy got into his first fight. "I was scared to go home," he said. "My father said, 'What happened?' I said, 'The kid was bothering my friend. Then he hit me. Then I think I broke his nose.' He said, 'That's really good. As long as someone's not bothering you, never touch them. People are bothering you, hurt them.'"

At Far Rockaway High School, he was captain of the football team. "We would drink in the morning, be drunk out of our minds all day, practice drunk–it was great!" he said. After graduation, he became a lifeguard at Rockaway Beach. In the winter he would work for two weeks at Macy's so he'd be able to collect unemployment. He also worked as a bouncer at a bar called the Paddy Wagon. "Babes, babes," he said. "I used to have a bungalow outside the bar, 10 feet away from the back door. This is right after free love, before AIDS–it was tremendous. Every weekend I would do two girls on Friday and two on Saturday, and I always did two minimum. Dude, I'm 260 pounds now. I was 197 pounds, had hair this long. I had a reputation as a nice guy who kept his mouth shut and gave you great sex."

He worked security at Studio 54. "It was great, man, everybody wanted to be my friend," he said. In 1991, he snagged 20 percent of a bar in the East Village called KGB. He got to know an old-timer named Yuri, who was dying of liver cancer. Yuri told Mr. Westmoreland that he used to work for Soviet intelligence and said, "One day I'm going to give you a gift." In 1994, the two men went up to the space that is now Siberia, which was then a kung-fu video store. Mr. Westmoreland loved it, but he was on welfare and about to be evicted from his apartment. He got a job as a waiter at the New York Hilton and saved some money. He opened Siberia, named in honor of Yuri, who was half-Siberian. One day he found some Soviet documents, passports and rubles behind a wall. It turned out that during the Cold War, Siberia was a K.G.B. drop-off place. The New York Post ran a story. The next three years were very good. Celebrities like David Spade, Chloë Sevigny and Conan O'Brien came in. Wynona Ryder guest-bartended. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe came, but ….

"For the record, Michael Stipe is barred," Mr. Westmoreland said. "He's not allowed in the building because he's a fucking asshole weirdo. He doesn't relate to anybody. He just stands around, introverted and rude ."

One recent night Siberia was too crowded, so Mr. Westmoreland and I went to Bellevue. Carolina Starin, a long-legged producer at CNN, was there. She said she was a regular at Siberia.

"You can just walk in and have a beer and everybody wants you there, and you can go by yourself and drink, and magical things are always happening," she said. "It's haunted."

Mr. Westmoreland came over and started massaging her legs.

"Tracy, you look so good. I miss you–I'm so happy you're here tonight," she said.

At around 4 a.m., Mr. Westmoreland asked the bartender, a brunette in a cowboy hat named Felicia, to show her breasts. She obliged. Then she laid down on the bar and began pouring shots of bourbon into her navel, which male patrons slurped out. Above her, a movie called Edward Penishands was playing.

That's all I remember.

The updating of Shakespeare is always a risky proposition, particularly when the play was written in one period, set in another, and brought to the screen in still another, with no corresponding changes in the text. Hence, the characters keep talking about Athens of ancient times even as the soundtrack is resounding with Puccini and Verdi arias, and the landscape remains lushly and definitely Italian.

Perhaps all these distractions would not matter too much if Mr. Hoffman and his colleagues had taken the precaution of recruiting a British cast to perform Shakespeare. Call me a mindless Anglophile if you wish, but I remain skeptical about the ability of even the best American actors to read Shakespeare's lines without giving the impression that they are enduring very painful cultural root canal work. When you add to the mix a heavily accented French actress like Sophie Marceau, and have to slash her role of Hippolyta to ribbons to avoid embarrassing her, you have the makings of a disastrously "international" cast.

I was particularly saddened by the poor showings of two talented American performers like David Strathairn as Theseus, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania. The knives are already out for Calista Flockhart as Helena here, just as they were for her portrayal of Ally McBeal and as Time magazine's anorexic poster bimbo of contemporary feminism. So I would like to take this opportunity to express my support of Ms. Flockhart in all her endeavors, and particularly as Ally McBeal, a lyrical original who gives me more pleasure every week on television than all but a very few performers in the movies. Her enemies will say with some justification that she plays Helena as if she were Ally McBeal, but isn't that who Helena really is under all of the Bard's iambic pentameter?

Think about it. She starts out chasing Demetrius (Christian Bale), who prefers Hermia (Anna Friel), but Hermia, in turn, loves Lysander (Dominic West) and runs off with him. Once in the enchanted forest, both Demetrius and Lysander are bewitched into chasing after Helena, and shunning Hermia. Is Helena happy with this sudden rush of attention? Not on your life. She's so paranoid and so lacking in self-esteem that she assumes that Demetrius, Lysander and Hermia are all in cahoots to humiliate her with this fake turnabout in male affections. If that isn't a cue for Ms. Flockhart to trot out her heartbreakingly exasperated expressions from Ally McBeal , I don't know what is.

The American actors who would seem to disprove my theory of Shakespearean inadequacy are Kevin Kline as an expanded and romanticized Bottom, Stanley Tucci as an unconventional but effectively incisive Puck, Bill Irwin as an eloquently gestural Tom Snout, and Sam Rockwell as an unexpectedly vibrant Thisbe in "a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe."

That is to say, those Americans excel in Shakespeare's prose characterizations of bumbling amateur actors, and not as his deeply poetic lovers. Indeed, the whole movie achieves its grace notes almost entirely from the drama within the drama. The centrality of Bottom's role in the movie is enhanced by the introduction of his silently disapproving wife (Heather Elizabeth Parisi), silent of necessity since Shakespeare never conceived of her as a character. She is among the more dubious of Mr. Hoffman's inventions, but nothing can compare in egregiousness with the mud-wrestling ordeal he inflicts on Helena and Hermia, and the acres of skin he reveals of the four lovers to express discovery of their true sexual affinities.

This gingerly salacity is a poor substitute for the extensive cuts in Shakespeare's mythological analogies in his poetic dialectic between fact and fantasy, the city and the forest, the regulated state and the unbridled unconscious. But unlike some of my more censorious colleagues, I have come to feel that even mishandled Shakespeare is better than no Shakespeare at all in a world of increasingly brutalized and bedeviled sensibilities. Hermia's modest reproof to Lysander's premarital advances in the forest sounds almost revolutionary in 1999:

But gentle friend, for love and courtesy

Lie further off; in human modesty,

Such separation as may well be said

Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid,

So far be distant; and, good night, sweet friend:

Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end.

Life Is Like High School

Alexander Payne's Election , from a screenplay by Mr. Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, tidily deserves all the accolades it received as an intelligently fair-minded satire before I had a chance to see it. Unfortunately, it needs all the commercial help it can get. As George Kaufman once said, satire is what closes Saturday Night. And intelligent fair-minded satire is lucky to get released at all in this current atmosphere of institutional and generational scapegoating.

After all the buzz, what surprised me the most when I saw Election was that Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick was not at all the teenaged terror and monster I had been led to expect. True, she is a bit of an overachiever, but it is mostly hard work and fanatical attention to detail that gets her ahead, not ruthlessness, dishonesty and unbridled promiscuity. True, Tracy did cause Dave Novotny (Mark Harelik) to lose his wife and his teaching career by allowing the self-deluding would-be novelist to seduce her and get caught at it when Tracy's hard-driving mother complained. Dave happened to be the best friend of Matthew Broderick's Jim McAllister, a dedicated teacher in charge of student affairs.

Jim views Tracy's inexorable campaign toward the school student presidency with ill-disguised loathing. When he persuades goodhearted campus hero Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against the hitherto unopposed Tracy in the name of democracy and free choice, Tracy smells a rat, indeed the right rat, and works twice as hard to foil Jim's scheme. Meanwhile, Paul's lesbian sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell) gets upset over her girlfriend's taking up with Paul to prove that she's straight. Tammy decides to revenge herself on the girlfriend, Paul, the school and the world by running for class president herself on a platform of abolishing the essentially powerless student government altogether. Tammy eventually shows herself to be the smartest and most interesting character in the movie, and the most knowledgeable about what the world really is as opposed to what all the other characters fantasize it is.

Mr. Broderick gives by far the best performance of his career as the hapless teacher who is hoist by his own petard with his classroom mantra about "ethics" and "morality" turned against him. I can't remember another movie in a long time hitting so many targets head-on without drawing blood. One of the strategies of the screenplay (and, I suppose, Mr. Perrotta's novel, which I haven't read) is to tell the stories of the major characters from their own point of view. Often the narration is contradicted by the images that accompany it. The many sharp jabs of satiric insight are too delicious to be described in detail.

As I alternated chuckling and laughing out loud at all the foolish mistakes and futile cover-ups shared by young, middle-aged and old alike, I thought of the remark attributed to Meryl Streep at a college commencement to the effect that life after college was not like college; it was like high school. Election is therefore directed not exclusively to teenagers, but to all of us squalling infants as we regress from crisis to crisis. The trouble is that's the last thing today's kids want to hear.

The Female Heir

Wu Tianming's The King of Masks , from a screenplay by Wei Minglung, glows as a deceptively dated parable of gender reversal in a society in which the female is still systematically despised and degraded from birth, and even before. The society in the movie is ostensibly provincial Sichuan in 1930, long before Mao and even before Chiang Kai-shek, when rival warlords held sway.

Bian Lian Wang (Zhu Xu) plays the title role of an old magician who performs with a dizzying variety of masks in the streets. His one lingering regret is that he has no male heir to whom he can pass on the secrets of his craft when he dies. Despite his comparative poverty, Wang rejects the offer to join the troupe of an enormously popular cross-dressing male opera star. There is bitter irony in the spectacle of women swarming around the star in the belief that if they can touch the man in disguise they will be blessed with the birth of a boy child.

When Wang grasps the opportunity to purchase a male child cheap from his purportedly impoverished parents, he feels that he has been blessed in his turn by finding a replacement for his own son lost to illness long before. When he is rudely and graphically disillusioned by the evidence that his new heir is actually a girl, he casts her aside, but in the fullness of time learns to treasure her. Zhou Renying as Doggie, the little girl, is nothing short of electrifying, as the movie soars into the stratosphere of the noblest folk art.

Since every downward trend produces at least one optimistic side effect, I knew if we waited patiently enough, the current plague of teenage flicks would eventually offer an exception that people over the age of 15 could sit through without suffering brain damage. Election is that film–a rare excursion into the world of kids with hormonal dysfunctions, which a few grown-ups seem to occupy as well. It's no masterpiece, but considering the junk that gluts today's movie screens, it has wit and intelligence, as well as another welcome opportunity to enjoy the talent and charm of the enchanting Reese Witherspoon.

Election is about a group of people in Omaha whose lives are altered drastically by the unusual events surrounding the high school election of a student body president. Matthew Broderick is seen to better advantage than usual as Jim McAllister, a teacher of history, civics and current events who, for 12 years, has been seriously dedicated to the teaching profession. He loves his job and cherishes his influence on the shaping of his students' young minds and their potential to become model citizens, but by everybody's standards, he's something of a nerd. McAllister is a low, squatty man, shaped like an English muffin, who has been married for nine years to a woman who is a bigger drone than he is.

Mr. Broderick himself is also a real mess. His body seems to have melted. Later, when his character finds himself, he has a completely different body, with definition and tone. Maybe he's just a good actor. At any rate, in a movie that depends on perfect casting, he's a believable doofus.

Ms. Witherspoon is equally perfect in the role of Mr. M.'s most annoying student, a scheming little Barbie doll named Tracy Flick. She's a smart, ambitious, hard-working, impeccably dressed, well-organized and tireless overachiever who makes straight A's and raises her hand before everyone else in class every time a question is asked, like one of those despicable eggheads on Jeopardy . She is also having a hot, secret affair with the geometry teacher, who loses his job and wife in the ensuing scandal. (In her words, she's on a mission–to save these poor schmucky teachers from their squareness.)

When she runs unopposed by her indifferent classmates for president, Mr. M. seizes the opportunity to teach a real lesson in ethics and morals by encouraging a more democratic election (the idea comes to him in the middle of the night, while he's watching a porno flick as his wife sleeps). Spicing up the competition, to Tracy's fury, he recruits Paul Metzler, a moronic jock with a broken leg (sweetly played by Chris Klein) and Paul's sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), a budding lesbian who is in love with her brother's girlfriend Lisa. To Tracy's horror, the election now has three candidates–the brilliant but friendless Tracy, the brainless but popular Paul, and the rebellious Tammy, whose campaign platform of total anarchy incites the student body to riot fever and standing ovations. While Tracy sets out to eliminate her competition, Mr. Broderick forgets his own sense of morals (seducing the wife of the disgraced geometry teacher) and ethics (destroying ballots so Tracy will lose by one vote). In the campus chaos that follows, punishing lessons are learned by everyone involved that will change the trajectory of their lives forever.

What sounds like a simple teenage flick has such astute writing (by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor) and such savvy direction (by Mr. Payne) that it piles revelation upon revelation in a dizzying thrust, providing many surprises and more than the usual number of hilarious situations. The film is well served by an impeccable cast, but the irony of watching Ms. Witherspoon's slick little operator outsmart everyone else like a Monica Lewinsky in training is perversely entertaining. You know she's going places, and she's funny and shrewd and shameless about it. The Monica parallels are inescapable, but rising early to bake and frost 480 customized cupcakes for her voters is a memorable moment in screen comedy that makes you think about Hillary Clinton. After years pass, Tracy's still on the rise, and now, living in Washington, D.C., she is seen climbing into the limousine of a senator–and she's not delivering pizza.

I don't know why so many desperate wannabe byliners writing think pieces in slick glossies insist on listing Reese Witherspoon as a current Hollywood Teen Queen. She's in a class by herself. Playing obnoxious, button-nosed twerps ( Pleasantville ) or sexy, pubescent sluts ( Freeway ) with equal aplomb, she holds her characters to the light like bugs on the end of a stick, explores every avenue, and acts circles around everyone else in her age bracket. She was the best thing in Cruel Intentions , a teenage flick with a narrow scope, and in Election , a broader film with other pleasant elements, you can't take your mind off her even when she's off-screen.

More good news about Election is the way it appeals on several levels simultaneously, providing entertainment value for all ages. It's as much about the career crisis faced by adults struggling to find themselves as it is about teenagers with some growing up to do. But right in the center of things, never out of focus, Reese Witherspoon adds a ballast that is ageless. She can run for office in my neck of the woods any time she wants. My vote is guaranteed.

Cronenberg Drills Another Orifice

David Cronenberg, unquestionably the world's most seriously deranged film director, has a new bucket of swill to peddle. Crash is still the worst movie I've ever seen, but now a load of vomitous rubbish called eXistenZ (the spelling is as pretentious as the movie itself) is ready for an early funeral. This rancid, low-rent freak show about what happens to an alleged artist, forced into hiding after her name appears on a hit list, is, according to the depraved Canadian director, "inspired by an interview with Salman Rushdie." Mr. Rushdie should stay out of hiding long enough to sue.

The alleged artist in this case is the kinky designer of something called eXistenZ, described as the daring, organic system which, when downloaded into humans, accesses their central nervous systems, transporting them on a wild ride in and out of reality. The game changes every time it is played, adapting to the individuals who are playing it. As a result, you have to play it to find out why you're playing.

The perpetrator of this monstrous insanity, which depends on guinea pigs called slave pods, is a zombie named Allegra, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, an actress with a nose for this kind of garbage. "The world of games is in a trance," she says. So is this movie. To become a player in this $38 million game, a "game pod" grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with DNA and resembling a human kidney with a breast nipple must be inserted into a port plug in the player's spinal cord. Ouch, you say, but you ain't heard nothing yet.

When the catatonic Allegra finds herself targeted for assassination by rival lunatics from a competing game called transCendenZ, she is whisked into seclusion by a market trainee (Jude Law)–a situation that opens doors for all sorts of inane futuristic dialogue. "Where's your bio-port? Don't tell me you've never been fitted!" "I've been dying to play your games, but I have this phobia about having my body penetrated," says Mr. Law. "I mean surgically!" If this nightmare wasn't so sick and gruesome, I'd swear it was a comedy.

Once the sadistic installation is completed, the game begins and the big payoff is that you get to become schizophrenic. The two stars are transported, after much senseless talk of antenna upgrades, range finders and shimmering morphs, to a trout farm with a Chinese restaurant where Mr. Law kills a Chinese waiter for serving the organs of two-headed amphibians and mutated reptiles in his soup. "You've just got a bad case of first-time user anxiety," says Ms. Leigh, adjusting her Barbarella gun that fires poisoned human teeth.

The movie is crap, but what else do you expect from a director whose characters shot up with roach repellent in Naked Lunch ? At the end of eXistenZ , I was the only person left in the screening room. It's the cinematic equivalent of germ warfare, or two balcony tickets to Cats .

A Literal Big Sleep

To finish off a vile week, there is Goodbye Lover , an idiotic attempt to copy one of those films noirs of the 40's about a scheming femme fatale who kills off all the men in her life for their insurance. Patricia Arquette, who makes more bad movies than Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bridget Fonda and Natasha Gregson-Wagner put together, plays the femme, who is married to an unstable drunk who works in P.R. (Dermot Mulroney), and sleeping with his brother, an executive who acts out his sexual fantasies tied to bedposts, doing weird things with handcuffs and olives (Don Johnson).

Before she can murder them both and blame it on a serial killer, this scheming tramp is thwarted by the office bimbo (Mary-Louise Parker), who is also secretly married to Mr. Mulroney's drunk, and a butch cop (Ellen DeGeneres) who cracks ghastly one-liners after every murder. "How can you be so goddamn cynical?" asks Ms. DeGeneres' Bible-spouting sidekick. "Because somebody killed Bambi's mom," she cracks.

This is supposed to pass for humor, but the only laughs involve Ms. Arquette's character's ludicrous attempts to do away with the entire cast while singing along to the Sound of Music soundtrack album. It's a sleazy, wooden mess that seems to have been made up while the cameras were rolling. Abysmal direction by Roland Joffé doesn't help, but not even a Kubrick or a Spielberg could turn Patricia Arquette into a sexpot. She's as erotic as a day-old bowl of warm buttermilk.