The path of true love never does run straight but does it have to run this crooked? Poor Bella. Her first love, Edward, turns out to be a vampire who has all sorts of "vampire" issues like turning all sparkly in the sunlight and never being able to sleep with her for fear he'll lose control and suck her blood to the last drop. Bella also frets over the fact that he never ages, so much so that her turning 18 actually freaks her out. That he's also a perfect, and dare I say gorgeous, gentleman simply makes their romantic difficulties all the more poignant and heart-wrenching for Bella.

But Bella doesn't know true heartache until Edward suddenly leaves her after an unfortunate incident involving a bloody paper cut and the subsequent frenzied attack on Bella by Edward's vampire brother. Deciding it's not safe for her to be hanging around him or his family, Edward selflessly tells Bella he doesn't want her anymore and leaves for good.

As with any first heartbreak, Bella is inconsolable for the longest time. Fortunately, she has a hunky and very buff best friend named Jacob who secretly, and then not so secretly, pines for her. He's another perfect gentleman who does all he can to help her get over Edward. He promises to never hurt her the way Edward has and to be her protector always. But just like Edward, he too has a secret that he can't tell anyone. A secret that just happens to leak out: He's a werewolf!

Poor Bella. I mean, what are the odds? Her first love is a vampire and her potential suitor is a werewolf? That girl is snakebit in matters of the heart.

Right after Jacob's literal transformation into a wolf right before her eyes, Bella utters my favorite line in the movie: "So, you're a werewolf." The seeming absurdity of the line is engulfed by Bella's world-weary earnestness. It's as if she'd discovered he was nothing more than a vegetarian. And when the extraordinary is treated as mundane, you know it's time to start thinking metaphorically.

Unlike my teenage daughter, I have not read the four Twilight books. But what the series seems to be about, at least at this juncture, is the emotional development of a teenage girl's heart. Edward represents the impossibly dreamy and romantic ideal of first love, whereby the man devotes all his time and energy to denying his own sexual nature in order to honor and respect the girl/woman. He's like the courtly gentlemen of the Middle Ages who took pride in the absolute nature of their love for "milady," a love unsullied by the physical. (Edward even speaks in a kind of courtly manner.) Edward becomes all the more alluring because of his self-control, his self-denial. His reticence doesn't kill desire, it enflames it. And all those "vampire" complications conveniently keep that desire at a safe distance.

Jacob represents something altogether different. After the first movie, I thought he was going to be Bella's more realistic and better grounded "human" option. If Edward was a little too much like a god, an unattainable ideal, Jacob was the healthy alternative - a more down-to-earth guy who knew how to be a good friend as well as a lover. He represented the kind of love that grows out of friendship, rather than in the hothouse of one's imagination. Or so I thought.

Then the writer/filmmaker drops the "werewolf" bomb. And I'm not sure what to make of that. Does he now signify a more animalistic kind of love? Like The Incredible Hulk, Jacob warns: "Don't make me angry." Otherwise, he turns into a raging werewolf. (The Incredible Hunk?) Perhaps he's meant to represent the more testosterone-fueled side of male sexuality, in contrast to the more effete and dandified poet/lover. The carnal versus the ethereal. Team Jacob and Team Edward indeed.

The problem is Bella's love never really wavers. If this narrative is meant as a metaphor for the kind of emotional choices women must face head on, shouldn't she at least be tempted by Jacob? As much as he wants her, she really only has eyes for her vampire. So, in the end, I'm left thinking Jacob does not represent an alluring alternative version of the ideal man. Instead, and more mundanely, he's just the poor chump who helps the girl mend her broken heart while all the time she unwittingly is breaking his. Poor Jacob. It just might be enough to bring out the werewolf in him.

Vampires are not exactly known for their sense of humor. At least not the ones in the Twilight series. They're dark and brooding creatures, or should I say, pale and brooding, creatures of the night. They're necessarily secretive and clannish, quiet and stoic. And most of all, they're smoldering.

Vampires seduce their audience not by what they say but by what they don't say. It's the repression of their beastly nature, controlling the blood lust, that makes them so damn irresistible. And although a good sense of humor can be sexy, it's rarely smoldering. The vampires in Twilight are too damn earnest to show off much humor. That's why it was so refreshing to see two NEW MOON actors have a good laugh or two during my interview.

I suppose it's fair to say Daniel Cudmore and Charlie Bewley play relatively minor vampires in the Twilight hierarchy of vampires. As Felix and Demetri, they're members of the Volturi Guard, vampires whose job is to keep the other vampires in line. They're tough-guy vampires, henchmen who enforce vampire laws. (I imagine if Dirty Harry was a vampire, he'd be a Volturi.) Felix's power is in his strength, which he uses to rip into and tear apart outlaw vampires. And Demetri is a master-tracker who tracks not scents, but sounds. He can zero in on a rogue vampire by directing his talent to detect a voice from miles and miles away. This particular team of Volturi packs a wicked one-two punch. As such, Cudmore and Bewley's characters are all about getting down to business. After all, these are ultra-serious vampires.

These actors at first seemed to be taken aback by my question about whether they were ever struck by the camp or hokum component of playing vampires. In some ways, I said, vampires are kind of goofy or absurd, aren't they? Both actors eventually got a good chuckle out of the question, especially Bewley (who plays Demetri.) He said it was refreshing to hear someone challenge the validity of the entire project since so many people have been blowing smoke up their various body parts in lavish praise of all things Twilight. He cackled at the notion (and Cudmore joined in) that here he was all puffed up as Mr. Serious Vampire and I was trying to convince him to reconsider: "Wait a minute, I'm pretending to be a vampire ... I'm an idiot! And ridiculous to boot." He laughingly said this line of questioning was "very grounding."

Deciding to press my advantage, I asked the two an even trickier question. Was Robert Pattinson, the now world-famous star of the Twilight movies, a hunk or a twit? Bewley let out a combination gasp and guffaw. "You're asking me to either slander my co-star or admit that I find him smoking hot!" he laughed. Cudmore again joined in on the laughter before they both settled down and acknowleged that the success of the first Twilight film was as much due to Pattinson as Stephanie Meyer, the Twilight author. There's no denying he looks great on camera, Bewley concluded.

The two went on to talk about Pattinson's reservation about his chosen profession since he really would rather be a musician, about the rabid fans who tracked them down, even to the remote Tuscan village in Italy where they were shooting, about the countless girls "and their mums" who begged them to lick (!) them, and finally, about their expectation that, once the movie opens next week, TEAM VOLTURI would soon rival TEAM EDWARD and TEAM JACOB in popularity.

But what I'll remember most about this interview is the two actors' great sense of humor and their easy ability to laugh at themselves, while still relishing what might be the break of their lives. Besides, come next week, they may find themselves laughing all the way to the bank.

Director Robert Zemeckis is still mastering his animation craft but I'll give him this - he's sure got the eyes right.

His 2004 release, THE POLAR EXPRESS, was an ambitious leap forward for motion-capture animation. A big name star, Tom Hanks, headlined a big-budget film version of a classic children's Christmas book ... all in the service of a method of animation that was still in its infancy. Earnest it definitely was, but THE POLAR EXPRESS had a waxen look that made the characters seem more mannequin than human.

But since animation is almost always a kind of visual reduction, the oddly ethereal pallor of the people in EXPRESS was not the film's downfall. After all, that pallor could define its own aesthetic. No, the problem was in the eyes. Since motion-capture depends on actors wearing sensors (or markers) all over their bodies, and eyeballs can't really accommodate sensors, there was a disturbing disconnect between the animated characters and their animated eyes. And if eyes really are the windows into the soul, then the world of THE POLAR EXPRESS seemed inhabited by soul-less zombies. Even Santa Claus. Now that might make for a nice holiday-themed horror film from the likes of George Romero, but I seriously doubt that was Zemeckis' ambition. Instead of heart-warming fare, the director dished up cold comfort - all those kids riding the Express were positively creepy with their glazed stares.

THE POLAR EXPRESS was supposed to be chilly because of the physical setting, not the emotional one. But it's hard to bond when you feel like you're in the Overlook Hotel instead of the North Pole.

Five years later, Zemeckis is back with another Christmas classic (you don't get much bigger than Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL) and another big star, Jim Carrey .... in another big-budget motion-capture animated film. And while far from a perfect movie, DISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL does perfect the look in the eyes that proved so troublesome earlier. In fact, so good is the technology that not only does Zemeckis get the eyes right, he raises the stakes even higher by having Bob Cratchit actually tear up and cry out of them. And it looks exactly right. I'm convinced Zemeckis does that for no other reason than to show off, and given how much grief he got over those EXPRESS eyes, I don't begrudge him one bit.

Unfortunately, there's more to great filmmaking than mastering the technology - and it's on that score that Zemeckis is still learning. Yes, the main characters are much more precisely "drawn" - the face of Carrey's Scrooge for instance is a marvel of detail and visual nuance - and the characters' eyes no longer distract us. But technical wizardry can't quite compensate for the movie's lack of emotional charge. The characters may "look" more like real people than ever before but without a better and more nuanced script they're never going to convince us they really are.

In the end, Zemeckis seems more interested in making Cratchit cry realistic 3-D tears than he is in giving the audience a reason to shed a few of their own. That's a bit like singing all the right notes of a Christmas carol but missing its meaning.

In the immediate aftermath of Michael Jackson's sudden death, what I was most struck by - thanks to the endless and ubiquitous loop of his music videos and performance clips - was just how singularly talented the King of Pop was. I found myself marvelling that someone, anyone, could do what he could do - that look, that singing, and most especially that dancing. It made me, a non-fan, inexplicably happy to see someone so masterfully at the top of his game. Unfortunately, I never appreciated him in life as much as I did in death.

And now comes this movie, THIS IS IT. Afraid that it might be little more than a blatant attempt to quickly cash in on Jackson's higher-than-Everest profile right now, I went into the screening with some trepidation. But I'm happy to report it's a fitting tribute to the man. It may not reach the emotional highs of a great concert movie but considering what director Kenny Ortega had to work with - strictly rehearsal footage that was never expected to see the light of day - the film is surprisingly successful at depicting what might have been.

But perhaps most impressive is how effectively the film dispels rumors about Jackson's frailty. Many claimed he was in no condition to undertake that string of concerts he'd scheduled in London this summer. But there he is, in number after number, actively engaged in the creative process. He's grilling his musical director on tempo and cues, instructing his dancers on the many complex and elaborate steps he's choreographed, and advising his artistic director on the many filmed sequences that introduce the songs. And he performs, albeit in rehearsal mode, with the vibrancy you'd expect from a Michael Jackson in his prime. It's hard to imagine he's actually fifty years old, so fluid are his moves. The entire movie is a rousing rejoinder to all his skeptics.

Being the perfectionist that he was, I'm sure Jackson would have been mortified to know his REHEARSAL footage would be on display for all the world to see. But his star power shines through, regardless. And it at least gives us a glimpse of how good the show could have been. It was to have started out with a razzle-dazzle pyrotechnic opening and the appearance of an enormous "global video man." Out of this giant man emerges a resplendent Michael Jackson snapping his fingers and launching into "Wanna Be Starting Something." Next up is a sharply staged militaristic-looking dance routine for "They Don't Care About Us," followed by a plaintive "Human Nature" and then an elaborate and slickly produced "Smooth Criminal," complete with black and white video placing Jackson in the midst of a Humphrey Bogart shoot-out. And the hits just keep on coming - "The Way You Make Me Feel." the Jackson Five's "Shake Your Body," and an "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" duet. There's a new video - in 3-D this time - that introduces '"Thriller," a number that ends with a full-size bulldozer on stage about to swallow Jackson whole. Then comes the irrepressible "Beat It," "Black or White, "Earth Song," "Billie Jean," and finally, and appropriately "Man in the Mirror." And through them all, Jackson looks completely at ease. Whether he's riding high above everyone in a cherry picker, or climbing out of a giant spider-mobile, or singing and dancing solo on the stage, he's a performer in his element. And he knows it.

Michael Jackson may indeed be dead, but he's never seemed more alive than he does in this movie. And that's the overriding sense one has after the film. What a shame. What a loss. And what a show it would have been.

Now that the balloon boy is yesterday's news, the saga having apparently run its course and the wheels of justice about to slowly grind the Heenes into dust, it may be time to step back and appreciate what they wrought: an experience so exhilarating that Hollywood must be shaking its collective head and marvelling at the power of such a simple concept. With a few swaths of mylar, a good yarn, and the ever-ready cable-TV cameras, Richard Heene managed to pull off the best action movie of the summer ... and in October even!

I'm sure our newsroom was like many places across America during the two hour extravaganza. Lots of people crammed around TV sets while others hovered over computer screens as the incredible story unfolded, everyone transfixed by the sight of that homemade flying saucer with the six-year-old boy on board flying higher and higher into the skies over Colorado. The visuals were stunning. A perfectly shaped silver mylar spaceship hurtling through the clouds in a light blue sky, going faster and faster, and reaching heights of six and seven thousand feet above ground. The remarkable camerawork allowed us all a front-row seat. We weren't just following a gray dot high above us. We were given a tight shot of the runaway balloon that made it seem tantalizingly close. So compelling was the sight that no words were needed to heighten the effect. It was sheer spectacle - a fantastical sight so riveting one couldn't look away.

And the premise was a model of dramatic purity - a child in distress, with no clear way for anyone to help him. Someone in our newsroom even said this is the kind of situation that calls for a real-life superhero to fly up there, corrall the gas balloon and rescue the trapped kid. Without the services of Superman, Spiderman, or the Incredibles, this cliffhanger was all the more suspenseful. Would the balloon rise to such heights that it could burst and send the boy tumbling to earth like a modern day Icarus? Or might it crash into some mountains and kill its occupant that way? If it simply ran out of fuel, would it make for a hard landing or a soft one? Could we somehow get aircraft close enough to it to rope it into a net and save the boy mid-air? The possibilities seemed endless, and each one more dramatic than the next.

Although most of the time the situation remained static - a balloon flying farther and farther away - there was a narrative arc of sorts to the proceedings, provided by CNN's coverage. This arc allowed for a roller-coaster of shifting emotions. First off, the chilling word that a boy had stowed away inside a balloon that was now thousands of feet above the ground and picking up speed. Then came the speculation that perhaps the boy was NOT in the balloon - that he had fallen out of an attached basket sometime earlier in the flight OR had never actually made it inside the balloon at all. The consensus seemed to be moving in the direction of the latter, to the relief of millions, when all of a sudden came the word that there definitely had been a basket attached to the balloon, a basket that was clearly no longer attached. Anxiety levels now skyrocketed. It now sounded like the boy had indeed fallen with the basket. CNN even found a still photo that appeared to show something falling from the balloon proper. This was followed by the nerve-wracking collapse of one end of the still-speeding balloon, the deflated part flapping like a useless appendage. And then finally, the downy soft landing and the rush to see whether anyone was inside. Relief jostled with dread as it became clear no one was inside the balloon. The dread was the boy had already fallen out. Joy reigned supreme quickly thereafter when the boy was found safe and sound at his home. (That joy soon gave way to acrimony, of course, and, as it turned out, rightly so.)

Lots of people are now furious that Richard Heene duped us all into believing his hoax, and on one level, I agree it's pretty insulting. But the vitriol seems out of proportion. After all, we pay Hollywood big money to dupe us all the time - and this balloon hoax didn't cost us a thing. (Okay, the price of the rescue operation wasn't cheap, I grant you.) Movies are all about the suspension of disbelief and for a couple hours last week we suspended our disbelief long enough to experience a rush of emotions that were richer and more gratifying than any conjured up by summer blockbusters like the Terminator, Wolverine, G I Joe, or the Transformers. Heene apparently concocted this balloon hoax as a way for him to land another reality TV series but he may have been setting his sights too low. Once he sorts out his legal troubles, he just might have a future in Hollywood.

Well, this certainly isn't your little kid's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. The classic Maurice Sendak tale of a young boy's adventure amidst a colorful collection of sharp-toothed monsters has been turned into a dark and brooding family psychodrama. Instead of a classic children's film for children, filmmaker Spike Jonze delivers a children's film for adults, or rather a grown-up film about childhood that may or may not score well with kids.

It's to Jonze's credit that he manages to create a completely original work of art despite the burden (onus?) of adapting one of the world's best-loved children's stories. Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers succeed in staying true to the spirit of the sliver-thin book while at the same time expanding its themes in ways neither Sendak nor his legions of fans might have ever anticipated.

One thing the movie and the book are in perfect sync about is the fine line for children between fun and fright. The film opens with our young hero Max picking a snowball fight with his older sister's male friends. When these older boys exact their revenge with unexpected ferocity, Max's initial exhilaration dissolves into tears of regret. That experience is repeated (and worked through) in Max's later rumbles with the monsters.

As in the book, Max's fantasy trip to the island of monsters parallels Max's personal issues at home. The monsters are clearly projections of Max's psyche and his interactions with them allow him to resolve many of his frustrations. But Sendak's Max looks to be about 4 or 5 whereas Jonze's Max is more like 9 or 10 ... and in kid years, that's a big, big difference. The book's "young" Max acts up, gets sent to his room, and once there acts out all his aggressions with imaginary monsters who mimic his anger. When the monsters declare him their king, Max calls for the rumpus of all rumpuses and the scary fun begins. Eventually, however, he tires of all this rumpus-ing and returns home to find a warm bowl of soup waiting for him.

The movie's "older" Max has somewhat more complex issues to deal with, both psychologically and philosophically. For instance, a giant, James-Gandolfini-voiced monster points out to Max that his kingdom had started out full of rocks but those rocks had now been degraded to mere sand, and even that sand was now turning into dust. "I don't even know what happens after that," he says bleakly. When Max joins in that he heard the sun will someday burn itself out too, we're closer to existential dread than rumpus-time. If Ingmar Bergman had ever made a children's film, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE could easily have been it.

Even more tellingly, the motherly monster K.W. plays the perfect child psychologist as she asks Max about himself. As he proudly proclaims himself an explorer who travels by sea and air, she interrupts him by pointedly asking if that means he has no home and no family. When he begrudgingly admits to having a family, Max also confesses to having gone a bit crazy and biting one of them. "They think I'm a bad person," Max says. "Well, are you?" K.W. again pointedly asks. "I don't really know," Max candidly responds. This is Monster Therapy at its best.

And to drive home the psychological truths even more clearly, Jonze and Eggers actually have Max literally climb down K.W.'s gullet for temporary protection. When Max is eventually disengorged, he's covered in a kind of goopy filter that is unmistakably a metaphoric amniotic fluid. By movie's end, Max has gone through a re-birth that allows him to rejoin his family with a new appreciation of the complexities of life. That's a conclusion not that far off from Sendak's version of Max's journey - just a little messier. And what a fine mess it is.

If Michael Moore's latest film really is a love story, then it's a tale told by the jilted lover. It's angry and outsized, passionate and one-sided, and in the end more emotionally persuasive than intellectually so. Like the broken-hearted everywhere, Moore feels compelled to tell his version of things, and desperately wants us to see it his way. Lucky for us, his tunnel vision doesn't rob him of his sense of humor.

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY is Moore's account of the recent near-collapse of the country's financial sector. He's outraged by last year's 700 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street and infuriated that working stiffs have to bear the burden of the fat cats' mistakes. A longtime bugaboo of the Right, Moore is relatively bipartisan in his attacks this time out. It's true he places the initial blame for the economic unravelling at the feet of the Reagan administration, and George W. Bush is the butt of a number of obvious jokes, but Moore is equally scathing of high-profile Democrats, especially Senator Chris Dodd. And he really skewers the Obama administration's Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner.

But that shouldn't really surprise us. Moore has always been more of a populist than a party man. As a result, he spends a lot of time in the film with down-and-out workers from the middle and lower middle classes. We're introduced to families whose longtime homes are being foreclosed on. We meet widows and widowers whose spouses earned their employers millions of dollars thanks to something called "dead peasant" insurance policies. (And of course, none of that money saw its way to the grieving spouses.) Moore also takes us to a factory whose workers barricade themselves inside after they're told they won't get their paychecks due to bankruptcy. These segments are designed to work on an emotional level and for the most part they do. But because they're so anecdotal in nature, they don't really persuade us of anything beyond the personal toll hard times have on people.

Moore really does have an argument he wants to make, and a rather daring one at that. He's convinced that capitalism does more harm than good; that's it's a fundamentally flawed system which rewards personal greed at the expense of the welfare of others and results in highly unequal and unfair distributions of wealth. He argues that the American public has been sold a bill of goods: that capitalism is next to godliness. If anything, it's the opposite, he says. It's for that reason Moore wants us to end our emotional attachment to capitalism. In other words, it's time to break off the engagement.

He's especially furious that our country's top bankers have so much influence in the government. At one point, there were so many Goldman Sachs bigwigs dictating financial policy, the White House was dubbed "Government Goldman." Moore reaches his own personal boiling point with Congress' approval of the 700 billion dollar bailout of the banks. He complains that by spending a few million dollars to sway Congress, the banks earned billions of free money. And since he's convinced the American public was dead set against the bail-out, he sees the vote as a prime example of capitalism co-opting democracy.

One problem here is that Moore never lets anyone try to explain why the bailout might have been a good idea. He's so convinced that anyone in support of it must be corrupt that he doesn't allow for any honest disagreement. (Doesn't he remember Debate 101 - that acknowleging an opponent's argument and then countering it is a far more effective strategy than ignoring it.)

But Moore may feel that he simply doesn't have enough time to debate the issue. He's in too much of a hurry to get HIS point across to worry about being fair to the other side. Which brings us to the strength of Michael Moore. He may not provide a fair and balanced approach to his always timely topics (health care, gun control, the Iraq War, etc) but he has an entertainer's flair ... for the dramatic and especially for the comic. It's that latter quality that keeps Moore among the top-drawing documentarians of all time.

CAPITALISM gets off to a clever start with a 1950's era theatre warning that what you are about to see is not for the faint of heart. Moore also gets a lot of comic mileage out of re-dubbing Zeffirelli's JESUS OF NAZARETH so that the Messiah spouts off bogus financial advice and advises Lazarus he can't raise him up since he has a "pre-existing condition." The laughs keep coming when a series of financial experts are unable to explain what "derivatives" are. (It's like a Jay Leno Jaywalking skit for the CNBC crowd.) And of course, we have the trademark Michael Moore stunts as well. First, he drives a Brinks armored car up to the headquarters of each of the major banks who received bail-out money and demands the money be returned .. to him. And then, for the movie's climax, Moore literally wraps the AIG building in yellow crime scene tape. As we're laughing at the sheer audacity and absurdity of it all, he hits us with his rather heavy (and yes, heavy-handed) message: Capitalism is evil!

What saves this jeremiad from being more than just a screed against capitalism is that Moore keeps his sense of humor intact and perhaps even more importantly, he finds a new and better love and she goes by the name of Democracy. Let the honeymoon begin.

It seems the timing for this couldn't be more ideal. We're currently awash in overexuberant praise for the likes of Patrick Swayze and John Hughes, two master purveyors of teen schmaltz. So what better time to release a remake of FAME, a movie about a bunch of bright but troubled students at a performing arts high school? After all. I've long considered FAME a kind of John Hughes movie, even though it was made years before Hughes made his first film.

But if the timing for this new FAME is perfect, the execution is decidedly not. Thanks to bad writing, stick- figure characters, and indifferent musical numbers, FAME 2009 is like a bad audition. You just want to say, "NEXT!" and be done with it.

The original FAME was no gem but what it lacked in style it made up for with a lot of heart. Each of the main characters, stereotypes though they might have been, got a chance to unburden their heart and reveal their true (or truer) selves. Thus, a gay kid could gingerly step out of the closet, a repressed Jewish girl could escape into The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a desperate Puerto Rican could eventually learn how to re-define himself in the wake of Freddie Prinz's suicide. These character studies may have seemed generic and obvious but they also allowed for some emotional resonance. They were more than just performers - they were human beings with personal struggles beyond the stage.

What's remarkable about the remake is that none of its characters is allowed enough depth to register emotionally. The student with the strongest back story is a serious-minded black girl who's studied cello all her life but desperately wants to sing hip-hop. When her conservative father forbids it, the potential for dramatic fireworks is set. But the dad is so ridiculously overbearing, and so comically overwritten, that any real tension dissipates quickly.

More ill-conceived characterizations crop up with our main "couple:" the sweet-voiced hunk and his slightly insecure girlfriend. For starters, since her character can't really act and sings like she's still in grade school, it makes no sense that she would have ever made it through the gruelling audition process for this supposedly exclusive performing arts school. But even that makes more sense than the phony arguments these two get into so as to justify their breaking up. The course of their relationship is so arbitrary it can only engender eye- rolling in the audience.

The other characters are so sketchily drawn that they make almost no impression. When one of them is on the verge of committing suicide by stepping in front of a subway train, you realize the poverty of the script - because even THAT has no emotional impact.

None of this would have ultimately mattered, I suppose, if the musical numbers were out of this world. As Broadway has demonstrated time and time again, a lot of flaws can be covered up by rousing performances and a spectacular musical score. And this is what's most puzzling about the FAME remake. The songs don't soar and the dances don't fly. You'd think that a movie about lives dedicated to the stage would be able to do something more theatrical and inspiring than the glum retreads we get. (Look at the first twenty minutes of MOULIN ROUGE for a reminder of what a truly creative mind can do with song and dance.)

The original FAME came out the year before MTV even hit the airwaves. And yet, despite almost thirty years of MTV videos to enrich one's visual imagination, the filmmakers behind the remake were unable to come up with anything to rival the exuberance of the original's dancing-in-the- streets scene. That may have been corny but at least it was full of life.

The chorus of the title song proclaims:

I'M GONNA LIVE FOREVER,
BABY REMEMBER MY NAME
REMEMBER
REMEMBER
REMEMBER
REMEMBER

I'm afraid the only remembering going on will be of FAME circa 1980. The later incarnation is best forgotten ... and soon.

A Cannes Film Festival prizewinner, AMREEKA tells the semi-autobiographical tale of a Palestinian family that leaves the Middle East and settles in a rural town in America.

Tom Tangney talks to first-time filmmaker Cherien Dabis about a life lived in two worlds.

That exclamation point says it all. This movie is not really about the most important corporate whistle-blower in the history of FBI investigations. It's about how that whistle-blower sees himself as the most important corporate whistle-blower in the history of FBI investigations ... and then some. He likes to joke that he's Secret Agent Double-O-14 because he's twice as smart as Agent 007 but he's only half-joking. He truly has self-delusions of grandeur. In truth, he's an American idiot. Make that American Idiot!

In the 1990's, Mark Whitacre was a successful biochemist/executive at the giant food additive corporation Archer Daniels Midland. For reasons still unclear, Whitacre blabs to the FBI that his company is involved in a global price-fixing scheme. He agrees to wear a wire for the next two and a half years (!) to help the FBI prove his claim. By the time he's done, he's scraped together enough evidence to convict a number of top echelon executives at ADM.

From this perspective, you have a dramatically harrowing tale of a lone individual taking on a giant corporation by living a nerve-wracking double life ... for years. In fact, Michael Mann made a very good movie a decade ago about a very similar situation. THE INSIDER was a psychological thriller about a biochemist who practically single-handedly battled the tobacco industry.

But director Steven Soderbergh doesn't want to make THE INSIDER II. He's much more interested in making, in effect, THE INSIDER! Soderbergh chooses to accentuate the comic rather than the dramatic or the tragic aspects of his story. And unlike Mann's tobacco chemist, ADM's biochemist provides a jaw-dropping amount of comic potential.

Like a 20th century Madame Bovary, Mark Whitacre has a rich fantasy life fueled by cheap fiction. He's constantly comparing his life to bestseller novels by Michael Crichton and John Grisham. And like Flaubert's heroine, he ultimately has trouble separating life and fantasy. He's convinced he's the hero in the novel that is his life, and that life is bound to be heroic. For instance, he persists in believing that once he brings down ADM, he would of course be named its new president. He refuses to listen when the Justice Department tries to explain to him that's not a likely scenario. He's apparently so dense, even his wife can't get him to face facts on this point. "Are you an idiot?" she finally has to ask him. Even that doesn't slow down his fantasy train.

He may be an idiot of sorts but he has an impeccable resume. With multiple degrees and a PhD., Whitacre is a highly paid scientist and corporate executive who's lived abroad in lots of places and is fluent in many languages. But those brains of his do him no good in the spy game. He conspicuously narrates his comings and goings into his hidden "wire," stares right into the lamp which is hiding the FBI tap, and starts fiddling with a malfunctioning spy recorder right in the middle of a clandestine meeting he's supposed to be secretly taping. He also can't seem to keep a secret, despite endless warnings and admonishments from his lawyers and the FBI. His antics turn his handlers into nervous wrecks as he continually puts at risk the entire investigation.

All these irritants pale in comparison to some other rather damning secrets that are eventually revealed about Whitacre, none of which I will reveal here. But rest assured Soderbergh mines them for all their comic potential. And Matt Damon seems to revel in the opportunity to play the antithesis of his Jason Bourne character. Paunchy, toupee'd, and sporting a ridiculous moustache, Damon here is a middle-aged doofus who only thinks he's Jason Bourne. And therein lies the humor.

Mark Whitacre is something of a cousin to William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard in FARGO, a bumbling incompetent with criminal intent. The difference is that FARGO'S universe is much darker than THE INFORMANT!'s. Unlike the Coen Brothers, Soderbergh chooses to keep it light and airy throughout. This makes for a breezy and entertaining watch, a la his OCEAN'S 11,12, and 13, but I think a little more grit and gravity would have given this already good movie a shot at greatness. Be that as it may, it's still a remarkably sly telling ... of a tale about an idiot, perhaps, but certainly not told by one.

In the end, Whitacre's story is so fanastic that you realize his own dimwitted fantasies about his life can't hold a candle to the remarkable like he actually lived. And that's worth an exclamation point all its own.