Ten years later, he represented what I had become, at least to the degree that Chicago offered the opportunities of Rome. Ten years after that, in 1982, he was what I had escaped from, after I stopped drinking too much and burning the candle at both ends. In 1992, he was a reckless young man with a weakness for romance. By 2002, he was the hero of a classic film, more than 40 years old, and I had to lecture audiences on the virtues of black and white. By then Mastroianni was dead.

And yet the film has not changed one frame in all of those years. It is a tribute to its greatness that it still has the power to hold me. I showed it again at Ebertfest 2007, because by then it was certainly "overlooked," and many in the audience might never have seen it on a big screen, or ever experienced the beauty of any widescreen b&w film.

Every time I see it, I notice new things. More importantly, I renew old memories. Where I was, what I thought, how I felt, how Marcello was living my parallel lifetime. He is dead, but the film is immortal. "I saw a picture of Anita in the paper," one of the characters says in that movie I saw, named "Elsa & Fred." "She still looks pretty good." Well, I saw her in Fellini's "Intervista" (1987) too, and she still looked pretty good--for her age. But in the scene in the Trevi fountain, she is frozen in time.

In 1962, Ekberg represented everything I desired in a woman. In later years, I began to think about Mastroianni, his hand forever outstretched to her, his lips forever prepared for a kiss he was never to experience. He is frozen for all time like that, reaching, but never achieving. In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats writes about a painting on an urn, of a man forever in pursuit of a maid:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Daniel Curley, my college mentor, wrote a novel titled A Stone Man, Yes, about a man forever in pursuit of a woman, yet never succeeding. That might be enough for a man painted on a stone, he concluded, but not for him.

Although it is great, I have seen greater films than "La Dolce Vita." But it is the film of my life. By its eternity I measure my time.

* * *

Now forgive me, for I must break the spell and tell you a story Mastroianni told me. I had asked about the filming of that scene.

"The water, it was-a very cold," He said. "Fellini, he shoots again and again. Finally, the time for the close shot of my fingers reaching to touch-a her cheek. I am always smoking, smoking, smoking. My fingers, the nicotine!"

He held them up to illustrate.

"Anita's skin is alabaster white. Fellini, he looks-a my fingers against her skin, and shouts, Marcello! When-a you gonna learn the right way to wipe-a your ass?"

The blog entry "In Search of Redemption" inspired an outpouring of reader comments remarkable not only for their number but for their intelligence and thought. It became obvious that many of us go to the movies seeking some sort of release or healing. Many of you mentioned titles that especially affected you; two of my most-admired films, "Hoop Dreams" and "Grave of the Fireflies," were frequently listed. You all had your reasons. Now Ali Arikan, a longtime contributor to this site, has written me about why he was so affected by a relatively unlikely title, "The Out-of-Towners." His reasons were personal; he can post them below if he chooses to. But in connection with his explanation, he quoted the first paragraph of one of my reviews.

I know exactly where the tape is, in which box, on which shelf. It's an old reel-to-reel tape I used with the tape recorder my dad bought me in grade school. It has his voice on it. The box has moved around with me for a long time, but I have never listened to the tape since my dad died. I don't think I could stand it. It would be too heartbreaking.

Yes. I still have the tape, and I still feel that way. But in connection with movies, I didn’t think my emotions ever ran that strongly. Then I had a striking experience. In connection with the Great Movies project, I settled down to watch a relatively recent film I thought was a likely prospect, Mike Nichols' "Wit" (2001). It was a made-for-HBO film, and although we reviewed it on the TV show and I picked it as one of the year's best films, I had never published a written review because it never opened theatrically. This would be my chance.

On our "Best Films of 2002" show, I said:

Made for HBO, "Wit" is a drama both intelligent and heartbreaking, starring Emma Thompson as a woman dying of cancer. She is an English professor who filters her own suffering through the disciplines of the poetry she loves. She was always a proud, independent woman who stood apart from others--and now, at the end, she is alone. The movie is merciless in showing how hospital routine robs her of her dignity. And awesome in the way she struggles with every ounce of her humanity to keep her self-respect. "Wit" was based on a play by Margaret Edson, and was directed by Mike Nichols, who wrote the screenplay with Thompson. If "Wit" had qualified in theaters, Thompson would certainly get an Oscar nomination for her best work on film.

I inserted the DVD in the machine, pressed "play," and settled back to watch it. The first shot is a close-up of a man's face, a doctor, who tells someone she has advanced ovarian cancer. The next shot is a close-up of the woman he is speaking to, saying "yes?" or "and?" I forget which. I turned off the TV. I realized I actually could not watch the movie.

I remembered it too clearly, perhaps, and dreaded re-living it. When I reviewed it, its situation was theoretical for me, and I responded to the honesty and emotion of the drama. Since then, I have had cancer, and had all too many hours, days and weeks of hospital routine robbing me of my dignity. Although people in my situation are always praised for their courage, actually courage has nothing to do with it. There is no choice.

I used to smile at reader letters saying things like, "My husband is sick and I need a movie to cheer him up." I doubted the Norman Cousins theory that laughter is curative (I still do). The experience with "Wit" was a revelation. Yes, movies can be immediate and real to us--sometimes too real. Sometimes they record events we do not want to experience, or remember. It is a tribute to their power.

I have been watching a lot of Ingmar Bergman. Last night I finished "The Passion of Anna" (1969). My original review is missing, but it was on my "best 10" list for the year, so I gave it full honor. Have you seen it? It is avant-garde in some of its devices, such as cutaways to the actors discussing their characters. Astonishingly well-photographed by Sven Nykvist. Some of the best work ever done on screen by Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow, and Bibi Andersson. And filled with deep, soul-lacerating anguish. But I could admire it, empathize with it, and not shrink away from it, because it was all happening to them. When it happens to you, that’s another matter.

One of the most prolific and intelligent contributors to the comments section of the blog is Solomon Wakeling. I wrote in curiosity, asking to know more about him. He replied that he is a 24-year-old law student from Australia, and that one of his problems is, "I read too many books." There was one thing he said that I felt I needed to write about in the blog: "I find your work is filled with an essentially humanitarian philosophy, dealing with concepts like redemption."

I'm often asked which movies made me cry. Without making a list (I hate lists of movies, which are so reductive), I'd have to reply that the deliberately sad films, the "weepies," rarely make me cry. What gets to me are the films about goodness--about people acting bravely or generously or in self-sacrifice. Consider a film like Spielberg’s "Schindler's List." Its hero was not a great man in his own eyes, and his actions were at least partially self-serving. But with all of his imperfections and flaws, he set about to save a group of lives, and succeeded. That he succeeded is secondary to his effort, which was the main thing, although I confess that in the emotionally devastating final shot (showing those who would not be alive were it not for him), I cried. I was moved so deeply that they lived because of this one strange, eccentric, driven man.

Consider Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby." Many were deeply offended by his action at the end. I myself disagreed with it on philosophical and personal grounds. I think he did the wrong thing. But he was certainly doing what the young woman desired, or thought that she desired, and I think he did it against his own wishes. He did not personally want her dead, or approve of euthanasia for that matter, but thought he was acting on her behalf. He was doing for her what she could not do for herself. What he did was consistent with the beliefs he had held up for her throughout the film. It was, for that man in that context at that moment, the right thing. So it's much more complicated, but, yes, I was moved. In all the frailty and fallibility of our poor human lives, he found the nerve to do what seemed to be merciful.

Or look at Kurosawa's "Ikiru," about an old bureaucrat who has spent his days in the meaningless shuffling of papers. Faced with a medical diagnosis meaning his own death, he tries at first to deny and escape. Finally, with the end approaching, he determines to achieve at least one good thing out of all the hopeful projects that found their ends by disappearing in his office. He wants to establish a little park for children. He succeeds, and at the end, in the falling snow, he is seen sitting on a swing in the park, dead. He has accomplished his good deed.

Consider, too, Bergman's "Cries and Whispers," the most emotionally devastating film I have ever seen. It was about a woman dying of cancer, and joined in her final days by her sisters, their husbands, and her maid. The sisters and the husbands were deeply disturbed, flawed, even evil. The maid, who had been patronized by them all through her life, felt pure love for the dying woman. There is an astonishing scene (only Bergman would have conceived it) where she bares her breasts and takes the dying woman to her heart, and comforts her with warmth and sympathy. It is the nudity that affected me most deeply: She was trying to remove all barriers of convention or modesty or shame, and to offer up her flesh itself to the dying woman, to say there was nothing she would not do for her. This gesture moves me even if I think back on it.

Having already included Bergman's "Winter Light" in the Great Movies collection, I have lately been revisiting the other titles in Bergman's trilogy about the silence of God: "Through a Glass Darkly" and "The Silence." Few other directors have been more drawn to the fundamental torments that we share (Dreyer, Ozu and Bresson are often mentioned along with him). These three films are notable because of their difficulty of redemption. Because of madness or obstinacy or obscure psychic wounds, their characters find it so difficult to achieve. Their are buried in their misery. But there is a force within them that keeps on trying, keeps on reaching out, and I think Bergman's subject is that desire we feel, that hope, that is perhaps contained within the concept of God.

At the end of the day, films like these are what persuade me to be a film critic. My job is to call attention to them. They need not be so deeply serious, but they need to have that human generosity and goodness. If I were to say that even "Juno" belonged on the list, would you understand?

As it turned out, "Triumph of the Will" turned out to be a relatively easy assignment for me. The film itself informed me how I was to review it, and this process took place during the act of viewing. What I wrote will have to await publication day of the article. But these are general observations:

I wrote about what I saw, and how I felt when I saw it. I decided not to devote long paragraphs to rehearsing the evils of Nazism, as if that subject was not already pretty well settled. I was not pious in my denunciations, as if I had something to prove. I simply wrote about the sounds and the pictures.

That's the approach I long used in the "shot-by-shot" film analysis sessions that I conducted annually for more than 30 years at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, and also for many assorted years at the Hawaii, Virginia, and other festivals, and in classes at the University of Chicago. I recommend the approach to any film enthusiast. The film teaches itself to you.

I began in about 1970, on the advice of John West, a Chicago film exhibitor, teacher and historian. "You know how coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to go through game films?" he asked. "Do the same thing with a feature movie. You don't stop after every frame, of course, but you stop at anything interesting, and discuss it, and you can back up and look at it a frame at a time."

This I did, to begin with, during U of C classes. The rules were simple: Anyone in the audience shouted out "Stop!" and we did, and discussed why they wanted us to stop. Beginning with Hitchcock, who remains the most fruitful director for such analysis, I worked my way over the years through the work of Welles, Bunuel, Bergman, Herzog, Truffaut and many others. I found that with a large group, there would always be one member with the expertise to settle the question at hand: A Hungarian speaker, for example, or a psychiatrist, or a specialist on Japanese medieval history. The Colorado groups often numbered 1,000 students and locals, and over the years we formed a community.

Of course the introduction of the laserdisc, and later the DVD, made this process infinitely easier.

When I was asked by Criterion to do a shot-by-shot commentary of Ozu's "Floating Weeds," I almost balked. (In his late work, Ozu's camera never moves. He always cuts between static set-ups. What would I analyze?) I had in fact between through the film a shot at a time at the side of Donald Richie, greatest English-language expert on the Japanese cinema, at Hawaii, but that had been years ago. All the same, I proposed "Floating Weeds" at Colorado one year, and the discoveries we made there were so fruitful that I modestly believe the resulting commentary track is superb. The greater the artist, the more deeply you can look, and the more you will find.

Viewing "Triumph of the Will" a shot at a time would be a relentless and harrowing experience, and that realization gave me my angle in writing about the film. I did not have to settle vast questions of good and evil. I simply had to look at what has been frequently called "the greatest documentary ever made." But to look slowly, and carefully, and at the screen, not the reputation.

In my previous blog entry, I told of receiving a message from a reader in Montreal who wanted know how I would deal with reviewing a new Canadian film with the f-word in its title. Would my paper print the title? What were my thoughts? I now have an opportunity to deal directly with those questions, because Steve Hoban, the film's producer, has sent me a DVD, along with a bulletin about its June 13 opening date in Canada, and a U.S. release later this summer.

To get the essential question out of the way at the beginning: Yes, this is an "adult" film, but only technically. It is not hard-core. It contains no genitals of either sex, and no "money shots," as the porn industry inelegantly calls them. It is simply about five couples who meet, talk, and have sex. Sometimes they even seem to be making love. It was shot in five apartments, and some doorsteps.

Director Martin Gero and his co-writer, Aaron Abrams, outline their plan at the beginning. There will be five stories, involving The Friends, the Couple, the Exes, the First Date and the Roommates. With an admirable sense of symmetry, Gero follows these four couples (and a threesome) through six stages of f***ing, which he identifies as prelude, foreplay, sex, interlude, orgasm and afterglow. That seems like a pretty comprehensive list, omitting only Sending Out for Chinese.

The dialogue sounds like these actors were assigned in acting class to improvise their characters discussing their situations. My notion is that real couples, especially those who know each other well, such as the Exes and the Couple, would spend a great deal less time talking than these people do. But, yes, the Friends might spend that much time, because they're negotiating the possibility of having sex with one another to eliminate all the bother of strangers. They have some good dialog: "Respect is like the opposite of liking someone," for example. Or the girl who changed her name from Dora Fox to Jamie because she liked that better, "And how was I to know he was going to start winning all these Oscars?"

The stories are not intercut; this is not a hyperlink movie, thank God, because then we might drown, not in a sea of sweat or sperm, but of dialog. No great lessons are learned. There is little high drama. As it stands, the screenplay could supply fodder for countless theatrical companies. It's...engaging, that's what it is. These are all essentially nice people. Canadians, you know.

My favorite situation, by far, is in the story titled The Roommates. Here we get Gord (Ennis Ermer) and his roommate Dave (Peter Oldring), and Gord's girlfriend Inez (Natalie Lisinska). Gord suggests Dave join him and Inez in bed. Dave, a quiet kinda guy, goes along with it. Then it turns out Gord would rather watch (while eating a submarine sandwich) than participate. Then Gord starts coaching Dave: "She really likes it when you grab her hair!" Then Gord's hand is on Dave's butt, which Dave does not appreciate. Finally all three are smoking cigarettes.

And so it goes. Not a great movie, but fun, and the title makes it sound cheaper than it is. I liked a sequence in which a girl employs a sexual device on her guy, who later complains that he said "wait," "stop," and “no." He complains, "When a girl says 'no,' that means to stop!" You have to admit he has a point.

Rating: Three stars

* * *

François Caron of Montréal, Québec wrote me:

"...Fucking."

"It's not a working title either. That's the actual movie title! It's even listed as such on IMDB! So, any plans to review it? And if so, how will you approach the delicate subject of mentioning the title in your column?

"There's an interesting situation with the movie; it received government funding just like every other major Canadian production. However, the Conservative government has a bill in the works, Bill C-10, which would allow the Heritage and Justice Departments to retroactively withdraw funding from any movie declared offensive or not in the public interest, even after Telefilm Canada or the Canadian Television Fund have already approved funding for the 'offensive' project. Then comes 'Young People Fucking.' Talk about stirring up a hornet's nest!"

* * *

Well, to begin with, I was unable to find a listing for either "...Fucking" or "Fucking" on the IMDb, although there is an entry for "Young People's Fucking" (2007, "a smart and fast-paced comedy that intertwines the stories of five couples over the course of one sexual encounter"). It played the Toronto Film Festival, received a friendly review from the National Post, cost $1.5 million Canadian, is X-rated, played the 2008 Seattle Film Festival, and is now on DVD, not having opened theatrically.

The National Post just went ahead and printed the title. I do not believe the Chicago Sun-Times, or the majority of American newspapers, would. I wouldn't want to myself, although I have just printed it in this blog, with an advance warning.

Why not? I have used the word many, many times. I have heard it countless more times. On occasion it is employed simply as punctuation, and some people seem scarcely aware they have used it.

On the other hand, I was standing in a truck stop in Harbert, Michigan a few years ago, and one truck driver unleashed such a stream of fuckings to another that I quietly asked him, "Do you think that's an appropriate way to speak in a public place?"

How did he react? He gaped at me as if the thought had never occurred to him.

I think I uttered my first fucking in the late 1950s, on the late shift at The News-Gazette sports desk. I felt a slight frisson. It was a special word. It had power. About that time I was reading Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, in which not even the great bold man himself could muster up more than fugging. In the 1960s, of course, the word entered into common currency.

But it is not such a nice word. It is an ugly word when applied to the act of making love, and a cheap word when used in other ways. I think it can carry a connotation of rape. Yes, women use it all the time, but are they not a little like Gidget, the female dog in SATC, who masturbates in male doggy style? Isn't a woman who says fucking saying something sad about herself? For that matter, now I think about it, isn't a man?

To be sure, I have campaigned against the automatic "R" rating for any movie containing the word, because many movies do contain it, and some of them are ideal for those under 17, all of whom know the word. I understand it floats in common currency. I am not shocked.

But I feel today a general decrease in public civility. To watch a sports broadcast is to see countless naked beer bellies painted with team colors. To walk down the street is to traverse the dictionary of nasty words. People create a space around themselves by verbal hostility.

I had a look the other day at the amazing job they did of transforming Lincoln Avenue into the way it looked when John Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theater and was shot dead. It's for Johnny Depp's new film. They found old signs to hang over the street: "Kelvinator," a big Bulova watch, "Amana." And in seeing the 1930s street I imagined the people who would have been walking along it, none of them saying fuck and just as happy not to.

Would I review the film? If it was reviewable, yes. Would the paper print the title? No. That's okay with me.

Gidget Gormley, "the world's cutest dog," stars in SATC.

In the Answer Man column for Friday, June 13, I write: "Oddly enough, searching the AM's Google Mail account for questions about 'Sex and the City,' I found that all the messages, every single one, dealt only with matters of masturbating female dogs. But surely I was mistaken? Surely with such a popular film there would be messages about something else, especially since it was a popular movie, my review was negative, and my hit-counting software indicated that tens of thousands had read it? Was the only thing they wanted to write me about was the leisure activity of Samantha's pet dog? Surely not. Then I had a brainstorm.

The author of that single message deserves recognition. He is Ian Gallaher of Fullerton, CA, and he writes to me: "In your review of 'Sex and the City,' you wrote, 'But this is probably the exact 'Sex and the City' film that fans of the TV series are lusting for,' and, as a 24-year-old straight male who's seen the entire series (but only after my sister already bought it) I can say the movie was a complete letdown. To the casual observer, the series was inch-deep raunchy girl talk, but if you give the series time, you get to know each character and their intricate personalities and subtextually honest flaws. The television episodes truly are a work of art, if you can peel back the glossy pink wallpaper and take a look at why the walls and foundation of these girls lives are deeply flawed. But alas, the movie was a disappointment. The girls' pasts were apparently wiped away in favor of cookie-cutter representations of their previously rich selves. My only guess is that the producers got ahold of the script and watered it down in order to appeal to everybody, and, in doing so, made it universally unappealing. If you have the opportunity, give the series some time, it is excellent."

I regret, Ian, that I will never have the opportunity. Wild horses could not drag me to the opportunity. SATC is so definitely not my cup of tea that, for me, it is not tea at all, and does not come in a cup. As I made clear in the first sentence of my review, "I am not the person to review this movie." But I found aspects of the movie curious, and one of those aspects was the sight of Samantha's female dog masturbating with great joy and energy in a way that my sadly limited experience had led me to believe was unlikely. I always had male dogs, who went about such matters in a straightforward way. In the Answer Man column you will find how ignorant I was, and I am informed that a great many female dogs masturbate just like male dogs and apparently have no complaints.

Trying to puzzle out this situation, I have concluded: (1) Those who loved SATC or hated my review just abandoned me as a hopeless case, but that (2) people love their pets, and love to talk about them. So those few shining sentences about Baby, Samantha's dog, stood out for them in a sea of hopelessness, and they sprang to their computers, eager to tell me about Tessa, Timoune, and other beloved lady dogs. The lesson, of course, is that sex is important, but our pets are more important, and have a more direct connection to our daily lives than do the sex lives of four fictional women in The City.

I talked to lots of friends who rushed to the various midnight screenings and Cosmopolitan-drink-fests that accompanied the opening of the film, and what I gathered was: (1) Yeah, the movie was okay; (2) it was pretty long; (3) it helped if you've seen the series; (4) the Cosmo is pleasant as a drink, but not as a habit. (The recipe, Wikipedia reports, involves: "vodka, Cointreau or Triple Sec, cranberry juice, and fresh-squeezed lime juice or sweetened lime juice. Informally, it is referred to as a Cosmo." A man named John Caine brought it from the Midwest to San Francisco around 1987, and then faded from the pages of history.)

So I am back where I started. Millions of people watched the series, wanted to see the movie, and have. They are not much moved to defend it or discuss it, at least not on my web site. But their mother-in-law's beloved Tessa is altogether another matter. I recommend a sequel titled, "Tessa and the City."

The question is, what dog would it star? Here at the movie desk we stop at nothing to inform our readers, and so I can tell you that Baby is played by a dog named Gidget Gormley, who has countless web pages in her honor, mostly pink. Search as I did, I found no information about how Gidget was trained to masturbate on demand. but since Gidget is billed as "the world's cutest dog," maybe all it took was a mirror.

When I caught up with "Iron Man," a broken hip had delayed me and the movie had already been playing for three weeks. What I heard during that time was that a lot of people loved it, that they were surprised to love it so much, and that Robert Downey Jr.'s performance was special. Apart from that, all I knew was that the movie was about a big iron man. I didn't even know that a human occupied it, and halfway thought that the Downey character's brain had been transplanted into a robot, or a fate equally weird.

Much of that feeling is created by the chemistry involving Downey, Paltrow and Bridges. They have relationships that seem fully-formed and resilient enough to last through the whole movie, even if plot mechanics were not about to take them to another level. Between the two men, there are echoes of the relationship between Howard Hughes and Noah Dietrich in Scorsese's "The Aviator" (2004). Obadiah Stane doesn't come onscreen waving flags and winking at the camera to announce he is the villain; he seems adequately explained simply as the voice of reason at Stark's press conference. (Why did "Stark," during that scene, make me think of "staring mad?"). Between Stark and Pepper, there's that classic screen tension between "friends" who know they can potentially become lovers.

Downey's performance is intriguing, and unexpected. He doesn't behave like most superheroes: he lacks the psychic weight and gravitas. Tony Stark is created from the persona Downey has fashioned through many movies: irreverent, quirky, self-deprecating, wise-cracking. The fact that Downey is allowed to think and talk the way he does while wearing all that hardware represents a bold decision by the director, Jon Favreau. If he hadn't desired that, he probably wouldn't have hired Downey. So comfortable is Downey with Tony Stark's dialogue, so familiar does it sound coming from him, that the screenplay seems almost to have been dictated by Downey's persona.

There are some things that some actors can safely say onscreen, and other things they can't. The Robert Downey Jr. persona would find it difficult to get away with weighty, profound statements (in an "entertainment," anyway--a more serious film like "Zodiac" is another matter). Some superheroes speak in a kind of heightened, semi-formal prose, as if dictating to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Not Tony Stark. He could talk that way and be Juno's uncle. "Iron Man" doesn't seem to know how seriously most superhero movies take themselves. If there is wit in the dialog, the superhero is often supposed to be unaware of it. If there is broad humor, it usually belongs to the villain. What happens in "Iron Man," however, is that sometimes we wonder how seriously even Stark takes it. He's flippant in the face of disaster, casual on the brink of ruin.

It's prudent, I think, that Favreau positions the rest of the characters in a more serious vein. The supporting cast wisely does not try to one-up him. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts as a woman who is seriously concerned that this goofball will kill himself. Jeff Bridges makes Obadiah Stane one of the great superhero villains by seeming plausibly concerned about the stock price. Terrence Howard, as Col. Rhodes, is at every moment a conventional straight arrow. What a horror show it would have been if they were all tuned to Tony Stark's sardonic wave length. We'd be back in the world of "Swingers" (1996) which was written by Favreau.

Another of the film's novelties is that the enemy is not a conspiracy or spy organization. It is instead the reality in our own world today: Armaments are escalating beyond the ability to control them. In most movies in this genre, the goal would be to create bigger and better weapons. How unique that Tony Stark wants to disarm. It makes him a superhero who can think, reason and draw moral conclusions, instead of one who recites platitudes.

The movie is largely founded on its special effects. When somebody isn’t talking, something is banging, clanging or laying rubber. The armored robotic suits utilized by Tony and Obadiah would upstage lesser actors than Downey and Bridges; it's surprising how much those two giant iron men seem to reflect the personalities of the men inside them. Everything they do is preposterous, of course, but they seem to be doing it, not the suits. Some of their moments have real grandeur--as when Tony tests his suit to see how high it will fly, and it finally falls back toward earth in a sequence that reminded me of a similar challenge in "The Right Stuff." The art direction is inspired by the original Marvel artists. The movie doesn't reproduce the drawings of Jack Kirby and others, but it reproduces their feeling, a vision of out-scale enormity, seamless sleekness, secret laboratories made not of nuts and bolts but of...vistas.

A lot of big budget f/x epics seem to abandon their stories with half an hour to go, and just throw effects at the audience. This one has a plot so ingenious it continues to function no matter how loud the impacts, how enormous the explosions. It’s an inspiration to provide Tony with that heart-saving device; he’s vulnerable not simply because Obadiah might destroy him, but because he might simply run out of juice.

That leaves us, however, with a fundamental question at the bottom of the story: Why must the ultimate weapon be humanoid in appearance? Why must it have two arms and two legs, and why does it matter if its face is scowling? In the real-world competitions between fighting machines, all the elements of design are based entirely on questions of how well they allow the machines to attack, defend, recover, stay upright, and overturn their enemies. It is irrelevant whether they have conventional eyes, or whether those eyes narrow. Nor does it matter whether they have noses, because their oxygen supply is obviously not obtained by breathing.

The solution to such dilemmas is that the armored suits look the way they do for entirely cinematic reasons. The bad iron man should look like a mean machine. The good iron man should utilize the racing colors of Tony Stark's favorite sports cars. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun to see a fight scene between two refrigerators crossed with the leftovers from a boiler room.

At the end of the day it 's Robert Downey Jr. who powers the lift-off separating this from most other superhero movies. You hire an actor for his strengths, and Downey would not be strong as a one-dimensional mighty-man. He is strong because he is smart, quick and funny, and because we sense his public persona masks deep private wounds. By building on that, Favreau found his movie, and it's a good one.

This blog entry has recycled onto the site as a review, with a 4-star rating. -RE

I got caught in the Indiana Jones whirlwind and allowed an important anniversary to pass unremarked: On May 16, Studs Terkel celebrated his 96th birthday. One of the great American lives continues to unfold. If I know Studs, the great day passed with calls and visits from friends, and the ceremonious imbibing of one (1) gin martini, very dry. I hope he has eliminated the daily cigar, but I'm not taking odds. If you don't know Studs, there are few people you can meet more easily in print. He is the greatest conversationalist I've met, the author of a shelf-full of books in which he engages people from all walks of life in thoughtful conversations about their own lives.

I met Studs very soon after I moved to Chicago. It was in the Old Town apartment of Herman and Marilu Kogan; Herman was the author and Chicago Daily News editor responsible for getting me hired at the Sun-Times. The evening was all conversation, nonstop, and all consequential: No small-talk or idle chat for these people. I felt as if I'd been put at the same table with the grown-ups.

Not long after, the (now) Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing visited Chicago. Studs knew I had read all her books while studying at the University of Cape Town, and he also knew, more importantly, that I had a car and knew how to drive. Studs has never learned how to drive; he enlisted me as chauffeur and I spent two unforgettable days observing Studs showing Lessing his own Chicago.

I have written about that day and other things Studsian in these articles:

* Doris Lessing's visit:
>http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19691015/PEOPLE/71016002/1023<

* Studs' 95th birthday celebration:
>http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070515/PEOPLE/705160301/1023<

My purpose today is not to repeat the same stories, but to tell you how the example of Studs Terkel is helping me live my own life. As you know, I've had a lot of health difficulties over the past few years. After surgery for jaw cancer, I'm told I am cancer-free. But I had operations to repair the cancer's damage, and these surgeries resulted in life-threatening situations. In recovery, I had treatment at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, was restored to health and fitness, was up and about, was even hiking in the foothills at Rancho la Puerta in Mexico. The surgeries failed to restore my ability to speak, but I was healthy and cheerful. I went back to reviewing movies on a full-time schedule.

After the latest restorative surgery in January, I was again very ill, again landed back in the R.I.C., was restored a third time, and again returned to work. To get into good shape for the Ebertfest in April, my wife and I went to the Pritikin Longevity Institute in Florida, where I've gone for 15 years or more to benefit from their wise programs. On our second day there, I tripped on a rug, fell, and broke my hip. A stupid accident that could have happened to anyone and was not related to illness. Just one of those things.

I found myself in the rehab institute a fourth time. Surely this was enough? Learning to walk after a broken hip is painful, but it must be done and I have done it. I've also returned to my full-time duties at the Sun-Times, and am pouring myself into the web site. This new blog is part of that effort.

What influence has Studs had on my life during these years? He has simply continued to live--to talk, read, keep up with the news, see movies, attend events, use e-mail, listen, visit--and write. It is melancholy fact that in the last three years Studs has visited me in the hospital more times than I have visited him. But let me tell you about visiting Studs three days after he had open-heart surgery a few years ago. I expected to find a sick man. I found Studs sitting up in bed, surrounded by books and papers, receiving friends. The author Garry Wills appeared at his door. Studs had just finished reading his new book. He was filled with questions.

In recent years Studs has had open-heart surgery, and broken his own bones ("I was walking downstairs carrying a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Don't try that after 90.") But he has never, ever, not in the slightest, degree, retired. He published Touch and Go: A Memoir in November 2007, but a memoir could never close the book on this life. In fact, it was his second memoir, after Talking to Myself. (1977).

The lesson Studs has taught me is that your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly "retire," you had a job, but not an occupation. Observing people like Studs and the author Paul Theroux, and the great sports writer William Nack, and directors like Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet, I have seen those whose lifelong occupations absorb them, and who are not merely maintaining, but growing. How astonishing it was to learn that Altman made great films after having a heart transplant! Nack, having "retired" from Sports Illustrated, has co-produced the film "Ruffian" for cable TV, based on his book about the great filly. He is an on-air talent for ESPN, and is now one of the producers of a film based on his book Secretariat: the Making of a Champion. For the first time in his life, he has an agent. His book My Turf has a story in it that has made grown people cry. I know.

Theroux continues among the great writers of fiction, and remains a voracious reader. He lives with his wife Sheila Donnelly, a travel agent, on Ohau. It makes perfect sense for him to be married to a travel agent, since Theroux arguably has seen more of this planet’s surface at ground-level than anyone else in history, and written about his adventures in famous books about travel. His wanderings continue. We met at the Hawaii Film Festival, began talking, and have kept talked ever since--about books, mostly. It is such a relief to find someone who has read widely among authors you can't discuss with anybody else. We plowed through George Gissing and on to Mrs. Gaskell. Theroux continues to be curious. Not long ago he wrote a long and much-discussed essay for the Times (of London) Literary Supplement, seriously comparing the work of Albert Camus and Georges Simenon. He thinks Simenon, the Belgian author of about 400 novels, mostly about policemen, criminal, and crime itself, deserves comparison with Camus. I agree. But that's another blog entry.

Like Studs himself, I'm free associating myself away from where I was pointed and toward where my curiosity leads me. That's how he works, too. The point is Studs. Among his books is one about this very subject: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. It became a Broadway musical. And there are The Good War: An Oral History of World War II and Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. These books set down eye-witness, first person accounts of eras in recent history that are already fading in the rear-view mirror.

One reason Terkel gets people to talk so openly with him is that he's not an academic or a cross-examiner. He comes across as this guy sitting down with you to have a good, long talk. Pick up one of his books, and now you're sitting next to the guy. You can't stop reading. Studs has an interviewing technique I admire: He combines astonishment with curiosity. He can't believe his ears. He repeats with enthusiasm what his subject just said, and the subject invariably continues and expands and wants to make his own story better. So many people have great stories, if only they could find an audience.

It's curious, how only two of Studs’ books are technically about himself, but in a way they're all about himself. Reading a novel, we may identify with one of the characters. Reading Studs, we identify with him--with the questions. Through his example, we become inquiring minds. And his subjects range widely. Look at his book Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. He provides not New Age malarkey, but real people having real thoughts about their real lives, and the inevitability of their own real deaths. Some people never articulate such thoughts to themselves, but they should, and in reading the book you are invited to turn inward and interview yourself.

Studs was married for 60 years to a beautiful woman named Ida, who stood by him in the good times (he starred on one of the first sitcoms in network history) and the bad (he lost that job because of the blacklist). He was envious that her FBI file was thicker than his own. When Ida grew older, she refused to use a cane, "because I fall so gracefully." Her death in 1999 inspired him to write Will the Circle Be Unbroken? In his introduction, he remembers her last words to him, as she was wheeled into the O.R. for heart surgery: "Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"

Studs has gotten a limitless number of people into things. I am one of them. He has taught me that if I break my other hip next week, I will simply learn to walk again, and continue do what engages me the most, which is to write about movies. Life might have taken me in many other directions, but this is the one given me, and if I stop following it, I will have lost my way.

True, after all that surgery, I still lack the power of speech. And after all those interviews, Studs is now, in his own words, "Deaf as a post." But I can still write about movies, and thanks to "a nifty little thing-a-ma-jig" device hooked to his hearing aids, Studs can still hear people and write about what they say. You hear about people retiring and then dying a month later, maybe because their life has lost its purpose for them. The lesson Studs teaches me every day is that to live is to live is to live.

Maybe even Harrison Ford was influenced by Mr. Wrong-Headed. "It's not unusual for something that is popular to be disdained by some people," he said at the press conference following the Cannes screening, "and I fully expect it." What he got was a standing ovation in the Palais des Festivals that night. The S.O. was heralded in all the coverage, even though any Cannes veteran would tell you it meant--nothing. Every film gets a standing ovation at the black-tie evening premiere at Cannes, unless it is so bad it transcends awfulness.

There are really two premieres at Cannes: The press screening at 8:30 a.m., and the black-tie, or "official," screening in the evening. Both fill the vast, 3,500-seat Lumiere auditorium. The morning offers a tough audience: Critics, festival programmers, people who have may have seen hundreds of other movies in this room. They are free with their boos, and if a movie doesn't work for them have been known to shout at the screen on their way out.

The black-tie screening, on the other hand, includes many people who have a financial motive for wanting a film to succeed: The worldwide distributors and exhibitors, their guests, and lots of Riviera locals. Or they may have been given tickets and are thrilled to be there. ("I recognized the woman sitting next to me from my hotel," Rex Red told me one year. "It was my maid.") In some cases, they may simply think it's good manners to cheer movie stars who flew all the way to Cannes. Then too, the stars are seated in the front row of the balcony. Everybody below stands up after the movie, turns around, and sees them bathed in spotlights. The Standing O creates itself.

Nevertheless, I believe the S.O. was genuine the other night. It takes a cold heart and a weary imagination to dislike an "Indiana" film with all of its rambunctious gusto. With every ounce of its massive budget, it strains to make us laugh, surprise us, go over the top with preposterous action. "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" does those things under the leadership of Spielberg, who knows as much as any man ever has about what reaches the popular imagination. The early reviewer on the web site, on the other hand, knew as little.

Spielberg at heart will always be that kid who sneaked onto the back lot at Universal and talked himself into a job. He's the kind of man who remains in many ways a boy. He likes neat stuff. He thinks it would be fun to have Indiana and friends plunge over three waterfalls, not one. He knows that we know what back projection is, and he uses it blatantly (Indy arriving in frame as if he had jumped there, while the background rolls past a little out of focus). He knows back projection feels differently that perfect digital backgrounds -- it feels more like a movie. He likes boldly-faked editing sequences: We see the heroes in medium shot at the edge of a waterfall, we see a long shot of their boat falling to what would obviously be instant oblivion below, and then he shows the heroes surfacing together and near the shore (no rapids!) and spitting out a little water. The movie isn't a throwback to the Saturday serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It's what they would have been if they could have been.

Consider another action series, the Matrix films. They're so doggedly intense and serious. They seem to think the future of the universe really is a stake. There's a role for serious action, but not when it's hurled at us in a cascade of quick-cutting and QueasyCam shots that make dramatic development impossible. Even if the they are constructed out of wall-to-wall implausibility, the Indy films have characters who aren't frantic. Harrison Ford and Spielberg are wise: They know a pumped-up Indy would seem absurd. Indiana Jones himself is so laid back he sometimes seems to be watching the movie with us. He's happy to be aboard, just as long, of course, as he can stay in the boat/truck/airplane.

But listen to the words in the screen. The people in the photographs are as puzzled as we are. They did things they might not have done under other circumstances, and yet were blindsided by this particular set of circumstances. The wisest statement in the film (however obvious) is by the prison guard Javel Davis, who says, "Pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don't see forward and you don't see backward. You don't see outside the frame." You don't see why these Americans enlisted in the military or the National Guard, you don't see their training, you don't see their experiences, you don't see how Iraq changed them. They seem to wonder about these things themselves. We look at old photos of ourselves and wonder why we ever wore that shirt, or combed our hair that way. When did I stop using Brylcreem? Why was I that person?> Still more does Lynndie England wonder how, at 20, she found herself in photographs from Abu Ghraib, pointing to a man forced (not by herself) to masturbate.

I'm not sure I agree with Morris that the Americans in the photos are even "bad apples." The one who does deserve that description seems to be Charles Graner (not allowed to be interviewed for the movie), who England believes deceived and manipulated her, and held the camera for a lot of the photos, and instructed the others in their poses. The others may not have been bad apples but good ones left to spoil too long in the sun of the war in Iraq.

Morris is correct; there is no rule that says he may not simply listen to them speaking. His chief occupation has always been to listen. Perhaps that's why Robert McNamara choose to be interviewed by him; you might think McNamara would go instead for someone like Ken Burns. In his Oscar-winning "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" (2003), Morris freely used montages and newsreel footage and all sorts of visual material to illustrate McNamara's words, but McNamara didn't squawk, and I think the visuals were fair enough. In "SOP," on the other hand, although Morris does use some reenactments, all his visuals are based on what might have been seen in that place, at that time.

There is a tradition for films, especially documentaries, that propose merely to look and listen. That seems to be the case with Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North." On the other hand, no one would think of Leni Riefenstahl’s "Triumph of the Will" as merely looking and listening. We now know, however, that "Nanook" was largely scripted, the locations were constructed, and the film represented a distillation of Flaherty's ideas about the Inuit people. No less was "Triumph" a distillation of Riefenstahl's ideas about the Third Reich, staged and filmed with the resources of the Reich at her disposal. The idea of a purely objective documentary is largely a fantasy, but "SOP" is objective in that it shows these people questioning their own lives and behavior, and offers no answers.

"The ultimate mystery is people," Morris writes. Yes. That helps explain a kind of film I instinctively admire: A film that examines human behavior in minute detail and infinite curiosity, and offers no conventional story structure to "explain" it. Consider "The Son" ("L'Enfant, 2002), the Cannes winner by the Dardennes brothers. Why is this carpenter instantly so fascinated by the apprentice who has been brought into his shop? Why does he leap onto a cabinet to get a better look at him? Why does he care? The young man has certainly never seen him before. It is their shared mystery that fascinates me, not anything else. And the mystery of Abu Ghraib. And the mysteries that fascinate McNamara, such as that some of the bombing raids against Japan that he participated in might have been considered war crimes if the Japanese had won. Why do we do the things that we do? Must we? Do we have a choice? There is no answer, but the question itself asserts our nature as human beings.

Twisters don't twist only at the end. They pull one rug from another out from under our feet, until we're astonished by how many rugs we were standing on. Sometimes it's almost impossible to keep all the versions of reality straight. Sometimes it's a futile exercise, because we realize the film could continue indefinitely. But when a Twister is in the hands of a master like Mamet, it can be devilish and ingenious.

Mamet's first film, the great "House of Games," kept surprising us with the unfolding levels of its con. He's fascinated by con games, and loves to use them in his films and plays. In most of his films, you'll see a saturnine, bearded actor named Ricky Jay, one of his friends, who is a consultant on magic and cons. Jay played one of the poker players in "House of Games," and is the pay-for-view TV promoter in "Redbelt." Mamet even produced a night of Jay's magic, off-Broadway, during which Jay performed the non-Mametian trick of throwing cards at a watermelon so hard they sliced into them.

After the show I went backstage to meet the magician, and was told, "Actually, this isn't the first time we've met. We met in college. You published something by me in a little magazine you edited."

"I don't remember you," I confessed.

"Don't let the name throw you off," he said. "I wasn't named Ricky Jay then."

"What was your name?"

"That, my friend, you will never know."

A nice touch. A nicer one is that in searching Jay's various biographies, I could find no mention of him having attended the University of Illinois. You see how it works. But of course it wasn't mentioned, you say, because he attended under another name. Yes, but he would have known where he went to college. Perhaps he made up his biography. Why? That, my friends, we will never know.

The difference between "House of Games" and "Redbelt" helps define two kinds of Twisters. In "House of Game," the other characters are in on the con, and Lindsay Crouse, their quarry, represents the film's point of view. In "Redbelt," while the manager of the martial arts studio (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the quarry, he becomes a victim on more than one level, and it's hard to see how everyone else could have been in on it, even after some awkward exposition. In every Twister, the audience, by necessity, is kept on the outside, but in some of them, the film itself seems to be the confidence game.

The exposition I was referring to comes when the studio owner bluntly asks how something happened, and is bluntly given the answer. It feels so awkward I almost think Mamet stuck it in after even he found the film hard to follow. Reminds me of the story about the Roger Corman film that made no sense. Two bit actors were brought back to stand in front of a backdrop. One asked, “What does this all mean?" and the other told him. Of course in a Twister, it need not mean, but be.

I suggested a backstage film that had empathy for the Clintons. It wouldn't involve whether you agreed with them or not, but would center on how these two people, in private, deal with one another and the campaign hell they live in. I imagined weary scenes set late at night in anonymous hotel rooms. The ways they dealt with one piece of bad news after another. The reasons and ways they had to persist in the face of discouragement. I mentioned Stephen Frears' film "The Queen" (2006) as a possible model.

Why the Clintons and not the Obamas? Quite simply, because their story is more interesting. It has a longer history, and apparently a bleaker outcome. They seem to be losing the primary season, and have seemed so for several months, and they have both been running for something, win or lose, for most of their adult lives. To face this ultimate defeat, at the end of the most punishing primary campaign in American history, must be an ultimate test of their relationship, and what makes them persist in the face of discouragement. I wrote:

"Hillary wanted to win, and she ran and ran and ran until there was a kind of heroism to it. Futile heroism after a point, but that's where the story lies."

Some careless readers thought I was referring to Hillary as heroic. Others argued that she could not be, for one political reason after another. Still more somehow extracted from the essay a defense of Hillary, or an endorsement. But the fact is, I envisioned a movie about the Clintons, not for or against them.

My mail from readers has often assumed that by writing about something, I am endorsing it. Every new documentary about Iraq, for example, inspires a flood of e-mail to the Answer Man. My political views on Bush and Iraq are well known, and I sometimes express them in reviews, but such a documentary's greatest interest is not in what it thinks about the war, but what it brings to the table.

Consider Errol Morris's recent doc "Standard Operating Procedures."

Its content centers on the infamous photographs of torture at Abu Ghirab. It interviews many of the American soldiers involved in taking them. That's it. In plain daylight, the film is about why we take photos, how we look at them, why those particular photographs were taken, how they looked to the soldiers at the time, and how they look now. Its political feelings about the war are never stated. Of course it's implied that the soldiers intensely regret the photos and the military culture that gave birth to their jobs as prison guards, but there is no suggestion they did not support the war in general, or that they were not proud to be serving in uniform.

Yet many of my correspondents needed only to see the subject of the review to denounce the movie, and me, as left-wing, anti-war, biased, and so on. I tried in the review to say the movie was about viewing and thinking about the photos, and wondering what the soldiers and the prisoners were thinking and feeling, and asking why they had been posed in the way we were. One of the Marines in the film states, wisely and clearly, that a photo doesn't tell you what happened before or after it was taken. I think Morris makes it clear that the events depicted, with the human pyramids and dog collars and so on, would never have taken place if a camera had not been present. So the film is about the photographs, and not about the war, Bush, or anything else.

It's the same, really, about movies about anything. It should be possible to admire a film with subject matter you deplore, or positions you despise. The critic can make that clear in a review, but he should acknowledge the qualities of the film. The acid test is Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." It belongs in my Great Movies Collection, but I've put off reviewing it for years.

I'm sure there will be documentaries. In the age of the video camera, there cannot be a public moment that went unrecorded. But I'm thinking of a fiction film. What would the angle be? Like most people I know, the primary went on long past my ability to care about it on a daily basis. It must have been a species of torture for the anchors at CNN, who seemed caught in a "Groundhog Day" loop, with the conclusion of each state election sliding relentlessly into the start of the next, while "panels" of talking heads were badgered to extract meaning when there was only pattern. If CNN had "the best political team on television," would it age and wither before the general election?

But where is the story? Hearing for the first time notes of exhaustion and discouragement in Clinton's voice, I wondered what it had been like for her, month after month, state after state, pumping out the same policies, the same optimism, while she was running on empty. Hotel after hotel, early morning show after late-night show, schools, union meetings, church events, potluck dinners, being introduced by the local clone of the Chairman of Today's Event. For Obama, it was the same, with the difference that for most of the time he seemed to be winning, which must have been a consolation.

The problem with a screenplay based on these events is that there would be a merciless sameness. Where is the drama in the story of a game of 48 innings? Each mini-climax, from "Hillary's tears" to the Rev. Wright's display at the National Press Club, was hopefully examined to see if it might "change the direction of the campaign," and it never did, it only prolonged the suffering of that day's CNN "panel." When Wolf Blitzer got out of bed in the morning, were his hand and arm already extended, so that the clipboard had only to be inserted by an aide?

The ideal primary movie was Warren Beatty's "Bulworth" (1998). There were other good films too, like Mike Nichols' "Primary Colors," (1998) based on a roman a clef about Hillary and Bill. Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog" (1987), involved Clintonesque moments, had a screenplay by David Mamet, gave a phrase to the language, and was the best of the lot. But "Bulworth" was the ideal, because it had a cut-off point made of drama, not election days. Beatty plays a candidate sick onto death of uttering the same cliches. He takes out a contract on his own life, assuring that he will be assassinated in three days. That gives him the freedom to say exactly what's on his mind--what he, and any sensible person, might be thinking while pretending to believe their own platitudes.

That gave you suspense, comedy, some poignant private moments, and even a possible romance (with the newcomer Halle Berry). It was about transgression, not repetition. But the primary campaign that's now concluding has been a Groundhog loop, with no cut-off except for a victory, at which point the contest itself becomes yesterday's news.

The commentators Tuesday night spoke of Hillary's tired voice and Bill's dejected body language as if describing the malfunctions of robots. To me, it was humanizing material, like the time Hillary shed those tears. And a few days earlier Bill came close to the truth-telling of Bulworth when he told an audience, "I haven't come to ask you to vote for my wife, I've come to ask you to pray for her."

Considering those moments of insight, I thought of another movie that might provide a model for a possible film: "The Queen" (2006). What fascinated me about that film was its uncanny credibility. I could imagine Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip sharing their private time much like the characters in the film, with honesty and realism, with exasperation and impatience, carefully modulated to preserve the stability of a long marriage. Even the verbal shorthand was right. These people have been over this ground so many times, they share the same reference points.

Hillary and Bill are both intelligent, experienced political creatures. They've both been running for something since grade school. They are fueled by the desire for high office and public recognition, but fueled also by the process itself. They're good at it. Considering their apparent depression on Tuesday night I realized that, yes, as late as that, they really did still think Hillary could win, even after the CNN "panels" were running out of ways to say farewell. They believed it right up to the end, because they had to, they needed to, in order to keep on running at all.

Yet there must have been private moments of despair. The two realists, as able as anyone to read the trends, must have spoken privately about their shrinking options. And on Tuesday night, as Hillary's double-digit lead in Indiana dwindled to very small single digits, there must have come a time when one of them said, "We've lost this thing."

What were those moments like? What kept them going between themselves? Did they encourage one another, or was there an unspoken pact not to voice the unspeakable? Was there blame when Bill had one of his unwise moments? Did their shared past, of success and scandal, enter into it, or were they absorbed in this moment?

In answering those questions, there you would find the movie. It would be more introspective than audiences would probably prefer, and less sensational. Smarter, too. There would be a limited budget, because you wouldn't need a stadium filled with thousands of people so much as you'd need lots of lonely hotel rooms after midnight. The climaxes would come as one old comrade after another abandoned them for the Obama camp. There would be a desperate, clinging love that had survived all the years, because it was based on shared experience and memories and goals, not so much any longer on passion.

It would be a sad story, but a true one, and it might contain more truth than political movies are conventionally allowed to have. It might, like "Bulworth," say forbidden things. And issues would not be at issue: The campaign was not about political positions, but about sheer desire. Hillary wanted to win, and she ran and ran and ran until there was a kind of heroism to it. Futile heroism after a point, but that's where the story lies.

Example: Harmony Korine's new film, "Mister Lonely." It gets a 50 at Metacritic, but high praise from Don R. Lewis at Film Threat. I understand that. I was one of very few critics who admired Korine's "julien donkey-boy." In that case I think I responded to the total freedom he granted himself to impose audacious and extreme characters and situations upon us. A lot of people were not willing to take the ride, and I understand them. Another example, close to my heart: It is almost impossible for Werner Herzog to make a film I dislike, but not everybody agrees. I have determined that he is the most creative source of new and visionary imagery in the movies, and I've seen nothing to change that opinion.

The average moviegoer doesn't care about the treasured personal inclinations of a critic on a particular peculiar film. The average moviegoer just wants to walk in, get his movie, and go home. I remember when the Spudnut Shop opened on campus. My friend Paul Tyner went to work there, and noticed a sign behind the counter: "No reading!" He asked the owner what that was about. "I have 18 stools at my counter," the guy said, "Some guy could come in and start reading some book and never stop. My motto is, get 'em in, give em' their Spuddies, and get 'em out again."

That is also Hollywood's motive, although they don't care if the Spuddies are studded with nails, as long as people buy them. But there are always some moviegoers who are excited by the experience of the surprising and the new, and realize a film is reaching them in a personal way. Consider the response to my mention of "Joe vs. the Volcano" a week or so ago. I got a lot of comments from readers who have, like me, treasured that rejected and forgotten film for years. One family watches it annually. When I praised the film, I suppose I was writing for those specific readers, although I didn't know it.

Remember that most critics write without benefit of hindsight. The Tomatometer has not yet run up its totals when they review a new film, and they may be astonished to find themelves in a minority of one. They 're not running against the herd because the herd has not yet formed. They are offering an opinion that, it turns out, will be the exception to the rule. When you find a review like that, think about it. Few of us have a desire to see the same damned thing over and again, but Hollywood is never happier than when supplying it. A minority opinion (better still, a majority of critics "surprised," or, one of my favorite words, "blindsided" by a film) are urgently trying to tell you something. And for you, they may be right.

Final example. My review of "Beowulf" was largely alone in the field; I thought it was brilliant, and I thought it was intended not just as action and fantasy spectacle, but as bawdy, audacious humor. Hardly anyone agreed. But the co-writer Roger Avary wrote me that, indeed, it was written as an over-the-top comedy, and he thought it worked that way. See it in that light, and you may see a different movie. Your particular sensibility may discover gold that otherwise washes away in the flood.