Based on Daniel Wallace's book "Big Fish: A Novel Of Mythic Proportions," it costars Ewan MacGregor and Albert Finney as younger and older versions of the same character -- Edward Bloom, an Alabama salesman and incorrigible spinner of tall tales.

The present-tense setup is that Finney is on his death bed, but while there's still time his son, William (Billy Crudup), flies in from Paris with his pregnant wife (Marion Cotillard) in order to find out who Finney really is/was, without the horseshit embroidery to cloud his vision.

The audience learns of Finney/MacGregor's supposed past by being shown dramatizations of his biggest whoppers -- the same tales William has been fed repeatedly since he was old enough to talk. Edward was a travelling salesman most of his life, often days away from home, and his journeys throughout the rural South provide the backdrop of said tales.

The emotional payoff doesn't kick in until 10 or 12 minutes before the end, but as we all learned in film school the holding of good cards until the last minute makes for a very strong finale.

Jim Cameron working the same strategy on TITANIC made all the difference -- it transformed an eye-filling, big-canvas action spectacle that rated maybe a 7.5 or an 8 into a first-rate chick flick that broke the meter.

The costars are Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Danny DeVito, Helena Bonham Carter and Steve Buscemi. The screenplay adaptation is by John August (GO). The producers are Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (AMERICAN BEAUTY) along with Richard Zanuck (ROAD TO PERDITION). Steven Spielberg was going to direct before he bailed and moved over to CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. (Good thing. He might have smothered BIG FISH in his usual goo.)

BIG FISH says that the hard facts and blunt truths about a person's life don't matter as much as their spiritual lives -- that sometimes a person's dreams and creations and yearnings count a whole lot more than whether they mowed their front lawn every Saturday or changed the baby's diapers.

To the world, at least. The family...well, sometimes they get the short end of the stick.

I see BIG FISH as a metaphor for the inner life of any artist who relies upon his/her imaginings in order to really live and breathe. The film says that the stuff born in the head of such a person is as "real" as anything else, and that you can't know that person until you let their pipe dreams into your own system. Is there a bigger alternate-reality guy in Hollywood than Burton? This is obviously self-portraiture.

Shot on location in Wetumpka, Alabama (somewhere near Montgomery), BIG FISH cost about $70 million -- and looks it.

Not Sure I Belong

There's an amusing piece by David Chute and Mark Horowitz in this month's issue of MEN'S JOURNAL about the "50 Best Guy Movies." An intro and the first ten choices are readable on the mag's website (www.mensjournal.com). There are two versions of the cover -- Kid Rock is on the newsstand version, and Clint-Eastwood-as-Dirty-Harry is on the special Blockbuster edition.

DIRTY HARRY is the #1 choice -- not my idea of a great guy flick by a long shot. (The killer played by Andy Robinson is way too fiendish and excessive, and the movie itself is only so-so.)

It mentions the usual-usuals (SCARFACE, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, THE HUSTLER, THE GREAT ESCAPE, FULL METAL JACKET, et. al.), and they're all fine...but what is a guy flick, exactly?

I'm not sure I even like the idea of gender-sensitive movies. Guy flicks, chick flicks...I prefer the general human condition thing.

But as long as we're talking XY chromosones, what about ROMPER STOMPER, SPARTACUS, THIS SPORTING LIFE, PATHS OF GLORY, RED RIVER, THE LIMEY, DR. STRANGELOVE, the first half of THE GUNS OF NAVARONE...? Forget it, I could go on for hours.

"We believe that a true guy movie is a movie only a guy can love," the piece begins. "Pop one into the DVD player and your wife or girlfriend should run screaming from the room. We frown upon films that are too serious or sensitive. THE DEER HUNTER got KO'd despite lengthy elk hunting and torture scenes because Meryl Streep was in it. Sure, she's a great actress, but rules are rules: no films with Meryl Streep."

That's THE HOURS talking. Meryl Streep ruled all through the '80s and into the early '90s, and she wailed in ADAPTATION. If you're gonna say "no" to an actress across the board, choose someone less major.

"Guy films can be watched in groups, over and over, and you should be able to recite yards of dialogue from memory," it goes on. "Great lines stick in your mind forever, like old pop songs, and when you blurt one of them in public ('Say hello to my leetle friend!.' 'Don't ever take sides with anybody against the family again'), women and children should give you odd looks, while other guys -- total strangers -- glance over and nod with respect and understanding."

I hear that, except I also like to repeat lines from GONE WITH THE WIND, 12 ANGRY MEN and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES ("You know how it'll be, don't you, Peggy? We'll have to work, scrape...get kicked around"). I guess that makes me a metrosexual or something.

There's a wrongo in the copy about THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (#48). It says that the key scene is when "[William] Holden blows the bridge." Holden doesn't blow the bridge -- Alec Guiness does. The why and whatsis of that last final move is the film's most fascinating question mark.

I don't agree that the best line in THE FRENCH CONNECTION is "All right, Popeye's here." I prefer Roy Scheider's line as he looks over at Tony Lobianco in the center of a big table of presumed perps and drug dealers at the Chez, and says, "He's throwing it around like the Russians are in Jersey."

And "we blew it" isn't the best line from EASY RIDER -- again, it's just the most quoted one. The best is Nicholson's just after he gets out of jail. He takes out a pint, opens it and just before guzzling, says, "Well, here's to ole D.H. Lawrence....nyick, nyick, nyick!"

The second best (or at the least the second most memorable, in part because of its '60s clunkiness) comes when Peter Fonda's "Wyatt" acknowledges the transitory nature of existence by saying, "I'm hip about time."

Analysis of a Meltdown

Last Friday Slate posted a piece by Matt Feeney explaining why the last two MATRIX movies blew chunks and why the whole franchise has now irretrievably gone south.

It's understood, of course, that the $200-million earned around the world by REVOLUTIONS during its first five days of exposure means absolutely nothing because of the crippling role it played in devaluing the MATRIX series in the hearts and minds of those who got and celebrated the original film when it opened in March '99.

Feeney, if you ask me, has summed up the basic ailment better than anyone or anything else, including the brilliant analysis provided by the L.A. TIMES' Manohla Dargis in her opening-day review.

Here's a portion of what he wrote -- I've added boldface here and there for emphasis. I'm urging everyone to go to Slate and read the piece in its entirety, although the essence of the thesis is that the Wachowski's, for whatever Godforsaken reason, picked up a revolver and deliberately fired right into the heart of the MATRIX mystique.

"The good news is that the conclusion of the MATRIX trilogy, THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, is not quite as terrible as THE MATRIX RELOADED. RELOADED was downright infuriating, with its portentous monologues and willful rejection of narrative coherence. REVOLUTIONS, as a thudding sci-fi war movie, is merely disorienting and unfathomable. From the standpoint of the original it is profoundly disappointing, but it does have its own romantic and martial intensity.

"The bad news is that that, in tandem with RELOADED, it achieves a kind of cumulative badness that will permanently and unfairly stain the reputation of the original. How did something so good go so wrong?

"It seems that, in conceiving their pair of sequels to THE MATRIX, the writing and directing team of Andy and Larry Wachowski overestimated the profundity of the original's philosophical musings. The resulting ponderousness might have been excusable, except that they disastrously misidentified which of those musings was most important to the original -- namely, the Matrix itself.

In the sequels, the Wachowskis ditched the conceit of the Matrix, the computer program in which all of humanity, save for a few thousand enlightened souls inhabiting an underground city called Zion, is unwittingly trapped.

"That, in turn, removed virtually everything distinctive and meaningful about the original film -- its hipster skepticism, its strangely compelling logic of human striving, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the storytelling discipline that imposed a gorgeous economy on almost every scene. THE MATRIX, it turns out, is nothing without the Matrix.

"The Matrix -- the concept that most of the human race was living in a virtual dream-state, awaiting deliverance from a rag-tag gang of hackers and visionaries -- is an extremely fertile dramatic device.

"It is the question that Neo had to answer and the obstacle he had to overcome. It is the cosmic basis for both early-Neo's groggy alienation and late-Neo's unique brand of whoop-ass. It provides a narrative structure in which some giddily convincing sci-fi pathos emerge: paranoia, dread, existential bravery, transcendent romance. It affords plausible-enough background explanation for some of the most inventive, deftly realized action sequences ever shot. And it offers a pleasing pretext for draping this whole cluster of effects in really cool clothes.

"But what it doesn't provide -- and what, until the sequels, I didn't think it pretended to provide --was philosophical insight. It seemed fitting that, by way of signaling their philosophical influences in the original, the Wachowskis had Neo pulling from a shelf not Plato's "Republic" nor Descartes' "Meditations," Western philosophy's signal treatments of the appearance/reality problem, but "Simulacra and Simulations" by Jean Baudrillard.

"Baudrillard is the French postmodernist who comes closest to the stony spirit (and the philosophical sophistication) of the freshman dorm: "Dude, what if this all isn't, like, really reality, but instead it's, like, a simulation of reality?"

"But in the sequels the Wachowskis drop the enduring but pleasingly simple appearance/reality problem, which is where the MATRIX's real buzz comes from. They instead treat Morpheus' incoherent and New Agey murmurings about Fate as the central issue, which is a real buzz-kill.

"This is boring enough, but worse is that, with Fate displacing Reality as the central pseudo-philosophical issue, the Matrix loses its central place in THE MATRIX. Though Neo and his crew continue to nose around the nooks and crannies of the Matrix's program, both sequels ignore the fate of people still trapped. We no longer get to participate in the giddy, awful process of enlightenment and emancipation, and the fragile semblance of logic that drew from the original's tidy dualism totally collapses.

"RELOADED signals its abandonment of even the pretense of coherence when Neo, head bowed and hand extended in the stance of a Pentecostal faith healer, stops several real-world machines in their tracks. By this time, the audience's response is, 'Ah, what the hell. Why not?'

"The Fate we're supposed to care about is, alas, that of gloomy Zion, where Jada Pinkett Smith sets the tone with her scowl. Much of the action in Zion consists of legislative hearings held by ponderous middle-aged counselors dressed not in snazzy leather but in canvas smocks. (Cornel West, the poster boy for dreary academism, plays one of them.) This lends the proceedings a neo-medieval vibe that is totally out of keeping with the original MATRIX but weirdly, grimly familiar from other sci-fi franchises.

"The Wachowski brothers, moved by some inscrutable nerd-muse, apparently decided that the one glaring flaw of the original MATRIX, besides the whole superfluous Matrix thing, was that it didn't feel enough like STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF KHAN."

Miss Ya, Ray

"Where the hell did Michael Keaton go?

"I know he was in HBO's LIVE IN BAGHDAD and has shown his face briefly here and there, but what the hell happened? I was always a fan of his work, thought he was the best Batman by far, loved him in comedies and thought he had a lot more to offer us moviegoing folk.

"As I remember you writing a few years back, you loved him in JACKIE BROWN as Ray Nicolette and wanted to see this character expanded upon. I couldn't agree more. But that role seemed to be his last higher profile gig.

"Maybe the downfall was him starring as a CGI-Snowman in JACK FROST. The trailer for which is still etched in the annals of my memory under 'things I'd like to forget,' alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn as a pregnant man in JUNIOR. I remember the big FROST sell line was his son saying to him, 'You tha man! and CGI-Snow-Keaton responding, "No, I'm tha snow-man!'" -- Tim Slowikowski, Chicago, IL.

Wells to Slowikowski: Most of you probably recall Keaton's character of Ray Nicolette, the not-terribly-bright FBI agent who figured in the plots of both OUT OF SIGHT and JACKIE BROWN.

The Nicolette character always struck me as distinctive and even novel in a quietly funny, ploddingly clunky way -- a lawman who's honest and does what he can to put the bad guys behind bars, but never quite manages to figure all the angles and is always behind the eight ball. We all screw up and miss the point on a semi-regular basis. Ray Nicolette is us. I would go so far as to call myself the Ray Nicolette of movie columnists.

Anyway, Keaton nailed this guy perfectly in those two films, and would kill if he had a chance to play Ray on a regular basis. An HBO series called RAY would be sublime, in my view, and an ideal way to re-ignite Keaton's career. I wouldn't' hesistate to pay extra on my monthly cable bill to see it...but it hasn't happened.

Keaton is in two upcoming features - FIRST DAUGHTER (20th Century Fox, January 9), a romantic comedy opposite Katei Holmes which he plays the First Dad, and WHITE NOISE, a British-produced thriller in a quasi-DRAGONFLY vein about a guy haunted by the ghost of his dead wife.

If Only...

"I don't hate romantic comedies when there are actors that I care about doing the bit. That's why I went with my girlfriend to see LOVE ACTUALLY at a preview last week. The cast looked incredible, and Hugh Grant is still riding high in my book from ABOUT A BOY. But this film just made me angry. It's even more trite than most of the genre because no one told Curtis to edit his script. It's like a highlight reel from a romantic comedy without the meat of the real character moments. How many times can you see two people have their big kiss at the end?

"The Colin Firth and Liam Neeson parts felt like nice little short films, but other plotlines felt unresolved, and in a Richard Curtis film that's tantamount to treason. In the Keira Knightley subplot, Curtis is trying to make us root for a guy who doing something despicable, but there's no time to show the devastation he's inflicting on his friend, so we're supposed to forget his betrayal and root for him. (Huh?) The problem is that with all that talent, it should have been great, and it's only mediocre. What a missed opportunity." -- Cary Brothers

Matrix Blew Too

"Most of the people saying that MATRIX RELOADED and -- now -- REVOLUTIONS suck are forgetting where the series came from to begin with. Cheesy death scenes? Neo getting shot repeatedly, only to revived by Trinity's kiss wasn't cheesy? A longwinded speech from the Architect? What's so dissimilar between that and Morpheus' speech to Neo within the training construct?

"The first MATRIX seems to have been so popular because people could have seen it as an independent film. Yeah, it was a Warner Brothers production, but most people viewed it as smarter than any other Hollywood film. It dealt with abstract philosophy that most viewers were unfamiliar with and as such came across as a mind-blowing experience. The truth was that the story was just there to give them an excuse for special effects.

"RELOADED and REVOLUTIONS aren't departures from the intelligence and freshness of the original. They're continuations of the hokey sci-fi actionfest that the original was. Those of us that were able to appreciate the first one for the effects picture it was and not give too much importance to the self-important story have enjoyed the sequels since they're exactly what we expected going into them." -- Rev. Paul "The Masked Debater" Trampe

"Thanks for continually providing me with the only film journalism/opinion column that I 99% agree with. I don't know if that matters to you or not, but I'm grateful for the meaningful distraction during the work day.

"Briefly, and at the risk of beating a dead dog, I agree with just about all the feedback on REVOLUTIONS. It saddened me that I got so bored during the battle scenes that my mind went on a tangent about how else they could beat the machines, besides firing ammunition.

Doesn't water usually short out most electrical gizmos? If Zion had conserved enough water to have a sprinkler system, we would have been spared however-many-minutes of humdrum battling in the ugly depths of the world. Unless of course there's some tweak in the Matrix philosophy where machines are water proof because of...oh, who the hell cares anymore?

All I know is at least one of the Wachowskis arrived at a major revelation during the making of the last two movies -- it's more fun to be a girl." -- Dezhda Mountz, citizenrobot.com.

Told Me So

"Dude, I don't wanna sound cocky or anything (I mean, I am, but I don't want to sound like it... oops, failed) but I told you something like two or three months ago that THE MISSING was missing from you radar (feeling funny today).

"You ought to give me some tiny bit of credit for that, and the fact that I came up with the idea of summarizing a year not yet passed, and I will be an oh-so-happy little amateur.

"All that's missing will be Ben Kingsley winning a Best Actor Oscar, WHALE RIDER winning Best something or other, and you cancelling out BIG FISH from the top spot of your Oscar Balloon 'cause it doesn't have a chance, man. Danny De Vito's in it, and he's a cursed performer as good as any, and it looks too weird and fluffy. I love Tim Burton, but if they're gonna award a fantasy film this year it'll be RETURN OF THE KING.

"As for what else might win Best Picture...fuck do I know? I live in Sweden, dude. I haven't seen a single one of the films you're talking about. It takes half a year for one those fuckers to get over here to our arctic wasteland. By the time they've arrived, the awards ceremony has long swished by. Who cares, anyway? I just read that in the NEW YORK TIMES that the Oscars are passe. " -- Nicolas Kockum