Caeaucescu had a seemingly solid grip on things that year and few Roumanians dared to think negative thoughts about him, even in their sleep, but in December 1989 this hawk-eyed, dogmatic little fiend and his wife were de-throned and machine-gunned to death.

It just shows that the powerful are never as powerful as they seem. Any big shot can be taken down. And if you think comparing Lopez to Ceaucescu is a weird analogy you're not reading the writing on the wall.

Take out the cultured women from inherited wealth with degrees in English literature who love everything she does, and this death-to-J.-Lo thing is fairly widespread, as far as I can tell. But what do I know?

So I'm asking. Am I part of a relatively small disgruntled cabal or in the company of tens of thousands of good, caring people in confessing to a deep dislike of this over-pampered Bronx belly-button? I'm not just asking readers but industry watchers whose job it is to study the mercury.

It's not just the diva thing or her bizarre relationships or her GIGLI performance or her agreeably speedy jog-through in JERSEY GIRL. It's all this coagulating into something that feels odious, almost ogre-ish. It's weird, but Lopez doesn't even register, for me, on a hottie level, and I'm generally susceptible to this.

This feeling runs so deep (and I admit it's not healthy, let alone interesting, to just sit here and rant about this) that I don't even want to see her next two films, both due from Miramax later this year -- SHALL WE DANCE? and AN UNFINISHED LIFE.

SHALL WE DANCE? (October 4th), directed by Peter Chelsom (TOWN AND COUNTRY) and costarring Richard Gere, is based on Masayuki Suo's much-loved Japanese romantic drama, which was released in Japan in '96 and in the U.S. a year later.

Like the original, it's about a dull middle-aged accountant (Gere) whose spirit and his marriage (to Susan Sarandon, in this instance) are revived by his taking dance lessons. Lopez plays the dance teacher.

The online trailer makes it appear harmless enough. I don't have a conceptual case against this film. For all I know it'll be fine. I just can't figure a way around her .

Lasse Hallstrom's AN UNFINISHED LIFE (December 24th) costars Lopez, Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Josh Lucas. It's one of those deep-rooted-animosity-
warms-into-begrudging-respect-and-then-love adult dramas.

Lopez is the widowed daughter-in-law of Redford's aging Wyoming cowboy, who blames her for his son's death in a car crash. But Lopez and her daughter are looking to get away from an abusive boyfriend and need a place to live so they wind up flopping on Redford's ranch...and you know the rest.

Oddly, curiously, Lucas doesn't play the abusive boyfriend. (He usually plays fiends and monsters, right?) Freeman plays Redford's best bud in a dynamic that recalls, according to a research-screening viewer, his relationship with Clint Eastwood in UNFORGIVEN. There's another intriguing performance given by a bear, apparently.

I'm not looking forward to seeing Lopez in MONSTER IN LAW either. The upcoming New Line comedy is basically MEET THE PARENTS with Jane Fonda in the Robert De Niro role, although not with Lopez as a female Ben Stiller. She plays Fonda's daughter (i.e., the Teri Polo role).

Part of my animus is that I've never detected great bolts of intelligence radiating from Lopez's performances. Except when she played Karen Sisco in OUT OF SIGHT, that is. I guess that's the Soderbergh factor.

I've never forgotten a story Owen Wilson told me about the shooting of ANACONDA, in which he costarred with Lopez and Jon Voight.

He said that the whole cast figured out early on that the only respectable strategy was to convey to the audience that they know the film is a goof and a hoot by making their performances as insincere as possible. He said Lopez was the only person in the film who didn't seem to get this, and that she played her scenes more or less like she was doing LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT.

I suppose deep down I've never gotten over her déclassé behavior in London in February '03, as reported when Lopez was there to do publicity for MAID IN MANHATTAN.

All the papers said she arrived with an entourage of 35. According to one account, she shelled out 12,000 pounds per night to put them all up at London's Metropolitan Hotel. Another report claimed that Team Lopez occupied 14 suites at the Metropolitan at a cost at 2,000 pounds nightly.

For a single lunch at the Dorchester Hotel, according to one of the cheesier tabloids, Lopez and her entourage were driven two or three hundred yards -- a block, roughly -- in four Mercedes Benz limos and two Chrysler people carriers, which were rented at a cost of 16,000 pounds.

I'd like to get past all this and just respond to her two Miramax films on their own terms when they start showing in the early fall. If anyone's seen either one and has a thing or two to share about her performances (or the films themselves), please do.

Shut Out

I tried to catch a screening of THE STEPFORD WIVES (known here as ET L'HOMME CREA LA FEMME), but the Paris-based distributor, UIP, told me they don't have a sub-titled print to show. That's too bad, but there are plenty of people in the States beating up on this thing, so I don't know what I could add at this stage from here.

You all know the story, or have heard fragments. It's supposedly a tweener, a feathered fish, overly messed with, etc. But don't let this stop you from going.

WIVES (Paramount, opening 6.11) is a $90 million pseudo-comic remake of the original 1975 chiller, based on the Ira Levin thriller, about a scheme by middle-aged husbands to turn their independent-minded wives into breathy sex-bunny robots.

(I never bought into the robot deal, which required that the husbands murder their wives, for God's sake. Why couldn't Levin have come up with some kind of brain-implant, personality-control plot of some kind?)

It stars Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken and Glenn Close. It was directed by Frank Oz (a.k.a., "Miss Piggy," as Marlon Brando once famously called him) and produced by Scott Rudin.

But according to Nancy Griffin's NEW YORK TIMES piece that ran last Sunday, WIVES "has been one of [Paramount Pictures'] most troubled projects in years." Shooting went over schedule by two months and was plagued by contention between Oz and the actors, and "has been in Hollywood's version of intensive care, undergoing a protracted series of test screenings interspersed with editing-room surgeries," said Griffin.

A month ago Oz and Rudin "were shooting new scenes -- inserts and an epilogue -- in New York," Griffin reported.

I guess I'll have to wait until I'm back in L.A. next Monday, the 14th, to see it. If anyone manages a peek before Friday and wants to send in a reaction, I'll run it....probably.

Brillo Pad Head

[Warning: portions of this article are copied from a piece I ran last January during the Sundance Film Festival. Okay, I'm lazy...but I couldn't see any way to improve what I wrote before.]

The moment of truth for Jared Hess's NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (Fox Searchlight, June 11th) is about to hit. Will the quirkiest, most original and most crowd-friendly "little movie" of last January's Sundance Film Festival find an audience of some size...or will it just fizzle off?

I'm sorry I said that, but that's how it comes out sometimes when you're trying to sound like a tough guy. The personal, emotional truth is that I'd love to see this film take off. I love the quirky, formalized Midwestern weirdness of it, and I have a suspicion others will too. Especially among the under-30s.

The script, co-written by director Hess and his wife Jerusha, is an absurdist comedy about the cold horror of teenage life in a tiny Idaho town. What works about it is the exceedingly dry, deadpan style of humor.

It's not a "sensitive" movie about alienation, thank God, but it is about a kid who's burrowed himself so deeply in a nihilist perception of life, in which everything he sees or hears is anguishing or appalling or otherwise intolerable, that he's barely able to function.

The story is about this kid, called Napoleon Dynamite, taking steps to feel less lonely. It's really not any deeper than that. He gets to know a kindly withdrawn girl who's just as awkward and wacked in her own way as he is in his, and he helps out another withdrawn kid named Pedro in his campaign to run for class president.

Like I said last January, DYNAMITE seems to speak to the dweeb inside us all. I don't know how many times I've seen a movie about a weird high-school kid who turns out to be cooler and more valued than all the jock-minded dickheads who disdain or persecute him, but that's not the thing.

There's not much in the way of conventional dramatic buildup or payoff -- it's pretty much just a series of bizarre comic vignettes. On one level it's a modest, emotionally limited film, and yet it gradually builds and pays off in ways that feel warm and tickly, like a cool little ROCKY movie without Sylvester Stallone having ever been born.

Napoleon is played hilariously by Jon Heder, whose appearance in real life compares to how he looks in this film is roughly analogous to Laurence Olivier's real life physiognomy in the mid '50s compared to his appearance in RICHARD III.

I know, I know...what's so funny about some dork with frizzy red hair who never comes out of the gopher hole of his own personality? But it's a hoot, trust me, with a brand of humor that feels true to what I imagine may be the spirit of rural Idaho, which may be a form of insanity.

Everyone else in the cast is a loon as well; nobody is "normal." Even the average high-school students seem on some level like they're from the planet Zelkon.

It's also got a distinctly retro feel to it, like it was shot in the early '80s, although online dating is prominently mentioned.

Hess has shot and staged this film with absolute formalist precision. It's all static shots with maybe two or three quick zooms, no pans, and only one tracking shot.

Rather than try to pretend this is some kind of semi-slick indie film, Hess plays it small and almost film school-ish. The mood of it seems geared to the pale-faced cineastes and brainy oddballs who enjoy the deadpan attitudes of Wes Anderson, Todd Solondz and David Lynch.

Does this mean it's "commercial"? Yeah, I think.....but no one should go into this thing expecting anything as assured or carefully measured as Anderson's RUSHMORE or even BOTTLE ROCKET. You don't have to cut NAPOLEON DYNAMTE too much slack in this respect, but you do need to cut it some.

That's the charm of this thing, in a way. It's almost as if Napoleon shot it himself.

Bukowski

"Thanks for turning me on to Charles Bukowski. I went down to the library and found one of his books. I feel like I'm reading the work of my brother." -- Jason

Harry's Formula

Rich Swank, a regular reader, wrote and said the following about the HARRY POTTER formula, and there definitely is one:

"The formula goes like this...exactly like this. Harry is miserable with his Muggle family. The new school term starts. Harry goes back to school, where there's a new Defense-Against-the-Dark-Arts teacher, who is usually a catalyst to the story. Voldemort makes his play. Things look bad. But Harry triumphs and things return to almost the same status quo, with Harry returning to live with his Muggle parents and the DAtDA teacher out of a job.

"GOBLET OF FIRE messes with things a bit by throwing in a Quiddich World Cup at the beginning, but ORDER OF THE PHEONIX settles right back into the formula.

"The sad part is, no one will be able to mess with the formula without the Potter fans and Rowling going berserk. I'd love to see what Tim Burton would do with it. Unfortunately, as the series goes on, we're going to be burdened with more of the same.

"After five books, it's really surprising how little actually changes in his universe."

I wrote a colleague who was full of praise for HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN and passed along Swank's observation. Here's what I said:

"This is the tiny little detail....just a teensy-weensy one, not really all that important...... which is that ALL THE POTTER MOVIES ARE SUBSTANTIALLY THE SAME. It seems to me that you and all the Alfonso-blowers have ignored or overlooked this. It's certainly fair to say that you and yours haven't made any significant mention of it.

The colleague responded, "You could say the same thing about virtually every series in history.

"The core of what freaked people out about THE MATRIX extensions, which I have said forever, is that it changed the thing that people loved the first time. That pissed everyone off. But that is reality.

"People like their series to be familiar, but slightly different. In [the Bond films], the girl and the villains change, but they are all the same movie. SPIDER-MAN 2 uses the same conceit as SUPERMAN 2.

"Even the first STAR WARS trilogy, when you think of it, was the same thing over and over, with new characters added, with Luke's journey being the only real changing throughline and a second film that had a cliffhanger instead of an ending with a ceremony, which is in episodes 1 and 3, and also 4 and 6.

"[Swank's] argument is stupidly asking for something that is naturally what it is to be different, almost for the sake of being different. There is nothing wrong with wanting something different, but the notion that there is something deeply wrong with the existing format is kind of like saying, 'I'm tired of McDonald's Big Macs, so McDonald's should add tomato to the sandwich,' when the real solution is to just move on to something else."

'Nother Take

"My take on the Harry Potter books/films is that they're revenge on behalf of every book lover who's ever seen their favorite novel eviscerated by Hollywood. Faithfulness to source material has never been a big Hollywood problem -- making wholesale changes for no particular reason (the what-the-f**k, why-did-they-do-that? syndrome) has.

"It's not unlike my reaction to celebrities complaining about anorexia in a culture drowning in fat -- sure, anorexia = bad, but why concentrate on a relatively small affliction while ignoring the vast contagion?

"Usually filmmakers are so intent on putting their personal stamp on something that nobody realizes their personal stamp is mental retardation. (See file under Sommers, Stephen or G,Mc.) I give the Harry Potter people great credit -- they don't even have Peter Jackson's small comfort of heading into a sprawling epic that has an end! Can you imagine going into a seven-film series with no idea where the hell it's heading.

"Never mind if Harry Potter dies in the end or not. Just try to wrap your head around foreshadowing events and keeping plot threads alive for subsequent novels that haven't even been written yet.

"Having said all that, I've also heard that Cuaron diverges greatly from the source material.?" -- David Ludwig

Great Canadians

"I'm a Canadian, and your comment that you found the docs on the new two-disc DVD version of THE GREAT ESCAPE even more interesting than the 1963 film brought back nationalistic memories. They took me back to my first viewing of the film after reading Paul Brickhill's book thanks to a school library. I loved the Elmer Bernstein score and a lot of the scenes and the decision to shoot in Germany instead of in L.A.

"But something was missing. The book had lots of Canadians in it but there were none in the film. I knew that a Canadian, Wallace (Wally) Floody, had served behind the camera. The former prisoner had spent a year and a half as the film's technical advisor, but there was no credit for Floody on the film...despite the fact that the booklet provided inside the older single-disc DVD does give him credit.

"Floody appeared on Canadian television to help sell the film in 1963. When asked about the lack of Canadian characters he would diplomatically answer that the characters were composites and let it go at that. I can recall thinking in the '60s that, well, the Americans put up the money for the film, so I suppose they can't be expected to do more than put American characters (McQueen, Garner) in the main starring roles, and then hand out the remaining strong parts to the Brits.

"The last time THE GREAT ESCAPE was shown on Canada's History Television (which is owned by Alliance Atlantis), it was preceded by the debut of a new documentary about the Canadians who were involved in the real-life escape. After this Ann Medina, the Chicago-born host for HT's film presentations, introduced the film as 'Hollywood's version.'

"And yet Jonathan Vance of the University of Western Ontario, author of 'A Gallant Company: The Men of The Great Escape,' notes that Floody's work is featured in an American documentary on the making of the film in the 'History and Hollywood' series.

"Despite these oversights, I have always thought we were lucky the original movie is as good as it turned out to be in 1963. I once read an interview with one of the two credited screenwriters, W.R. Burnett (LITTLE CAESAR, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE) who did a lot of work on the James Garner and Steve McQueen scenes.

"Burnett once said McQueen drove him nuts with his requests for a better-written part, but one Burnett contribution is the bit in which McQueen repatedly bounces the baseball against the cell wall inside the 'cooler.' John Huston once called Burnett 'one of the most neglected American writers.

"But the real (apparent) author of the bulk of the GREAT ESCAPE screenplay is nowhere to be found in the final film.

"In a 1972 book by writer-producer and UCLA lecturer William Froug, called 'The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter,' we find out that the real key writer is Walter Brown Newman. His credits include an Academy Award nomination for CAT BALLOU. Froug tells Newman in the book that he had heard Newman wrote the first GREAT ESCAPE screenplay and "that it's largely [yours]."

"Newman answers he put himself in the embarassing position of having gotten so mad at producer-director John Sturges that that he demanded the removal of his name and said he never wanted to talk to him again. Froug is then told by Newman (also an uncredited writer of Sturges' THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) that this was not the end of their relationship.

"I was walking along Santa Monica Boulevard one morning some time afterwards and a little car, a Porsche, came by and screamed to a stop, and it was Johnny. He said to me, 'Wanna write another movie?' and I said, 'Sure, John.' Newman says that Sturges had a number of ideas but nothing got very far in the end. Newman died in 1993 and I believe Sturges left us around 1990." -- D.R. Atkinson

Solid WWII Flicks

"I still think THE GREAT ESCAPE is a classic even if John Sturges played fast and loose with some of the American involvement. What ultimately works is that he did stick to the ultimate reality, which is that lots of POW's lost their lives and only three escaped. Perhaps the title was ironic? As James Garner asked, 'Was it worth it?'

"As far as other darker WW2 movies go, my fave is still John Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN . That last shot with the bodies and the artwork -- succinct, brilliant, poetic." -- David DuBos, host of "Movie Talk," New Orleans, Louisiana.

"Samuel Fuller's THE BIG RED ONE was a pretty gritty effort and much underrated. Lee Marvin was great in it. COMMAND DECISION was another first-rate war movie which eschews any notion of sentimentality or flag-waving. (Walter Pidgeon's performance was great.) At one stage, by the way, COMMAND DECISION held the record for most words in a movie script. I don't know what hold the record today." -- Brian Lee, Sydney, Australia.

"Well, the obvious one is Robert Aldrich's movie of THE DIRTY DOZEN. Not a whole lot of sentiment there, right?

"But another Robert Aldrich movie, ATTACK, also fills the bill. When I was younger I always thought of as 'the movie where Jack Palance gets his arm run over by a Panzer.' I saw it recently on TCM.....no idea if it's on DVD.

"This is a movie steeped in cynicism (the nobility of the ending, then, I suspect, may well have been forced on Aldrich by the studio), and it's also interesting that years before THE DIRTY DOZEN Aldrich was clearly interested in the idea of underlings killing superior officers. It's closer to the books of Paul Fussell than any other war picture I can think of, in fact.

"But here are some additions: the original version of THE THIN RED LINE with Keir Dullea and Jack Warden, PLAY DIRTY with Michael Caine and Nigel Green and, of course, Don Siegel's great, unnerving Hell Is For Heroes with Steve McQueen at his most minimal and hostile (with a great supporting cast of guys like Bob Newhart and Fess Parker).

"Toss in, too, Cornel Wilde's underrated BEACH RED, which takes a very downbeat view of the Pacific War. And also give some credit to Frank Sinatra's own directorial effort, NONE BUT THE BRAVE, which is actually a fairly surprising piece of work." -- Richard Szathmary.

Wells to Szathmary: If you ask me, THE DIRTY DOZEN is fairly sentimental. All that joshing-around humor and brusque macho camaraderie between Lee Marvin's pater familias and his bad-boy children whom he can't help but love. (Except for Telly Savalas's pervo character.)

"One WWII film in particular that still has genuine feeling and still moves me every time I see it is TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH, which was released on DVD a couple of years ago.

"Michael Gebert in 'The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards' rates it as the best movie of 1949: "Going against the grain of every morale-builder made during the war, the bomber-squadron movie TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH suggested that officers and men were fundamentally different creatures after all (by job if not by nature), that the individuality we were fighting to preserve was the one luxury we could not afford during wartime -- and that the price of victory was a commanding officer's soul.

"All of which are more original and daring things to say than that some politicians are crooks, the message of ALL THE KING'S MEN, which won the Oscar that same year." -- Susan Snyder, Chicago.

"I read your piece on WWII movies right after reading one by David Gelertner in the WALL STREET JOURNAL that claimed the WWII veteran has been neglected all these years, and in both cases I feel like the answer is the same-- the reason nobody pays attention to WWII now is because it was EVERYWHERE for 30 years after the war.

"I mean, I grew up playing fighting the Germans (which meant most of my older relatives, actually, but nobody saw it that way), and 'Combat' and 'Rat Patrol' were on TV, and WHERE EAGLES DARE and PATTON were in movie theaters, and Jack Higgins novels were in the bathroom, and then 'Holocaust' and 'QBVII' and 'Farewell to Manzanar' were on TV after that.

"So WWII is simply worn-out as a subject, unless you can come up with a new spin on it (which you'll notice Steven Spielberg has spent his recent life working on-- has anyone really commented on the fact that at a time when practically no one else makes WWII films, our most successful filmmaker has devoted half his career to different takes on the war?).

"Anyway, here's my list of WWII movies that rise above the typical run of smug 50-year-old stars playing soldier:

"IN WHICH WE SERVE-- Noel Coward, who had been quite happy to celebrate class snobbery before war broke out, wrote and co-directed with some kid named David Lean this archetypal we're-all-in-this-together drama.

"TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH-- Gregory Peck shows the human effects of the loneliness of the hard-ass commander sending boys out to die, over and over.

"THE CRUEL SEA-- Jack Hawkins shows the human effects of the loneliness of the hard-ass commander, this time on a boat in a fine British movie still practically unknown over here.

"ATTACK! -- Gleefully over-the-top Robert Aldrich thing about a tough lieutenant (Jack Palance) and a chicken C.O. (Eddie Albert).

"THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR-- William Holden in a well-made adult drama about a Swedish businessman who posed as a Nazi sympathizer, though the most interesting character is Lilli Palmer as a guilt-obsessed Catholic with whom he has an affair.

"OPERATION CROSSBOW-- All-star adventure thing about an attempt to sabotage the German rocketry facility at Peenemunde, raised above average by a really tough, no-sugarcoating script." -- Mike Gebert

Wells to Gebert: OPERATION CROSSBOW? Get outta town.

"Check out Sam Peckinpah's CROSS OF IRON. Made right before he really hit bottom, but features a great cast and some of the best battle scenes around. And it's also devoid of sentimentality.

"And if you can hunt it down, seek out a Russian film (!) made in 2003 called THE LAST TRAIN. It's about a German doctor wandering around the Russian Front in World War 2.

"And for fun, KELLY'S HEROES." - Gabriel Neeb

"I'm really not sure I'd consider BATTLEGROUND, A BRIDGE TOO FAR or THE LONGEST DAY among the 'darker, more complex' WW II movies. What does that make films like Fuller's MERRILL'S MARAUDERS and THE BIG RED ONE, Aldrich's ATTACK!, Siegel's HELL IS FOR HEROES, Wellman's THE STORY OF G.I. JOE or Milestone's A WALK IN THE SUN?

"Are there really all that many gung-ho WW II films, anyway? Think about it. Raoul Walsh's OBJECTIVE, BURMA concentrates at least as much on fear and confusion as on derring-do and anti-Japanese speechifying, and Ford's THEY WERE EXPENDABLE celebrates the fulfillment of duty in about as non-triumphalist a manner as possible." -- Ira Hozinsky

"The yin vs. yang of WWII movies has always seemed to me drama vs. action. Those that play out as action movies, such as THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE DIRTY DOZEN, or WHERE EAGLES DARE, are certainly meant to be no more representational of the 'real'[ war experience than Sturges' own THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is an accurate depiction of the Old West.

"That said, the WWII movie that continues to amaze is surely David Lean's BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. The structure of the 1957 epic, wherein the POWs Shears (Holden) and Nicholson (Guinness) meet, are separated for the bulk of the film, and then are reunited at the film's climax with diametrically opposed goals, carries as much weight today as ever.

"Indeed, I think that the choice a viewer makes in siding with the soldiers -- Warden and Shears, whose goal is one of immediate strategic importance , or the far-thinking Colonel Nicholson, who sees the bridge's existence as a monument to himself and his men -- says a lot about that person. Lean certainly gives the audience no help in determining a 'right' or 'wrong.'

"I'd say that a message regarding short term thinking vs. long term consequences is pretty apt right now, wouldn't you? " -- Marcus Moore

Dreams

"I know I'm in one of the world's tiniest minorities, but I've always hated FIELD OF DREAMS. I don't know how you can say the movie isn't mawkish or that some of the casting isn't ridiculous (not only Frank Whaley but Ray Liotta as corn-fed Shoeless Joe Jackson!) or that the ending isn't ludicrous (why are all those cars headed for the farm? Have they come to pray?...play baseball?...buy a time-share?)

"What about when James Earl Jones harkens back to the golden days of baseball? Doesn't he remember it was segregated? Didn't you want to hit Kevin Costner's daughter every time she opened her mouth?

"But by far the worst scene in the movie is that school- board meeting when Amy Madigan takes on the right-wing hypocrites who want to ban Terrence Mann's novel. It's such a cheap, easy, obvious scene -- horribly written and directed.

"Give me EIGHT MEN OUT, BULL DURHAM or PRIDE OF THE YANKEES any day. " -- Charles Hilton

Wells to Hilton: Charles, either you get the emotional import of all those cars headed for the farm and the ball field, or you don't. For me that ending is perfect.

"I agree -- Kevin Costner's BULL DURHAM commentary is a hoot. My favorite bit is hearing the uncomfortable silence between Costner and Tim Robbins during the Susan Sarandon/Costner make-out scenes.

It's nice to see another critic step up and forgive Costner's past cinematic transgressions, especially since OPEN RANGE was such a fine, fine movie.

"And I never knew FIELD OF DREAMS's aspect ratoio was lopped off. Thanks for that --now I'll be doubly sure to get this DVD, which is easily one of my favorite films of all time. And I do get the tears aflowing during the 'wanna have a catch? scene." -- Alan Cerny