HEARTS AND MINDS: The Great Undecided

I'm wary of Michael Moore, but I want to see FARENHEIT 9/11 for myself. Hitchens is a pretty persuasive hatchet job, but Rosenbaum is generally worhtwhile, so perhaps it's somehow redemptive for Moore in the way that Iowa's victory was redemptive for Kerry. I do think it's telling that we're circumspect about who carries this year's liberal flag, and Moore is wrong to proclaim the Bush administration over with, as he did on Jon Stewart.

We watched Wonderland for Kate Bosworth a couple weeks back, and although it's bad, it's stayed with me. Most of its problems are not really with the script by James Cox and Captain Mauzner, they're with Cox's dopey direction and hopped-up editing. You start to wonder how Cox romanticizes these dopeheads by his cutting and swerving, as if he were on dope while editing the movie. But Bosworth is quietly riveting as John Holmes's girlfriend Dawn Schiller. Near the end, when Holmes's wife (Lisa Kudrow) meets up with him at a hotel room where he's being kept before giving testimony, Bosworth lets the two go off to an unbugged room to talk, and picks up his sunglasses after she's left alone there. It's the kind of gesture that defines a character: Holmes is in deep doo-doo, but she's so naive she gets a thrill just by trying on his glasses. BLUE CRUSH surfed on Bosworth's smile and cool way with Hawaiian locals, but in WONDERLAND, she shows off acting chops to such an extent you're convinced that a sweetie pie could stick with such a loser for so long. The other key performance is Josh Lucas, whose Ron Lanius has such a hard-on for horse that his outbursts make way too much sense, even though you know his ripoff triumphs will backfire mercilessly. This is a bravura performance that could have been embarrassing and somehow transcends the dope-fiend clichés. Music is predictably bad throughout, and closes with the unspeakably hipless "If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot.