Enchanted

The line has been used before, but I'm not above petty larceny. ENCHANTED is enchanting.

Everything about this movie, from casting to costumes to color palette to CGI, is perfect. So perfect, in fact, that even little boys can groove on it. Adams, Marsden, Sarandon, and Spall (the faery contingent) play their parts with delightful servings of innocence or evil or both. Dempsey, Menzel, and Covey (the New York contingent) manage to be both grounded and hopeful. Even the choice of narrator is spot on: Julie Andrews, the woman Adams (if she's lucky) might get to be when she grows up. There's danger, but no real sense of danger, the production numbers are absolutely top notch, and everyone seems to be having a good time.

What's not to love?

Audition

AUDITION is like a very special special episode of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," one in which Bill Bixby's new romance spirals into a hellish nightmare of torture, hallucination, madness, and death. Hey, it's Takeshi Miike: what do you expect?

AUDITION begins like a somber "starting over" tale. A man loses his wife, then is left to raise his boy as best he can. After about a decade, his son's constant encouragement to find another wife finally wears him down and he hatches a plan to audition potential mates, hoping to find that diamond in the rough. He finds something that gleams, but it could be the tip of a blade. It's good setup for a movie, and Miike plays it well, investing us in his Bixby and taking his time to build the tension in the latter half of the film. If I have one gripe about AUDITION, it's the movie's overreliance on filters to set moods and create atmosphere. It's a good thing I'm not colorblind - if I had trouble seeing blue, I'd have missed half the movie.

This is a quibble, however. AUDITION is sweet, scary, horrifying, and satisfying. I wish Bill Bixby was still around for a remake.