Micucci says when Lindhome first floated the name as a kind of trial balloon, it drew an immediate reaction. "We were just doing some really early demos. We still didn't have a band name. We'd probably been through three or four different names at that point, and she mentioned Garfunkel and Oates, and the guy recording us just started laughing so hard, he's like 'That has to be it. That has to be it.'" And so, one of the best stage names in the business was born. It's a comedy calling card like no other.

Of course, Micucci and Lindhome have absolutely nothing to do with either Art Garfunkel or John Oates. That's just the first of many jokes that make this musical duo so funny. Like many comedy teams, they're physically mismatched. Lindhome is tall and blonde, Micucci small and brunette. But there's a kind of awkward naturalness about them that makes them both quite endearing. Ultimately though, it's the quality of their lyrics that sets them apart. Micucci, in fact, cites the brilliant Stephen Sondheim as a major influence and it often shows. So clever and witty are they that one is tempted to just list the words of song after song after song. But let the following chorus suffice:

"My self esteem's not low enough to date you It's close, but not quite there Give me time to get a little bit more rejected And you and I could make an awesome pair A totally awesome pair."

"We definitely write stuff that's personal or about dating, that I think people can relate to, and I think people appreciate the honesty as well," says Micucci. Sometimes that honesty has a real bite, as in their signature song about pregnancy:

"Pregnant women are smug, everyone knows it, nobody says it, because they're pregnant. Eff'in son of a gun, you think you're so deep now, you give me the creeps now that you're pregnant."

Watch Garfunkel and Oates on TBTL :

Not only are Garfunkel and Oates songs personal, they're also refreshingly frank. In one song, they explain the brutal truths of sexual attraction.

" 'Cause I really like you as a friend But there are things I can't pretend Know I would love you 'til the end But there is just one problem (problem, problem).

I would never have sex with you Believe me, you'd know it if I wanted to I already would have shown my boobs to you But that will never happen."

And sometimes, the songs are not only personal and frank, they're breathtakingly explicit. Micucci cheerfully volunteers that "we just wrote a song about how we're bad at giving handjobs." That song made its Seattle debut at Bumbershoot this weekend and it's as blue as any hard-bitten comedian's work can be ... and yet, when delivered by the impossibly fresh-faced and wholesome-looking Garfunkel and Oates, the material seems, well, fresh and wholesome! What's their trick?

Micucci thinks she knows. "Both Riki and I were really, really late bloomers," she explains. In other words, she thinks the two of them took their innocence and naivete so deep into their young adulthood that they're forever marked as "wholesome." At the same time, since they WERE such late bloomers, Micucci says "we're maybe making up for lost time by writing these songs that were a little bit more dirty" than most people would write.

As with a lot of comedy, it's the disconnect between their squeaky clean looks and their sometimes raunchy subject matter that makes us laugh and laugh hard. That comic disconnect is further reinforced in a rap song like "This Party Just Took A Turn For The Douche," which manages to reference Truman Capote, John Donne and Zach And Cody amidst plenty of four-letter words.

Garfunkel and Oates' humor can also have a political edge, as in my favorite song of theirs, "Sex With Ducks." "This comment that Pat Robertson had said relating gay marriage to having sex with ducks, it just seemed like the most ridiculous - we took that little nugget and wrote a song about it," says Micucci.

"Pat Robertson once said, "It's a long downward slide That'll lead to legalizing sex with ducks If two men can stand side by side."

God, I hope he's right 'Cause if gay marriage becomes lawful Gonna find myself a duck And legally do Something awful (awful, awful)."

Garfunkel and Oates performed to sell-out crowds Saturday, Sunday and Monday at Bumbershoot.

Bonus: Garfunkel and Oates "Worst Song Medley" on TBTL :

I fully realize Elizabeth Gilbert's EAT PRAY LOVE is held in near reverence by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers. I also freely admit I haven't read a word of it. (I mean, c'mon - it's called EAT PRAY LOVE.) But I HAVE seen the movie, and all I can say is, I hope the book is a hell of a lot more profound than the film.

From what I can tell, it's supposed to be a journey of self-discovery for a woman struggling to find herself. Unfortunately, the film is such a slick travelogue, and so superficial in its life lessons, that even its great cast (Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, James Franco, Richard Jenkins) can't save it from floundering.

Julia Roberts is actually quite winning as Gilbert, a woman who walks out on her husband when she suddenly realizes she doesn't want to be married anymore. It's not like she hasn't given it some thought. In fact, on the advice of a medicine man in Bali, she spends one whole night praying to God for guidance about her marriage. In the morning, when the husband confides in her that he doesn't want to go to Aruba for their vacation, she confides in him, "I don't want to be married." The poor guy doesn't stand a chance. Praying apparently is just another word for "doing whatever you want."

Roberts/Gilbert senses she's lost her appetite for life and yearns to "marvel." She decides to do her marvelling in exotic locales: Italy, India, and Indonesia. Not bad for a mid-life crisis, huh?

First stop, Roma (or EAT.) Here she learns from the Italians all the cliches Italians always have about Americans - that we're too busy, that we rush through life when we really should slow down and, you know, smell the roses. This advice is helpfully accompanied by lots of shots of happy Italians eating and drinking and laughing, followed by dozens of lovingly shot close-ups of one gorgeous dish of food after another. An insistently cornball collection of syrupy Italian musical cliches further drives home the point - these Italians sure know how to live the good life.

Next, she's off to India (or PRAY.) She joins an ashram and tries to do the Hindu meditation thing but can't quite get a handle on the contemplative life. But she does meet another displaced American (Richard Jenkins) who manages to get through to her with his folksy quips, bite-size morsels of wisdom like "You can't get to the castle without swimming the moat." After he confesses his own deep dark secret, I guess they both convince themselves it's time to move on with their lives, so he heads back to Texas and Roberts/Gilbert is off to Bali.

BALI (or LOVE) brings our heroine full circle. This is where she first met that wise old medicine man who told her her fortune - that she would have two marriages (one long and one short), that she would lose all her money, then gain it back, and that she would one day return to Bali where he would teach her everything he knows about life. (You just know he speaks the truth because he has no teeth and looks like Yoda.) When she does indeed return to him, she completes her life lessons and realizes it's okay to love a hunky but sensitive Brazilian (Javier Bardem.)

When the Texan at the ashram was peppering her with quips to the wise, Roberts/Gilbert accused him of turning everything into a bumpersticker. Well, that goes double for this movie. Between the Texan and the medicine man, there's a spiritual slogan for everything: Forgive yourself and everything will take care of itself; Ruin is a gift, the road to transformation; Accept the truth about yourself and the truth will not be held from you; Nothing lasts forever; Let it be; God dwells within me ... as me; Believe the physics of the quest; I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit, people like me. (oh, sorry, that last one's from Stuart Smalley.)

Now I'm sure there's a lot here for people to relate to. After all, life after divorce can't be easy and escaping into a kind of self-affirmative spiritualism must be awfully tempting. But is that really all this movie/book has to offer, a philosophy of platitudes?

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy the woman finds happiness in the end. But when it comes to her guru's "physics of the quest," gravity is what's missing.

This week's film fare raises the age-old question "What's worse, a bad romance or a bad comedy?" The two contenders are the Zac Efron melodrama CHARLIE ST. CLOUD and the Steve Carell vehicle DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS. The first wallows in cheap sentimentality, the second in uninspired slapstick.

Zac Efron plays Charlie St. Cloud, a high school graduate with a sailing scholarship to Stanford who puts his life on permanent hold when his little brother Sam dies in a car accident. He makes a deal with his dead brother to play catch with him in a forest glen near the cemetery every day at dusk ... forever. Sacrificing his plans for college, Efron even takes a caretaker's job at his brother's cemetery. For five years, he faithfully keeps his promise - conversing with the ghost of his 11-year-old sibling as he throws the baseball back and forth, back and forth.

When Efron eventually falls for a girl named Tess, he suddenly finds himself emotionally torn. His otherworldly brother tearfully accuses him of breaking his promises while Tess pleads with him to move on with his life. Efron desperately and earnestly explains to Tess that the more time he spends in her world, the less time he has for Sam and he just can't bear to do that. When Tess later is lost at sea, Efron's crisis really comes to a head. What's the poor boy to do?

This is some serious pablum. Incessantly buoyed by sappy violins and shot like a series of overwrought Thomas Kinkade paintings, CHARLIE ST. CLOUD is full of treacly messages about life, love and grief. Teenage girls will no doubt swoon with every frame of Efron's "baby blues" but unless you like living life in the shallows, this greeting card of a movie is bereft of any real emotional resonance. The film frequently invokes St. Jude as the patron saint of lost causes. He should make this movie his next project.

St Jude should probably take a look at DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS as well. Based on the refreshingly mean-spirited French comedy THE DINNER GAME, the Americanized DINNER is not really mean-spirited and worse, barely registers as a comedy, since the laughs are few and far between.

The rather dark premise involves a dinner held regularly by a smug group of friends who set out to invite the most clueless idiots they can find. Following the dinner, the friends vote on which of the unsuspecting guests was the biggest loser. Paul Rudd plays a young executive who chooses to invite an extremely dense tax accountant who spends all his free time creating dioramas of dead mice dressed up in period clothes. Steve Carell, of course, is the nitwit. The tables get turned, however, as Carell unwittingly wreaks havoc in Rudd's life.

Despite a cast that includes comic talents like Jemaine Clement and Zach Galifinakis in addition to Carell and Rudd, this movie is at least an hour old before anything very funny happens. The film's mostly just a series of limp jokes and sloppy slapstick. An extended sequence with Rudd trying to get around with a bad back goes absolutely nowhere and when Carell joins in with a stalker girlfriend to trash Rudd's apartment, it feels more desperate than humorous.

In the last line of the film, Carell says "The mind is a terrible thing." Well, it's certainly wasted in this movie.

But in the showdown between a lousy romance and a lame comedy, I think I have to side with comedy. No matter how bad a comedy, there's almost always a least one of two good laughs amidst the proliferation of "bombs," whereas a romantic misfire is usually a dud through and through. Case in point: in a restaurant scene in DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS, Carell tries to impress some important Swiss clients of Rudd's by singing the praises of their country. "Oh, have you been to Switzerland?" they ask. Carell replies apologetically," No, never. But I have a cousin who drives a Volvo." The movie overall isn't much, but that line is comedy gold. And there's simply nothing equivalent to that in CHARLIE ST. CLOUD.

First and foremost, SALT is 100% unadulterated hokum. That may seem too obvious to even mention, but I think it's important to establish right off the bat, since most discussions of the movie will veer off in other directions.

SALT is about as preposterous as an action thriller about spies and double agents can get. Never have presidential assassinations seemed easier to pull off than they do in this movie. The Russian president is under the high-alert protection of both his Russian security and the full-force detail of the American Secret Service - and yet neither government is the match for a lone, on-the-run female operative. And the President of the United States may be in the super-secret bunker 8 floors below the White House with every imaginable security precaution taken and double-taken - and yet, once again, he doesn't stand a chance against the likes of the same renegade agent. It's amazing what a woman with a full set of lips can pull off, if she just puts her mind to it.

Which brings us to tangent #1. SALT is probably best known for the fact that it was originally intended as a Tom Cruise vehicle and that Angelina Jolie stepped in when Cruise opted out. For a major female star to take over for a bona fide male superstar is unusual enough to at least add a layer of -- oh, I'd hate to use the word "complexity" in relation to this movie -- let's just say, a layer of added interest.

To the film's credit, it doesn't really "sex" up the movie to take advantage of its star. The opening scene gives one pause because a couple of sadistic North Korean guards torture Jolie while she's conveniently clad in a matching bra and panties tandem. But the sexploitation angle dissipates quickly and never really surfaces again. And except for one other scene, in which she takes off her panties to cover up a security camera, the movie barely acknowledges its protagonist is a woman at all. Regarding the countless fights Salt gets into, no concession is ever made to the womanly figure behind the fisticuffs. She doles out punishment as if she were Tom Cruise himself.

Speaking of Tom Cruise, he chose instead to star in KNIGHT AND DAY this summer, another outlandish action movie. But unlike in SALT, Cruise's impossible stunts are treated with a sense of humor. Part of the (limited) charm of that movie is that it knows it's a lark and laughs WITH the audience. When Jolie leaps from one high-speed moving van to another to another, for instance, the scene could have been taken straight out of KNIGHT AND DAY and yet our giggles are meant to be suppressed, not expressed. Cruise was smart not to play it straight. Getting a rare chance to play a "tough guy," Jolie probably didn't feel she had another option.

And how does Jolie stack up against the male action stars? She's convincing enough, I suppose. After all, nobody really believes all those stunts that guys like Cruise, Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), or Daniel Craig (James Bond) have to pull off, either. It's only slightly more disorienting when Jolie manhandles a dozen fully armed agents than when Damon does it. It's all a matter of suspension of disbelief, in the end. And good for Jolie that she prefers to play Bond than a Bond girl, as she recently said. I just wish SALT had taken advantage of the fact its hero was a woman by having Jolie use a little more "brain" and a little less "brawn" to win the day.

And now to tangent #2 - the Russian spy angle. With Cold War animosities mostly a thing of the past these day, SALT did run the risk of seeming hopelessly outdated. After all, does anybody think Russia is hell-bent on starting World War 3 anytime soon? Any yet, has there ever been a more propitious turn of events for a movie than the recently uncovered deep-cover Russian spy network? Most of these just swapped spies had spent years, decades even, living quietly in this country under assumed names, dutifully working their mundane jobs as they rose in the ranks of their respective businesses. Not to give too much away, I'll just say something similar is indeed at work in SALT. In fact, so apt is the parallel that the "breaking-news" spy story plays like a brilliantly planted publicity stunt, a work of marketing genius. This doesn't make SALT any less hokey - it just means it's unexpectedly pertinent hokum. Better to be lucky than good, as the saying goes.

In the visually stunning and thematically ambitious INCEPTION, director Christopher Nolan's central cinematic insight is that the mind is an action landscape.

As with many summer blockbusters, INCEPTION is chockful of high-energy car chases, elaborate shoot-outs, and massive explosions, all done in some of the most stunning locales on the planet. But thanks to the movie's rather brainy context, these action sequences are limned with philosophical, psychological, and even physiological parallels. When is a gun battle more than a gun battle? When it represents the mind's war with itself. And it's that war that is at the center of INCEPTION.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a security expert whose specialty is the subconscious. He contends that trained "extractors" like himself can literally steal ideas from the unsuspecting minds of others. How? By accessing those minds through their dreams. (It's industrial espionage of the highest order.) He then sells himself to clients who want the ultimate in protection: to be trained to make their minds impregnable to outside interference.

Things take an unexpected turn when a client requests an "inception," that is, not an idea extraction but an idea implantation. This is an extremely rare and difficult operation since it requires delving not just into someone's dreamstate but travelling three and four levels deep into that dreamstate. In other words, a dream within a dream wthin a dream of yet another dream. As explained in the movie, that deep space entry makes for a highly unstable environment within which to work.

Clearly we are in the realm of science fiction, but much like in THE MATRIX, everything in INCEPTION is presented with hyper-realistic detail. Conceptually, it's very "out-of-this-world," but it's meticulously grounded in a very recognizable reality. The film may be full of dreams within dreams, but within those dreams, those mental projections carry machine guns.

Thus, when DiCaprio and his cohorts journey inside this dreamworld, they are constantly confronted with physical manifestations of a psyche's defense system. To the intruders, the bullets flying their way are every bit as dangerous as their counterparts in the real world, even though they're more likely neurons firing off warning signals. As the extractors venture deeper and deeper into their subject's subconscious, more fiercely does the subject fight to deny access and correspondingly, more troublesome does their environment become.

The complexities of the situation increase exponentially when it becomes clear DiCaprio may hold the key to others' psyches but he doesn't have a handle on his own.

Nolan's ingenious framework also allows him to play with time almost as cleverly as he did in his earlier MEMENTO, which told the story of a man with no short term memory ... backwards! In INCEPTION, each dream stage has its own internal clock, so that what may take 5 minutes in real time takes one hour in the first level of dream time, one full day on level two and maybe a week, say, in level three. These separate timeframes allow Nolan to operate with three tempos of suspense and provide him with three cascading climaxes, all edited together superbly.

INCEPTION is smart, stylish, imaginative and ambitious. It's certainly not without flaws - it feels the need to explain everything, for instance, and it's not as profound as I think it'd like to be. But in a year with a remarkable dearth of great films, INCEPTION shines brightly as a beacon of hope for Hollywood.

Ever since the Colton Harris Moore story broke, parallels have been drawn with the movie CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, a true story about a brilliant young counterfeiter played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leo's obviously too old to play him now, but there are plenty of young actors who could fill Colton's non-shoes. In fact, websites like zimbio.com are already running polls on Hollywood's Barefoot contenders.

Zac Efron of High School Musical and Hairspray fame seems to be the flavor of the month for every movie that comes up, and could channel our Bandit's desperation ...

But sorry, Zac - you're probably too good looking and besides, it's not BAREFOOT, THE MUSICAL.

Leading one website poll is Michael Cera, the hyper self-conscious star of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, SUPERBAD, and YOUTH IN REVOLT. He definitely plays "young" and could tap into the "precocious" Colton.

But Cera always seems to play Cera more than the character, so Colton fans might feel dissed.

If a real actor is what you're after, you could hardly do better than Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling. As proven by THE NOTEBOOK, he knows just how to project a wrong-side-of-the-tracks country charm that may be the secret to Colton's success ...

Other suggestions have included Adventureland's Jesse Eisenberg (kind of a poor man's Michael Cera), Twilight's Taylor Lautner (oh, please), even Justin Timberlake, who proved he could act in ALPHA DOG.

Some in our newsroom think King 5 reporter Kyle Moore is the spitting image of the Barefoot bandit.

But if it's a local tie you're after, I'd suggest TBTL's Luke Burbank. He's a little old to play 19 but he acts young and has the same cheeky insouciance I imagine animates Colton Harris-Moore. You don't believe me?

Now who should play the Mom?

The supposed trick of DESPICABLE ME is that its hero is a villain. The problem is he's not nearly despicable enough.

This animated film's villainous premise has a lot of promise. One might expect a movie with the satiric bite of a Charles Addams cartoon, a razor sharp send-up of conventional society. Or perhaps a more full-bodied film with the topsy-turvy sensibility of a WICKED, in which we get the "true" story from the villain's point of view. Unfortunately, DESPICABLE ME has no such lofty aspirations. Instead, it quite happily settles for a mildly amusing tale of a man whose every effort at villainy makes him less and less a villain.

Gru is an independently wealthy bad guy who spends all day being a jerk to everyone he comes across. For instance, he'll give away balloon animals to kids, and then pop them to make the kids cry. Not only that, he freezes people with his freeze-frame gun so he can cut to the front of the latte line. Since he also fancies himself a supervillain, he spends a lot of his time planning elaborate crimes. He runs a weapons manufacturing factory, manned by hundreds of little yellow creatures call "minions" who work under the guidance of a somewhat mad, somewhat dotty scientist. Their charge is to create enough firepower to ensure Gru's claim to be the best villain of all time. To best his arch-rival Vector, who just stole the pyramids, he decides he must steal the moon.

As is evident by this plot description, DESPICABLE ME is not going for "dark" or "scary," and definitely not for "satiric." Instead, Gru's shenanigans are played for laughs, a kind of catch-all hodge-podge of minor gags and goofs and cute mumbo-jumbo. The minions may be working for an evil master, for instance, but they joke around with each other like they're Santa's elves. And the movie takes great delight in the fact that the scientist has mistakenly invented a fart-gun instead of a dart gun. The fact that Gru is voiced by Steve Carell only cinches the deal that we're not to take any of Gru's evil ways too seriously.

That being said, an inordinate amount of time is devoted to Gru's rivalry with Vector. They go back and forth stealing a powerful shrink-ray gun from each other using more and more sophisticated machines, including tiny robots disguised as cookies, that can break through all the security devices both men have installed. Gadgetry is even more on display in the buildup to the moon caper. But since these machines' capabilities are so random and arbitrary, there's no real chance to generate any tension or suspense. As a result, much of the movie becomes downright tedious.

The film's one saving grace is the introduction of three little orphan girls, whose big eyes and irrepressible natures could have been the height of "cloying" but instead give the film a much needed heart. Gru officially adopts these girls as part of a convoluted plot to defeat Vector but over the course of the film these orphans get the upper hand. Over his objections, these kids insist on treating him as a parent. And as all contemporary parents know, that means demanding what they want, ignoring what they're told, and throwing a fit if they're not played with ... By the time these three are done with him, Gru is a lot less like Lex Luthor than he is like Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof, a man defeated by his own daughters but better off for it.

DESPICABLE ME goes off in too many directions in search of too many easy laughs, but that father-daughter dynamic is what brings it safely back home.

Actor John C. Reilly's new film Cyrus is an oddball comedy that was the talk of the Sundance Film Festival.

Reilly says it was nice to play a character a little more mature than those he’s played in some of his big blockbusters.

“The cool thing about this one for me was that I got to play a character that was a little more mature. I didn’t have to act like I was 12-years-old.”

Despite an Oscar nomination, for Chicago, and a string of highly praised dramatic roles, John C. Reilly is best known for his movies with Will Ferrell and that's just fine with him.

“Step Brothers and Talladega Nights certainly brought me to a wider audience of comedy fans. Look, the fact is, I’m happy just to be employed.”

Reilly says he loves comedy but he's no comedian.

“I’m not one of these actors that knows really how to be a funny guy. Like Will Ferrell is amazing at that. He can just take a regular line and sprinkle funny dust on it, and all of a sudden you don’t know why you’re laughing, but it’s just really funny. I’m always amazed at his ability to do that, but I take more of a character approach, and I try to just make things seem real.”

Listen to full interview:

Reilly says he doesn't really act any differently, no matter what the material.

“I just try to commit as fully as I can, and if the circumstances are ridiculous then I’m in a comedy, and if they’re awkward I’m in a movie like Cyrus.”

In Cyrus, Reilly plays a lovable loser who falls for a single mom played by Marisa Tomei who has an impossibly clingy adult son.

“You really want my character and Marisa’s character to be together. It seems like they’re suited for each other. You’re kind of rooting for everybody and cringing at how it’s all possibly going to work out.”

The film has been well-received with independent film audiences, but Reilly says Cyrus should have cross-over appeal as well.

“Independent film audiences have been really responding to the movie because it’s so weird and honest about how people deal with each other and talk to each other. But more mainstream audiences are also really appreciating the fact that it just feels authentic and it’s got a sweetness to it that’s really genuine. There are some big laughs to this movie. The movie starts with me with my pants down. That’s pretty broad.”

The Twilight movie series benefits from a kind of clunky charm. Its amateurish earnestness comes across as endearing and covers up a myriad of flaws (stilted dialogue, suspect acting, wan special effects.) It so wants to capture the essence of tortured adolescent emotions that it eschews all slickness. And that in itself is refreshing.

But "refreshing" only takes us so far. In this third Twilight go-round, the embarrassing overtakes the endearing and leaves the audience chagrined, if not mortified, at having given the series the benefit of the doubt this far.

The revealing flaw of ECLIPSE is its explicitness. It may be the most physically chaste teen movie ever but emotionally it's far too explicit for its own good. Whatever power the earlier films might have engendered arose from the mostly unspoken desires burbling beneath the surface of its anguished principals: Bella, Edward, Jacob. It's easier to accept (or maybe overlook) the silliness of vampires and werewolves if they're masking recognizable human emotions. And these emotions have so much more resonance when they're hinted at rather than explained, suggested rather than proclaimed, repressed rather than expressed. Better to smolder than to state.

And yet that's all this movie does. Bella and Edward and Jacob just can't shut up about their emotions. (No wonder girls love this series. Finally, here are a couple of studs who not only aren't afraid to talk about emotional stuff, that's ALL they want to talk about.) The movie opens in an impossibly cheesy field of wildflowers with vampire Edward blurting out to Bella, "Marry me!" Because she's playing coy, he has to ask her two more times and then explains, "I love you." Later, when Bella tries to talk him into having sex with her, he demurs. He explains he comes from a different, more courtly era. He says he wishes he could ask her father's permission to marry, then get down on one knee and proclaim, 'Isabella Swan, I promise to love you forever. Would you do me the extraordinary honor of marrying me?" He even presents her a ring right there and then. Demonstrating just how chaste the Twilight series is, Bella actually jumps OFF a bed to embrace him and say "Yes." Many more scenes occur with Edward declaring his love - "You'll always be my Bella,' he whispers earnestly.

Not to be out-talked, Jacob also proclaims his love for Bella. And he's one persistent werewolf: "I'm in love with you and I want you to choose me over him!" When she says she doesn't feel that way about him, he matter-of-factly says, "I don't believe it. You're rushing into this because you're afraid you'll change your mind!" He then rushes in for a kiss before she knows what's happening. She eventually slaps him, so hard in fact, she sprains her wrist. This incident allows him to later apologize and further explain his feelings to her. Bella's conflicted but, secretly, she must be loving the attention. As with Edward, Jacob has many scenes in which he expresses his love for his perfect match.

Most extraordinary is the tent scene in which the hated rivals actually discuss their feelings for Bella WITH EACH OTHER, while their beloved sleeps between them! And the conversation isn't all macho posturing. It's actually a rather thoughtful and speculative discussion of emotional hypotheticals. The problem with the scene is two-fold. For one thing, it feels completely false dramatically, a forced conversation under ridiculous conditions. Secondly, and most importantly, it reveals too much. It's unnecessarily explicit about what makes them tick. They actually conclude that, if the circumstances were different, they might even like each other. Too much information, guys. Let's try to keep at least a little sense of mystery, okay?

Far too many times, ECLIPSE breaks a fundamental dramatic dictum: Show, don't tell.

I'd also suggest another rule of thumb: Sometimes less is more.

Looking for a more traditional review? Listen to my audio review

It may seem more than a little absurd to invoke notions like existential anxiety in a review of a mainstream animated movie, and yet if Pixar has taught us anything, it's that their ambitions know no bounds. This often means that Pixar film-makers will venture forth where few animators dare to tread. Take for instance, the abyss that Woody and his gang of desperate toys stare into in the action-filled climax of TOY STORY 3.

It's a remarkable scene. In the midst of a wild, hair-raising chase in which Woody and pals elude one disaster after another at a garbage dump/recycling center, the action abruptly screeches to a halt. The toys suddenly find themselves face to face with their imminent and inevitable demise - a conveyor belt is inexorably carrying them downward to their awaiting fate, a roiling sea of red-hot embers that resembles nothing so much as a fever dream vision of Hell. Quite unexpectedly, the ever-resourceful Woody doesn't even look for a way out of their predicament, for one more incredible escape. No, so overwhelming is their predicament, so impossible the odds, Woody instead accepts his dire situation philosophically. Without a word, he reaches out to grab the hand of the cowgirl doll, who in turn extends her hand to another toy who grabs yet another toy and on and on until the entire gaggle of mismatched toys form a daisy chain of solidarity. They may be slip-sliding their way to extinction but they're facing it head-on, with a full appreciation of how great their battle and how great their loss. In this moment, Woody transforms himself into a kind of Knight of Infinite Resignation.(And students of Kierkegaard know good things can happen to those who resign themselves so utterly that they take a leap of faith into the absurd.)

Now, as I mentioned before, TOY STORY 3 is a mainstream animated movie, so it doesn't linger long in existentialist territory. It has many other thematic items on its agenda. This momentary philosophical break in the action is better savored as a grace note than a full blown melody. But the fact that Pixar takes the time at all to savor as rare a moment as this ... is to be celebrated to infinity and beyond. The most amazing thing about TOY STORY 3 is that it's filled with many, many such moments ... of heartfelt insight, of winning wit, and aesthetic brilliance.

In fact, did you notice that moment of Edward-Hopper-like alienation when all the toys are huddled at the entrance of a vent and seemingly too far away is Buzz Lightyear, stranded on the lid of an industrial garbage bin, yearning to help and yet forever out of their reach? No? Okay, I'll give it a rest ....