I saw a sneak preview of this movie last night. The reviews that I'd seen ahead of time were not that great, but walking out of the movie, I wondered if the reviewers must have seen something different than I did. The movie I saw was absolutely amazing. It's also one of those rare films that I can't wait to see a second time.

As a quick summary, this film is a biography of the songwriter Cole Porter. It stars Ashley Judd and Kevin Kline (and I think they should *both* be nominated for Oscars), and covers decades of Porter's life, with song and dance and comedy and drama. All through the movie there'd be familiar music and I'd get that dawning realization of, "wow, Porter wrote that one too??" And through the many nightclub scenes, with different singers on stage, I'd peer at the singer because though they were dressed in styles from many decades ago, they'd look vaguely familiar, and then there'd be a shock of recognition as I figured out which modern singer that they really were: "Wow, that's Alanis Morissette! OMG, that's Elvis Costello. Hey, that's Sheryl Crow!" and so on.

If you *don't* like musicals or song and dance numbers, you may not care for this movie. But if you've enjoyed films such as "All That Jazz", "That's Entertainment", "Chicago", "Evita", or "A Chorus Line", you will probably love this one too. Any time I'm at a party from now on, and someone wants to pop in a video or DVD, I'm going to ask for this one.

Update: One of the recent reviewers who *did* like it is Roger Ebert. Here's his review: http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-delovely02f.html