Word: wobegon
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Craig Gillespie's direction is a little too attentive to the physical drabness of the setting, the slow pulse of north-country life, the locals' constipated cordiality. The story is a Lake Wobegon anecdote that Garrison Keillor would have told in 20 minutes, with a defter comic sense and more laughs. Even the movie's title could use some editing. Why not just Lars' Girl...
...moving the goalposts may be inevitable. Decreeing that all kids (except 1% with serious disabilities and an additional 2% with other issues) must be proficient by 2014 is a little like declaring that all the children are above average in the mythical town of Lake Wobegon. California has some of the toughest K-12 curriculum standards in the nation, and O'Connell despairs of hitting the 2014 goal. "Today we don't have any of our schools with 100% student proficiency, and I will predict that we won't by 2014," he says. "Right now about one-quarter...
...wait. We movie reviewers may be starting to shutter our cabins here on the shores of Lake Wobegon (they give us special rates to compensate for the drought that annually afflicts our profession). This means we're much too busy to catch Lassie as she limps homeward one more time this weekend - especially since we have been given to understand that Peter O'Toole is not playing the dog. This does not mean, though, that we are insensible to the demand for instant nostalgia, with a dash of instant analysis thrown...
...having been decreed irrelevant by the new owners of the radio station that has long carried it. This Companion is purely local, not nationally syndicated as Keillor's real show is, and it is basically a songfest. Keillor does not do his monologue about the latest doings in Lake Wobegon. Nor are there the dramatized comic snippets about private eye Guy Noir (played here by Kevin Kline) or the lonesome cowboys, Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly) that have been a long-standing feature of the show. These figures are present, but worked into a feckless...
...This, of course, is not Keillor's way. His radio show is generally easy listening, but it exists for the moment when he intones, "It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon" and launches into one of his tallish stories, marked by a looping inventiveness and softly colored by a kind of deadpan compassion. I would not for a moment imply that he achieves in them a tragic sense of life, but they are certainly implicitly sympathetic to people whose reach exceeds their emotional grasp and often enough hypnotic in their telling. I'm not saying that a movie...