The only new movie I've written about lately has been Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ but that's not because I can recommend it. My amateur standing as a critic means that I don't get to see new movies (for free) long enough in advance to publish a review on opening day. This further means that I don't have editors breathing down my neck, so I can choose to write about movies solely on the basis of whether they make me feel like writing about them, which is different from whether I feel like recommending them. The problem I've had with most of the new movies this year, then, is that I haven't had much to say about them, which doesn't necessarily imply you wouldn't have a good time if you saw them.

50 First Dates starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore is a good example. The concept of a young woman whose short-term memory is erased every night, so that they guy she hits it off with on their first meeting at breakfast has to win her again every morning, works, and the amazing thing is that they don't abandon the concept at the end with some trick so that everything can be nice and normal. Moment to moment it was the best time I had in the theater so far this year, and I think the weirdo jokes about Sandler's gender-question-mark co-worker and the gross-out walrus jokes were funny, too.

The problem is that it isn't better. If you describe it honestly you run the risk of damning it with faint praise, and if you analyze its failings you can sound awfully prissy since it isn't that ambitious in the first place. It's almost irrelevant to hold light comedies up to the highest models because they're made for current consumption not for the ages. Even worse, when critics start theorizing about what you can and can't do in comedy, they're mostly talking through their asses, attempting to abstract from too few examples an ad hoc theory about what is perhaps the most opportunistic of the dramatic arts. Comedy is what makes people laugh; an analysis of what has worked doesn't promulgate rules as to what can work.

But 50 First Dates does make an obvious, if non-fatal, central mistake: the comedy specialist is in the low-pressure role. It's a sign of Sandler's gallantry that he let Barrymore have the showpiece part, and that's part of what makes him so likeable. (I can't see Jim Carrey making a similar mistake.) But it's also self-defeating, because as charmingly touching as Barrymore is, she doesn't have the comedy skills to get inside the concept and warp your brainwaves with it.

And then the major virtue of the movie works against it. The fact that they don't abandon the concept pushes the story into a more emotional and even speculative realm when, despite the heroine's disability, the romantic comedy concludes happily. Barrymore is appealing because she comes across as an amateur and yet despite that lack of expertise reveals herself emotionally. She does wobbly things that more technically refined actresses and more thoroughly synthetic stars wouldn't dare to. But she would need to be a much more spookily poetic performer than she is to suggest the mysteries of living every dawn as if it were a rebirth. But see it anyway.