So, I finally saw i heart huckabees, which was AWESOME and hysterical. Great character performances from the always reliable Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman as husband and wife team Vivian and Bernard Jaffe. Isabel Huppert turns in a sexy and frustrating performance as existentialist Caterine Vauban. Jason Schwartzman was hillariously outraged and touching as our confused protagonist Albert Markovski, while Mark Wahlberg quite possibly deserves a best supporting actor nomination for his nihilistic turn as a firefighter struggling with life's big questions. Roger Ebert must be a philosophically, collosally ignorant little man if he couldn't see the redeeming and delightful properties of this film.

I think that anyone expecting to see great art when they go to see a movie that focuses so much energy on Shania Twain obviously has unreasonable expectations and has stopped going to the movies for the sheer enjoyment of getting lost in the fantasyland of FICTIONAL movies that tell stories just for the point of telling a story.

I've neglected to mention the affable Jude Law and Naomi Watts as yuppies in denial of their own existential, suburban meltdown, mostly because their performance are adequate and serve only to further the likeability of other characters without properly adressing their own vilification. They turn out, like anyone, to be fallable people, just like every other character in huckabees, but their dynamic just isn't as interesting as the Jaffes with themselves or Albert's with Tommy (check out clip 7 on the official website. Click on the pink square that lookes like a polaroid camera).

The website itself is expertly designed to suck the reader in, like a sub-website for the Jaffe's existential detective agency (the plain yellow square) that asks the big questions. "If nothing matters, do you matter?" "How am I not myself?" "What does it all mean?"

It means that we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously and we should just enjoy a movie for the story and not the complete deconstruction of every bit of symbolism. What will you gain by that, except a loss of innocence? A loss of joy?

Asks yourself those big questions, but don't forget that the world is out there, and it's full of pain and misery and wondrous things and magical coincidences that may not mean anything at all.

Dress up and be silly, be wildly serious and resolutely absurd. Write bad poetry. Accept no substitutes for the real thing and question everything you know to be real. Then relax and see that we are all connected, even for all the tiny gaps.

Oh yeah, and don't forget to listen to the soundtrack. It helps.