The following is a "transcript" from the top secret brainstorming session that occurred during the greenlighting of the holiday masterpiece Christmas with the Kranks:

Studio Suit 1: "It's the holiday season again..."

Studio Suit 2: "I know. Shit. That means we've got to parade out all that flatulent family tripe before Thanksgiving."

Suit 1: "Yeah, but don't worry, if we put that Home Improvement toolbox and that chick from Halloween together on screen, we'll already have half of Mall of America riding our sweet candy canes all the way to the box office."

Suit 2: "Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis? But what're they gonna do? Act?"

Suit 1: "Hell no. You know John Grisham? He knows a moving Christmas story when it comes to him on the crapper. So he wrote this book about the despicable fate that befalls a Midwest family who dares to buck the capitalist, commodity-driven holiday pressure to make your humble abode look like Pottery Barn blew its entire cranberry-scented-candle holiday section out its ass and all over your house. This Midwest couple attempts to skirt the pressure of conforming to their neighborhood Xmas explosion and go on a Caribbean cruise."

Suit 2: "Holy crap. You mean Allen and Curtis don't want a tree? Just like those goddamn Jews? I hope they learn their lesson."

Suit 1: "No tree. Exactly like the Jews. It's a travesty. But the neighbors harass them until they learn their lesson and put the fucking Frosty on the roof and the goddamn ham on the table."

Suit 2: "Christ, that's moving. Do you think we can get Cheech Marin a cameo too? Now that Nash Bridges is on the USA Network..."

Suit 1: "Totally. He can be a Latino cop who doesn't know that Enrique isn't spelled 'N. Reeky.' It'll be hilarious. But no Don Johnson. We have standards." JENNIFER MAERZ

Callas Forever
dir. Franco Zeffirelli
Opens Fri Nov 26.

In Franco Zeffirelli's liberal reimagining of the last year of Maria Callas' life, a close friend named Larry Kelly convinces the opera diva to film a lip-synch version of Bizet's Carmen, substituting an early-career recording for Callas' by-then desiccated voice. Callas (Fanny Ardant, smudged French consonants and all) is finicky about the project--a stance viewers will sympathize with since Larry (Jeremy Irons) is forever running off to describe Carmen as a cash spigot to a roomful of greedy investors. Callas throws tantrums and pops pills with abandon, while Larry indulges in some intravenous drug use and a homosexual affair with a hearing-impaired and thoroughly untalented painter. Jay Rodan, who plays the painter, speaks in a needlessly annoying cadence ("When I... had my... operation... to try to repair my... hearing...") and generally tries to be as distracting as possible.

Callas Forever swings wildly from one tone to another, and far too much of the film--the painful scene where Callas pays an obsequious visit to the painter's sixth-floor walkup, for example--is dedicated to grim '70s "realism." Zeffirelli lets his lush impulses take over only in little self-contained segments, including a truly great scene wherein Larry peers through a crack in the door to witness Callas in the midst of a weepy and thoroughly Sirkian meltdown. And then there's the film within the film, which, though lovely, brings up some uncomfortable issues. If, at the end of the movie, Callas (or at least, Callas as ventriloquized by her old friend Zeffirelli) insists to Larry Kelly that she wants their film destroyed--that a lip-synch Carmen is a ghastly aesthetic travesty--then why does Zeffirelli let us see those tantalizing, ochre-tinted scenes? Fanny Ardant's mimed arias, no matter how minutely fitted to actual Callas recordings, certainly violate that proscription. ANNIE WAGNER

Easy
dir. Jane Weinstock
Nov 26-Dec 2 at the Varsity.

At one point in this patently ridiculous romantic comedy, a doctor tells a young woman that while she was in a coma, she kept screaming "Homer!" The woman smiles faintly because she knows that while she was in her coma (brought on after coaxing a jumper from a ledge and then accidentally falling herself), she was dreaming of having sex with Homer Simpson. Note to writer/director Jane Weinstock: People in comas do not scream. Nor do they dream, much less fantasize about sex with a potbellied cartoon character.

Weinstock--who according the press notes, counts John Cassavetes as one of her foremost influences--might also note that Cinema Verité does not generally traffic in plots involving a woman who names consumer products for a living, a charming acupuncturist who lives across the hall, and a public access-star boyfriend who inadvertently impregnates two bisexuals, one of whom (his former wife) then shacks up with the other (who goes into labor at the product-namer's birthday and spontaneously decides it's a good time to let the birthday girl know her boyfriend is the father). And I haven't even touched on the scene where the product-namer gives her pet turtle an enema.

This narrative diarrhea might--might--have been redeemed by some stellar visuals, but unfortunately the movie is rendered in amateurish digital video, full of jaundiced yellows and vibrating, bluish whites. Marguerite Moreau, who stars as the comatose product-namer, has TV-pretty features and dark Bambi eyes, but she looks appealing in about two scenes. In others, like the climactic sex scene set in a dim, all-blue hotel room (who thought that was a good idea?), she appears to be starved of oxygen. Easy is embalmed spontaneity--the worst kind of "indie" film dreck. ANNIE WAGNER