Stanley Tucci's third directing effort (his second solo), all starring himself, all period pieces, all dealing with one or another aspect of the Artistic Temperament, only this one based on fact. In it, Tucci plays the Southern-bred New Yorker staff writer Joe Mitchell, who profiles a true-blue bohemian with darker tendencies toward outright bum, moocher, and madman -- a former eugenicist who claims to have "measured the heads of a thousand Chippewa Indians," and author himself of an ongoing "oral history of the world," currently sitting at "one million, two hundred thousand words," the actual existence of which is in serious doubt. E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound are said to have written poems about him. A nude portrait of him with three penises is presented before our very eyes. And Ian Holm impersonates him as a sort of unstable weather pattern of histrionic flurries, squalls, gusts, and thunderstorms. Quite a character; not much of a movie. Not much, that is, in the way of incident, nor in the way of momentum, nor (apart from some last-minute romanticizing) in the way of a resolution. Interesting situation of the journalist's inability to shake free of his pesky subject after his piece is finished and published. Uninteresting and unsatisfying situation of a mysterious anonymous benefactor who puts up the bohemian at a seedy residential hotel for a time, and then puts him down again. Susan Sarandon, Hope Davis, Steve Martin. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd