We watched A Prairie Home Companion last night, but to be perfectly honest, I was drifting in and out throughout the film. Olive and I set off for a bicycle tour of Tuscany next week, and the lower-body training is exhausting. I also had one or two Rob Roys with dinner, which didn’t help matters. But from what I saw, I don’t think I missed much. Click below to read our full reviews.

Cliff: A Prairie Home Companion is a perfectly good NPR radio show, but it should not have been made into a movie. Midwesterners and their sense of humor are a lot like academics and their dissertations: Only interesting to themselves, and to one another. The one thing I really enjoyed was the singing, which brought me back to my old Yale Glee Club days. Jolly, jolly are the days, ‘neath the elms of dear old Yale…In fact I was so deep in reminiscence after the movie finally ended that I made myself another Rob Roy in the study, and looked up my fellow ex-tenor I, Richard Mansfield, who I hadn’t spoken to in six years. “Hello?” a small, terrified voice answered after two rings. I suddenly realized that it was one o’clock in the morning, and I hung up right away on Richard’s Japanese wife. Childish, I suppose, but the point is that I would expect more from an Altman film.

Olive: Well, I’ve never listened to A Prairie Home Companion, because on Saturday afternoons I have my Daughters of the American Revolution meeting, and then the girls and I like to go to Payard for chocolate and Banyuls – so as you can imagine, I don’t exactly rise with the dawn on Sundays. It’s always been my position that a screenwriter shouldn’t expect you to have listened to his radio show, because an artistic work must be able to stand on its own, and it’s fair to say that A Prairie Home stands, stumbles about, and falls over like a toddler who crashed into the screen door. Though it seems to have been intended as an ode to radio or the past, with a side of bitter midwestern humor about death and religion, it comes out as a confused, middle-aged mess. Basically, the theater where PHC is broadcast every week is being bought out by the evil company of the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), but the Midwestern performers put on their last show like it was their first. Also, someone we barely get to meet dies backstage in his shorts, thanks to an angel, who also attempts to protect the theater and lethargically comfort people. Unfortunately, Virginia Madsen’s angel was one step up from the one in Barbarella; benign, expressionless and blond. Also, Lindsay Lohan is laughable as a suicidal teenager, who turns into a high powered CPA with a smoker’s rasp and a pony-tail. If that’s what heaven looks like, I’ll take Tommy Lee Jones.