Well, Odie, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. "A Prairie Home Companion" is my favorite movie of the year so far -- a statement you have to take with an asterisk because I've been living in a hermit cave for about three months -- and right now, if I had to make a list of Altman's ten best, this one would definitely be on it. You astutely detail the differences between "All That Jazz" and "A Prairie Home Companion," but I do think they share one big similarity, namely their belief in the inherent nobility of being a professional artist, somebody who views performing not just as a job or an obsession, but as a compulsion or a calling.

You're right that in Altman's movie, all three incarnations of "A Prairie Home Companion" -- Keillor's real-life source, the "show" within a film and the film itself -- are in some sense attempts to keep dying cultures alive or reanimate ones long dead. Reilly and Woody Harrelson's characters, while comic, are keeping alive some vague facsimile of cowboy/rural humor, a school of comedy that wasn't relevant to mainstream American culture when "Hee-Haw" was doing it 30 years ago. The family of Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and (finally, though it takes some doing) Lindsay Lohan are still grieving for their own dead relatives, all of whom presumably were musicians, too; they keep the memory of their loved ones alive by performings songs they used to sing together -- in some cases songs the deceased personally taught them.

Kevin Kline's Guy Noir (one of Keillor's most admittedly tiresome and irritating characters on the radio program) is an incarnation of a certain hardboiled 1940s radio/film noir cliche, an embodiment of a certain type of suave, cynical, macho man who was a museum piece when Altman dusted him off again -- and with help from Elliott Gould, reinvented him -- in "The Long Goodbye" back in 1975. And so on and so on. I know I'm walking off a cliff by citing these examples as proof that Altman (and Keillor) have a grand design, and some other tricks up their sleeves besides simply giving us a movie about death and dying (which God knows they do in a big way, as you point out).

One could certainly counter that some archetypes and performance schools are better left to die-- that evolution is the natural order of things, art and entertainment included, and nostalgia acts don't really reanimate anything, they're just a form of taxidermy. But I guess that depends on whether you value that particular art or not, or find some nobility in the professionalism of the artists keeping it alive (or resurrecting it) -- a sort of Hawskian admiration for another human being's willingness to commit wholeheartedly to the task at hand and stick with it, though not without a bit of self-awareness and even self-deprecating humor. (I felt as though the Reilly and Harrelson characters, for instance, knew deep down that they were riding along on schtick ponies, that they might as well be dressing up as Vikings or cavemen for all the relevance they had.

) Altman's made a lot of movies in this vein -- movies about the compulsion to perform, to testify in some quasi-religious sense -- including "The Company," "Nashville," "Kansas City" and even, in its fucked-up way, "Pret-a-Porter"; the man's a curmudgeon, yes -- he sees through everybody's personal/emotional bullshit even if they aren't capable of doing the same -- but curiously, the one aspect of life where he's not snide, where he is in fact shockingly sincere, is the respect he accords performers. He has affection for everyone with a performer's instinct, even the people who stink ("Nashville" deliberately has more mediocre to bad singers as good ones, but when the characters make an ass out of themselves, Altman usually mocks them not for daring to express themselves artistically in public, but for other delusions they harbor, and for their obliviousness to their own lack of talent). This might, in fact, be the one area where he most nakedly reveals his heart -- his buried sentimental streak.

Anybody who devotes his or her life to transforming life into art or entertainment gets a gold star from him, no matter how many balls of dung he flings their way. Given all this, it didn't surprise me that "A Prairie Home Companion" turned out to be a valentine to the whole "The Show Must Go" on cliche -- a means of sanctifying it, and linking the artist's desire to achieve immortality, even in a small way, with every living person's doomed wish to somehow cheat death. There is a sense in which to leave a legacy of art or entertainment, however modest, is to achieve some measure of immortality -- to leave some permanent mark, even if it's within your own family.

After I saw this movie for the first time, I went home and popped in a compilation CD of my maternal grandmother, Hazel O. Volkart, who composed and performed piano music in Kansas City, Altman's hometown; nobody except the occasionally piano student recognizes her name, but I sure do love that CD, and when I listen to it, I can picture hear clearly, sitting at the piano in the recording studio my mother rented back in 1983, overcoming the pain of bone marrow cancer long enough to pound out some of her own concertos and love songs. Granted, at this point I'm not really defending any specific aspect of "A Prairie Home Companion" the movie so much as I'm grafting my own family history and my own emotions onto Altman's film.

But on the other hand, I think it's designed to evoke those sorts of emotions. The Dangerous Woman is a device, not a character, and yeah, Madsen's pretty flat and many of her lines are a bit high school; and yes, Keillor's character is a benevolent whitewash of Altman's impresario tendencies, and a means of reassuring viewers that even though the great director can't stay alive much longer, don't grieve for him, becuase the death of an old man isn''t a tragedy, death is just a natural part of life, and so forth. You're absolutely right to say that Altman never would have tolerated such bullshit 30 or even 20 years ago.

But I'm inclined to cut the guy a lot of slack because of the legacy he's going to leave behind when he passes. There is such a thing as an Old Man movie, and this is one of them; I think John Huston's "The Dead" is another, and if I recall correctly, that one got reviews similar to Altman's latest -- even the pans or mixed reviews were respectful, as if nobody wanted to insult a beloved uncle who probably wasn't long for this world. But that's a type of sentimentality I'm willing to indulge.

Again, it might just be a personal thing -- it probably comes as no shock that this movie is the right movie for me at this particular time in my life, and yeah, I admit I'm probably grading it on a curve, out of personal need and my own rather slavish love of Altman. (Along with Spielberg and Coppola, he's probably the 70s giant whose work has meant the most to me, from childhood onward.) But what the hell; a lot of this stuff is subjective anyway.

I would never defend "Field of Dreams" as a pinnacle of cinematic art, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't cry watching it, because when that actor playing the dad took off his face mask, he reminded me of old photos of my grandfather. Half of moviegoing is what you bring to it -- sometimes more than half -- and any critic who presumes Olympian detachment in this regard is lying to himself and the reader. Now I've wandered so far off my original point that I don't have the energy to talk about "All That Jazz," a movie I probably love as much as you do, Odie.

In fact, I'm listening to "On Broadway" as I write this. But it's late, so I'll have to wax rhapsodic on Fosse's masterpiece some other time. Well, Odie, we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.