Taken on its own terms, "It's Kind of a Funny Story" is a delicately balanced work, rich in spirit but never melodramatic, and full of sharp observations and lovely performances. (Not to mention a totally irresistible, John Hughes-inspired musical number, featuring the Bowie-Queen hit "Under Pressure.") Viewers are likelier to identify with Keir Gilchrist and Emma Roberts, as the attractive young couple who meet in this universe of damaged people and begin to understand how fortunate they really are. But it's the supremely deadpan tragicomic performance by Galifianakis that gives the movie its heart.

When Craig (Gilchrist), a stressed-out Brooklyn, N.Y., high school student, has one too many suicidal fantasies and checks himself into a locked psychiatric unit, he comes under the wing of Bobby, who comes off at first as another one of Galifianakis' funny-sad clown characters: supremely overconfident, lacking in self-knowledge, unable to comb his hair correctly. Compared to some people on the ward, Bobby seems perfectly normal. He talks in English sentences, he's oriented in time and place, he harbors no grandiose delusions. He knows the doctors and nurses and has earned their trust; he smuggles Craig off the ward to go shoot hoops and buy junk food.

Incrementally, through a world of small moments and gestures, Galifianakis begins to convey hints of the nearly bottomless despair and self-hatred that lies below Bobby's bonhomie -- and it's like seeing his supposedly amusing characters in "The Hangover" or "Dinner for Schmucks" from a new angle. It's a brilliant dramatic performance precisely because it avoids huge dramatic moments, and relies almost entirely on wit and understatement to convey a painful emotional condition. By the time we learn how serious Bobby's life situation is, we almost don't need to know. That competent, doofusy facade is costing him immensely, and his future -- as in, whether or not to keep on living -- is very much shrouded in doubt.

"We were excited to find out what Zach could do with this kind of role," Anna Boden told me in Toronto. "I think we had a pretty good idea that he'd be able to pull it off after meeting with him and seeing, first of all, how down he was to try something different and, second of all, how grounded and warm and kind and charming a person he is. He ended up really knocking it out of the park, and doing things that went beyond our expectations. Every day, we were excited to see what he was doing on the set, with the dramatic elements as well as the comedic ones."

If "It's Kind of a Funny Story" has a much broader potential audience than anything Boden and Fleck have made before, it might also attract the smallest audience of Galifianakis' movie career. That might be a good thing for all parties. The filmmakers badly need to get out of the dwindling indie ghetto, and "Funny Story" might be one of those rare films that can please teenagers and their parents, date-night moviegoers and art-house film buffs. (I thoroughly recommend it to other urban parents, negotiating the ridiculous extremes of the big-city public schools.) Some people may feel this is a trivial or lightweight teen film, but I strongly disagree, and it's Zach Galifianakis, playing a guy who seems to contain both Hamlet and King Lear's Fool in one body, who lends it gravity and a dash of darkness.

"It's Kind of a Funny Story" is now showing in roughly 500 theaters nationwide, with more likely to follow. 

I don't claim the review makes its case with perfect clarity, and I didn't expect many people to agree completely. Being forcefully told that you're full of crap goes with the job description, especially in an inherently subjective endeavor like movie criticism. I was gratified that a lot of people read the review, and e-mailed or Tweeted it onward -- and was somewhere between flattered and startled that Roger Ebert posted a lengthy takedown of my review on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. Like almost everyone in this insular field, I venerate Roger as a passionate movie lover, a generous spirit, and an old-school journalist who has made the transition to new media and now pretty much owns the joint.

I thought Roger's response was worth a response of my own, partly because I think he's misreading or misinterpreting me, but mostly because I think the cultural gulf between our understandings of "Secretariat" offers a fascinating opportunity to talk about all kinds of stuff film critics don't generally discuss: the nature and meaning of propaganda, the ideology (or lack thereof) of Hollywood movies, the role of religion in public discourse and maybe the gap between idealism and cynicism when considering movies, or the world. (Actually, activists and commentators on the right are way ahead of us: They talk about this stuff all the time, and have compelled Hollywood to understand that there's enormous demand for a movie like "Secretariat.")

UPDATE: I also posted this to Roger's blog, where he has responded. Scroll to the bottom of the page to read that.

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Well, gee. Thanks, Roger. (I think.)

I'm not eager to get into a public dispute with you over a Disney movie that you found "straightforward" and "lovingly crafted" and I found weird, fake and inexplicably disturbing, which may be all this boils down to. The world isn't likely to care much, and will render its verdict without our help.

I appreciate that you opened and closed this piece with some kind words, and I have great respect for you as a man and a critic. That said, I think the only place where we agree here is when you say, "O'Hehir's reading [of 'Secretariat'] is wildly eccentric." I'll cop to that happily -- my review of the film was willfully hyperbolic, even outrageous, in hopes of getting people to look at a formulaic Disney sports movie through fresh eyes. I know I don't have to explain the function or uses of hyperbole to you, since it's a technique you often employ (here and elsewhere). My hyperbole in the "Secretariat" review was supposed to be funny, and also to provoke a response. I appear to have succeeded brilliantly with the second part! The results on "funny" are more mixed.

Now, clearly I could have written a more "normal" review, in which I said something like: "Secretariat" was kind of fun to watch, but it bugged me. It presents a prettied-up, phony-baloney vision of America in the early '70s, in a transparent effort to appeal to the "family-values" crowd who ate up "The Blind Side" -- people who want a comforting and unchallenging movie without any sex or swearing. There's nothing wrong with that as a way to make a buck, but this example is ultra-tame, scrubbed clean of any genuine conflict or drama, and I pretty much think it's crap.

Now, I gather you would have disagreed with that, and pretty sharply, but I very much doubt you'd have bothered writing several thousand words ripping me apart. Now perhaps you see the genius of my plan!

Seriously, that is what I think -- and pretty much what I said, albeit in somewhat stronger language. In your haste to take me down, I think you frequently read my gag lines as being deadly serious, mix or conflate different aspects of my argument (e.g., I don't say or think anything about the horse being evil, or representing evil), and confuse events in real life with what we see in the film.

Now then: I do indeed compare "Secretariat" to "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl," a deliberately outrageous claim that, I suspect, pissed you off right at the outset. Let me elaborate a little. In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing." Viewed that way, of course, a very large proportion of Hollywood movies could be considered propaganda, which is a subject for another time. (The shoe may fit.)

Of course it's offensive to compare a contemporary filmmaker to Riefenstahl -- although she was unquestionably a great director -- but I never said or suggested that Randall Wallace had consciously or deliberately created a film whose primary purpose was ideological. It's more like the ideology of reassurance and comfort and gorgeous images -- what I refer to as the "fantasia of American whiteness and power," which is, yes, going kind of far -- is so built into this kind of movie you can't get it out. I do, however, see Wallace's desire to appeal to Christian audiences and a never-enumerated set of "middle-American values" as politically coded, at least to some degree. (Or rather, it's coded if you want it to be; of course he's happy with secular left-wing types watching the movie too.)

You believe, or suggest, that I damn the film for not noticing Vietnam or Watergate, but that isn't quite right. As I think I make clear, I was struck by the oddness of the film's idealized, "Ozzie and Harriet" portrait of American life, which feels more like the '50s, being set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. That's a suggestive fact, an element of the overall picture, not an indictment. You indulge in some hyperbole of your own in suggesting that I accuse Penny Chenery (the movie character? the real person? I am not sure) of being an evil right-winger, when I never say, and do not know, anything about her politics. Watch out for the "O'Hehirian Riefenstahlian TeaPartyite" clique, though --we're on the rise!

I could go on, and I guess I will just a little: I never say or suggest that anyone considered the Triple Crown victories "as a demonstration of white superiority." (I honestly don't believe you don't get the "Nietzschean Überhorse" joke. Secretariat was a product of eugenics if any living creature ever was.) You suggest that I attack Randall Wallace for his religious faith, but I do not, and you cite nothing to support this. You say that I see "a repository of Christianity (of the wrong sort, presumably)" in the film, when I say clearly that religion plays almost no role in the story. On the other hand, it's simply a fact that Disney is marketing the film to Christian conservatives, and neither of us is required to have an opinion about it. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say you refuse to allow me to define the film as "Tea Party-friendly." Is Sarah Palin not allowed to like it?

On the film's racial issues: You suggest that I am demeaning the real-life Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's groom. I say nothing about Eddie Sweat. I am discussing a fictional character, the only black person ever seen in the film, who is presented as subordinate, unreflective, constantly cheerful and uniquely well equipped to communicate with an animal. Could there be such a person? Of course. But in the context of my perception of the film's total universe, this feels like an unwholesome and old-fashioned stereotype (for which there is a borderline-offensive name I will not use).

Similarly, I have a tough time believing you don't get what I'm trying to say about the Pancho Martin character. Those who reported on the Triple Crown at the time have said that the real Pancho Martin was neither talkative nor boastful, and had no particular adversarial relationship with Penny Chenery. That stuff we saw in the movie did not happen. But the filmmakers have taken the one faintly "ethnic" or non-American character in the movie, and made him thoroughly despicable. What was that? An accident? An aesthetic choice? Or a lazy and coded shortcut?

For me, all in all, "Secretariat" adds up to something that looks pretty but tastes pretty bad, and apparently I expressed that view with a degree of force you found "insane." Frankly, I wish you had avoided those kinds of epithets, and focused more on areas where we may have real differences of philosophical or political or aesthetic opinion and interpretation to discuss. I'm inclined to believe that you understood my argument well enough -- better than you claim to, at least -- but that it pissed you off so much you just didn't want to deal with it. But that's only a theory, and I assure you that my faith in Roger Ebert remains. Generally speaking.

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UPDATE: Ebert's response, just posted on his Sun-Times blog, is typically concise and gracious, and comes with a zinger or two:

Thanks for responding. I understand your points, and have had similar thoughts of my own about some films. But you're correct: I didn't read it as satire, maybe because I've been softened up by so many similar Armond White reviews that he (apparently) writes seriously.

We can agree perhaps on one thing: Your review helps us define what Rotten Tomatoes considers "positive."

Here's what I wrote about "Nowhere Boy" last January after attending the film's Sundance premiere, with the celebrated couple in attendance. (I've made some edits for clarity and context.)

There is no more mythologized figure in the history of pop culture than John Lennon, unless it's Lennon's teenage idol, Elvis Presley. So I wasn't even sure I wanted to bother with Sam Taylor-Wood's "Nowhere Boy," a retelling of Lennon's late teen years in Liverpool, just before the creation of the Beatles. I'm glad I did. Aaron Johnson's hulking, almost loutish performance as the angry young Liverpudlian may displease some Lennon-worshipers, but the movie is an elegantly rendered surprise. This is a classic British family melodrama, anchored by one of the subtlest, richest roles in Kristin Scott Thomas' impressive career.

Johnson plays the 17-year-old Lennon as a boiling pit of anger and yearning. He's almost desperate for approval and affection (and convinced of his own genius) but covers that most of the time with a mask of sardonic, often cutting humor. "Why didn't God make me Elvis?" he jokes to his party-girl mother, Julia (a lovely, vulnerable performance from Anne-Marie Duff). "I'll get the bastard back for that."

Julia's answer -- "He was saving you for John Lennon!" -- reads on the page too much like movie dialogue, but Duff pulls it off. Matt Greenhalgh's adept and concise screenplay, based on a memoir by Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, generally avoids such pseudo-prophetic moments. (Greenhalgh also wrote "Control," Anton Corbijn's film about a doomed rock icon from a different era, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.)

If this Lennon seems like an arrogant little shit, sometimes irresistible but often insufferable, Johnson and the filmmakers have based that characterization largely on Lennon's own reflections, particularly in post-Beatles interviews. More broadly, this Lennon is an almost archetypal angry young man or rebel schoolboy of British Isles fiction and drama, a Liverpool cousin of Stephen Dedalus or the kids in Lindsay Anderson's films, dreaming of escape from his strangled, provincial environment.

But as I mentioned earlier, "Nowhere Boy" isn't just about aspiring rock god John Lennon, and how he meets a couple of guitar-playing schoolmates named Paul (Thomas Sangster) and George (Sam Bell) and starts a skiffle band called the Quarrymen. Those things happen in the film, and Sangster is wonderful in limited screen time, playing 15-year-old McCartney as an angel-faced, serious-minded prodigy. "You don't seem much like a rock 'n' roll guy," John taunts him. "Why?" asks Paul. "Because I don't run around smashing things up and acting like a dick?"

That stuff is essentially context for the film's central drama, the three-way, push-pull relationship between John, his damaged and flighty mother, and his redoubtable Aunt Mimi (Scott Thomas), who raised John after both his parents abandoned him at age 5. Mimi is a fortress of middle-class English propriety against the heavily Irish, heavily working-class landscape of Liverpool. She refuses to grieve after her beloved husband dies ("It's just the two of us now, so let's get on with it," she tells John), runs a rigorous household of proper teatimes and dinnertimes and is of course predictably suspicious of John's rock 'n' roll dreams. You watch Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi and as the deranged French housewife in the recent "Leaving," and she barely seems like the same person; I'm not sure there's another living actress with this breadth and range.

"Nowhere Boy" is less concerned with a boy's first steps toward stardom than with his first steps toward emotional maturity, and those lessons are all provided by Mimi, not by John's irresistible, unstable and profoundly unreliable mother. Julia takes him on day trips to Blackpool, dances with him to Screamin' Jay Hawkins records, showers him with borderline-inappropriate affection and then disappears, both emotionally and actually. Mimi, on the other hand, put in the hard work of preparing a brilliant but deeply wounded child for the heavy lifting of manhood -- and the film makes a strong case that without her influence John Lennon would never have become John Lennon. Scott Thomas' delicate, ferocious performance captures a woman quietly at war with herself, who begins to realize that her vision of respectability may not fit the remarkable young man in her care.

A packed house of Sundance civilians and celebrities, including Elton John, gave "Nowhere Boy" an extended ovation, and then sat reverently while Taylor-Wood delivered droll anecdotes about her phone conversations with Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono, who both, slowly and incrementally, gave the film their blessing. "I'd be shopping in the supermarket and, oh my God, it's Paul -- Sir Paul! -- on the phone," she told us. "He'd just give me some little tidbit, something he remembered about John or about Mimi, and then he'd hang up."

"Nowhere Boy" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

Angry and elegant is an unusual combination, and as a wealthy, well-connected policy wonk who makes expensive movies aimed at a large audience, Ferguson has gotten a mixed reception from the documentary world and from film critics. But "Inside Job," which was the smash hit of last spring's Cannes Film Festival and reaches American theaters this month, has made me a believer. Ferguson is here to tell the world that the crisis that has wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth, thrown millions of people out of work and out of their homes, and further widened the global gulf between rich and poor was no accident. It was a crime.

Ferguson, who made millions in the software industry of the 1990s and has worked as a scholar or lecturer at MIT, University of California at Berkeley, and the Brookings Institution, is definitely no left-wing bomb-thrower or closet Marxist. But he plays one in the movies, you might say. He is both more pragmatic and more intellectual than most people in the film world, which makes him an unusual and challenging interview subject. Here's what I wrote about Ferguson and "Inside Job" from Cannes last May (edited for length and clarity), followed by an excerpt from our conversation.

"Inside Job" offers a lucid and devastating history of how the crash happened, who caused it and how they got away with it. Furthermore, Ferguson argues, if we don't stop those people -- preferably by removing them from power, arresting them and sending them to prison -- they will certainly do it again.

With a damning parade of interviews, images and public testimony, Ferguson illustrates how, by the time the 21st-century bubble reached its peak around 2006, the financial industry had ridden 20-plus years of manic free-market deregulation and neoliberal fiscal policy from one crisis to the next, surfing a rising tide of greed and corruption. There are several people in this movie, prominent among them former George W. Bush adviser Glenn Hubbard and Harvard economics chairman John Y. Campbell, who must be very, very sorry that they agreed to talk to Ferguson. Some critics have complained about Ferguson sandbagging such clearly unprepared subjects -- but, no, I'm sorry. There are some people who richly deserve public humiliation, and it's totally gratifying to see them get it.

I met Ferguson, a lean, intense fellow in his mid-50s, for a post-breakfast conversation in the oddly apposite setting of a restaurant overlooking the Cannes beachfront.

Your film and Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" sequel tackle approximately the same subject matter. He's built his movie around the financial term "moral hazard." What you show in the film -- a situation where we've deregulated the entire universe and created a strong disincentive for people to behave ethically -- isn't that the ultimate illustration of moral hazard?

Yes. Deregulation permitted, allowed and created an industry where moral hazard was the norm and the universal condition. And people took advantage. When there is moral hazard one usually finds that people take advantage and in this case a whole industry took advantage.

Do you think the deregulation of, say, the Reagan years and thereafter started from a pure ideological position? Or was it influenced from the beginning by the financial firms who had a great deal to gain?

The latter. Well, it was a combination of the two; it wasn't just that. It was both of those things. And you saw in the '80s for the first time the beginnings of this unholy alliance between the financial services industry and the academics who pushed the free-market ideological-intellectual agenda. We talk a little bit about that in the film. About the fact that Charles Keating paid Alan Greenspan to write him a consulting letter, for example. We actually have a lot more material on that that was in a rough cut of the film, which I took out for reasons of length and I have many regrets about.

One extraordinary thing that we have is a filmed interview, sometime in the late 1980s, with Sen. William Proxmire, who at the time was the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He says in an extremely blunt, direct way: My committee was bought off by the savings and loan industry, which led to the passage of the Garn-St. Germain Act of 1982, following which there was this extraordinary wave of criminality. So the money was there from the beginning -- both money and ideology. Over time I think the money has come to be even more dominant. Now, of course there are people who still believe in free-market ideology, but that's not the core of what's going on; the core of what's going on is the money.

This may be forcing a parallel, but here's what occurred to me: At the beginning of Marxism-Leninism, the leaders who believe in what they're selling. We can assume that Lenin and Trotsky believed that they were changing the world for the better, history was on their side, and so forth. Maybe Stalin did too, at first. By the end of the Soviet state, you have a completely corrupt environment in which nobody, including the leadership, actually believes in the Communist future. I wonder if we're seeing a speeded-up version of that same ideological decay in the world of free-market capitalism.

I think that's an extremely accurate and perceptive analogy. And it's also a very disturbing one. The idea that the United States is being taken over by this utterly cynical group of people who know that this is a rigged game and just kind of give it lip service. I think that there's a lot of that. The United States has changed over the past 30 years. America has changed. And it really is time I think for the American people to unchange it.

As you demonstrate, these guys have taken advantage of the way Congress works to fund candidates, control the process and control and actually write legislation. It's not quite enough to throw the bums out. We have to remake the political process as well.

It is an extremely daunting problem, but I wouldn't say that I'm entirely pessimistic about it. There have been times before in history where a country, a government, got taken over by some bad people who did some bad things and the population threw them out. I think there's a reasonable analogy in that regard with Watergate. There's a situation where one could have said -- and many people did say -- "Look, how are you going to get rid of the president? How are you going to get rid of a whole administration?" We did.

Just because the system has been taken over doesn't mean that that always has to be the case. I am reasonably optimistic that over time the American people are getting angrier about this. That's happening now. Will they get angry enough? Will there be enough action? We don't know yet.

One manifestation of that, I suppose, is the Tea Party movement. That represents populist anger, at least in theory. But if it's just incoherent, xenophobic rage that's ultimately in thrall to the Republican Party, that's not likely to disempower the financial elite.

Situations like this are dangerous and unstable. The Great Depression gave us Franklin Roosevelt, but it also gave us Adolf Hitler. When a system is under stress and things get extreme and people are angry, they call for reform but they are also vulnerable to exploitation, and that is disturbing.

In your film we see recent congressional testimony, from April 2010, in which Goldman Sachs executives discuss selling securities to major clients, such as pension funds, that they themselves were betting would fail. How does someone in that world justify that behavior to themselves?

In a number of conversations I've had with bankers, I've been struck that they find it surprising that somebody would raise ethical questions. They don't find it surprising that legal questions could be raised. "Could I get in trouble?" That's a discussion they're very familiar with. But, "Is this right or wrong?" That's not a discussion they have often.

As you depict it, this industry has completely absorbed the idea that there is no right and wrong, there's only making money. Maybe I'm naive, but that 's pretty shocking.

It was shocking to me. It's not like I didn't know that there were greedy people in the financial world. When I started making the film I knew that there had to have been some bad behavior, but I had no idea that on a very large scale people had designed securities with the intention of selling them and gambling on their failure. I was stunned when I discovered it.

You have a fascinating conversation with Eliot Spitzer where you suggest that the financial sector has become an enormous criminal enterprise. You yourself were a high-tech entrepreneur, and what he says about the differences between the two worlds is very interesting.

I asked him about this striking, distinctive, unique level of criminality in finance, which is not restricted to the behavior that led to this crisis. There have been many other examples of criminal behavior in finance. There are now three major banks that have been convicted of large-scale money laundering for Iran. Just a few days ago, ABN AMRO signed -- I love this charming phrase -- a "deferred prosecution agreement" and agreed to pay a $500 million fine because they did it too. So it's an industry that has a very high level of criminality. It has become, I personally think, a criminal industry.

I asked Spitzer about that: Why this industry? I have some experience with high technology and the same thing doesn't happen. He agreed with me, but we actually didn't show his full answer. His full answer was: Look, high technology is an industry where you create money by doing something different. In contrast, finance is really kind of zero-sum. It's a trading game, it's a gambling game. There's a relatively fixed pool of money, but there's a lot of money and the way you make more, as a banker, is by making sure that someone else makes less. It's really hard to keep that industry ethical without appropriate legal and regulatory controls. If Intel made microprocessors that blew up the computers they're in, Intel would go out of business. The same is not true for financial services. It was a very sobering moment.

You cover the question of executive compensation in the film, the insane salaries and bonuses these guys take home. Is that a largely symbolic question, or does it speak to the corruption of the system?

Oh, it's an extremely real question. First of all it's a very obvious symptom and example of the corruption of the system, but it's much more than that. It's also systemically important. These people do these things because they can make money doing them and get away with it. And if they couldn't, they would behave differently. If there's a place in the world where you can make a billion dollars by being a criminal, that place is going to attract criminals. And if you have a system that is appropriately regulated so the only way that you can make money is by doing something worthwhile, you are not going to attract criminals to run that industry.

We now have a situation where the way that you can make the most money is by doing criminal things. And you get away with it. You can even destroy your own company. In some cases, destroying your company is the way that you make the most money. And that's bad. Personally, from the experience of researching and making this film, I think that legal controls on the structure of executive compensation are a very important part of fixing this.

By the way, from the experience of starting my software company, I can tell you that people in high technology are extremely aware of this. I dealt with the venture capital firm that invested in my company and they were extremely clear. They said: You're going to get a salary. It's going to be $100,000 a year. It's never going to go up. You will never get a bonus. You will have no outside activities of any kind. You will not make a dime doing anything else. Your stock will vest over five years. And if you want to make money, you make that stock worth something. Period. It's really simple.

 "Inside Job" opens Oct. 8 in New York and Oct. 15 in Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow. 

Well, I kept watching all right, more out of formal or academic curiosity than anything else (and I'm not claiming that's an honorable reason). But I decline to take the movie seriously, or lend much credence to its claims of meaningfulness or moral equivalence. A story about a brutalized woman who turns on her attackers and exacts a level of grotesque, Grand Guignol fantasy vengeance the redneck rapists could never even have imagined is not a "feminist" film, if that word has any meaning. (Purist alert: I watched the "unrated version," which will open in roughly 10 cities, and presumably has more nudity and violence than the R-rated version that will be more widely available.)

I don't propose going off into some long film-theory tangent about whether horror movies are inherently misogynist or not, and what we mean by that, but let's review briefly. Meir Zarchi's crudely effective 1978 original -- and yes, fans, I know its real title is "Day of the Woman" -- had the virtue, if you want to call it that, of adding a new twist to the horror-movie lexicon. Zarchi showed us an attractive young writer being repeatedly raped and beaten by upstate New York yokels at her rural cabin, but lavished even more attention on her subsequent campaign of terror, as she hunts them down one by one and dispatches them in imaginative if highly implausible fashion.

Even then, Zarchi was riffing off the already-existing horror convention of the Final Girl: The movie's last surviving protagonist, who must wage a climactic battle against the masked madman or the slimy ghoul or the whatever, is invariably female. Sometimes she prevails and sometimes she doesn't (and every possible attempt to fake us out on this question has already been tried). But you rarely see a Final Dude; that would be like ending a romance novel by having the bosomy heroine decide that she doesn't especially like the sideburned, swashbuckling count and would rather hoe onions. Really, all that happened in "I Spit on Your Grave" was that Zarchi took the combat between the Final Girl and the monsters, made it especially violent and sadistic, and drew it out so it filled up two-thirds of the movie.

In updating this dubious achievement in cinema history -- and let's just pass over the question of whether that was worth doing in the first place -- director Steven R. Monroe and writer Stuart Morse could, in theory, have come up with something interesting. Their movie is far superior to Zarchi's on a technical level; the acting is mostly quite good, and Neil Lisk's cinematography is cool, graceful and ominous. We've come a long way since 1978, at least in terms of public discussion of female sexuality, and this version's heroine, Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler), definitely fills the role of big-city hipster chick, emanating unconscious creative-class privilege. With her long, straight hair, hip-hugger jeans, designer running shorts and preoccupied demeanor, Jennifer looks exactly as if she's taking time off from writing first-person sexual confessions for Salon to crank out that first, impassioned novel about her suburban girlhood.

In fact, when Jennifer first meets Johnny (Jeff Branson), the muscular, buzz-cut lunk who runs the local gas station -- the story has relocated from upstate New York to backwoods Louisiana, which makes for nice pictures but is also far more of a cliché -- a momentary spark seems to pass between them. The balance between fantasy and reality would be vastly different in this film if those two characters were less like horror-movie archetypes and more like people. Couldn't Jennifer be less of a virginal priss, and at least be tempted by the idea of this good-looking and (at first) polite country boy? Couldn't Johnny be less of a village idiot and a bit more of a smooth talker, maybe a guy who's seen a few reruns of "Sex and the City" on TBS?

But I guess at that point we're going in a totally different direction, into a Joyce Carol Oates novel about complicated and messed-up people or something. Needless to say, that isn't this story. Any time Monroe wastes on developing Jennifer and Johnny as characters is time he doesn't spend showing them doing other stuff: Johnny forcing Jennifer to deep-throat his revolver, say, or Jennifer, somewhat later, pulling out Johnny's teeth one by one with a pair of pliers. (Yeah, I just "spoiled" two scenes, and you know what? The complaint desk is closed at this time. Anyway, don't worry: There is way, way worse stuff than that in this movie.)

Despite seeming like nothing worse than a low-rent rural Lothario, Johnny soon talks a few of his dumb-ass buddies -- including the mentally disabled Matthew (Chad Lindberg), who is sadistically goaded into coming along -- into paying Jennifer a late-night visit and bringing a video camera. At first they just want to torment and terrify her, until the arrival of the vastly more depraved local sheriff (Andrew Howard) sends it in a darker direction, but arguably the drawn-out scenes of verbal and psychological torture are harder to watch than anything that follows. For one thing, they're entirely too realistic and too familiar; we realize while watching that thousands of women are subjected to this kind of abuse every day, even if relatively few get gang-raped by backwoods numbskulls right afterward.

See, that's where the problem lies in claiming that "I Spit on Your Grave" contains some kind of moral balance. Yes, Jennifer miraculously survives being raped by five guys and dumped naked in the swamp, and comes back to wreak elaborate vengeance with the help of industrial chemicals, garden shears, fish guts, triple-barbed fishhooks and hungry crows. (Work it out for yourselves.) But the key word in that sentence is "miraculously." Jennifer's ordeal is convincing enough, but nothing about her revenge is adequately explained or even remotely plausible. Where has she been sleeping and what has she been eating? Where did she get clothes? Did she dredge her iPhone out of the swamp, dry it off and place a J. Crew order? It's as if the rape and near-murder has turned her into an undead, Freddy Krueger-style supervillain, capable of going anywhere and doing anything and possessed of unlimited equipment and know-how. Some of her torture setups are like New York performance-art installations, circa 1988; they'd take a team of builders three or four days to assemble.

It isn't just that two wrongs don't make a right, or that becoming more sociopathic than a group of dead-end criminals doesn't make Jennifer much of a feminist role model. It's more that the whole movie is a bizarre psychological game, in which we permit ourselves to watch (and/or suffer, and/or enjoy) an all-too-realistic and brutal rape, and then repent at leisure by watching a long series of gruesome but utterly ludicrous torture scenes. Here's a news flash: Horror movies always challenge us to move back and forth between victim and perpetrator, the "male gaze" and the female. (I'm not trying to convince you to like them, if you don't.) Once in a while, they do it with imagination and style, but this well-crafted example just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claim that it means something. Well, it doesn't. So unless you're exactly the kind of obsessive who already knew you had to catch this before you started reading, don't bother.

In its own strange way, "Secretariat" is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it's an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia 'tude. "Secretariat" is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year's hit "The Blind Side" (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a "true story" as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues -- self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. -- without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.

Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in "The Blind Side" (where it's more like text, period), "Secretariat" actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she's like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean Überhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn't human at all.

Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I'll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK -- you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible -- Penny's eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of "The Brady Bunch" -- but our heroine's double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words "Vietnam" and "Nixon" are never uttered.)

One shouldn't impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can't help thinking that "Secretariat" is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck's sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in -- well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.

Religion and politics are barely mentioned in the story of Chenery and her amazing horse, but it's clear that "Secretariat" was constructed and marketed with at least one eye on the conservative Christian audiences who embraced "The Blind Side." The film opens with a voice-over passage from the Book of Job and ends with a hymn. Wallace, also the director of "We Were Warriors" and the writer of "Pearl Harbor" and "Braveheart," is one of mainstream Hollywood's few prominent Christians, and has spoken openly about his faith and his desire to make movies that appeal to "people with middle-American values."

Hey, all's fair in art and commerce. Hollywood has finally woken up (a few decades late) to the enormous consumer power of the Christian market, and given all the namby-pamby Tinseltown liberalism right-wingers love to complain about, it's about time. But it's legitimate to wonder exactly what Christian-friendly and "middle-American" inspirational values are being conveyed here, or whether they're just providing cover for some fairly ordinary right-wing ideology and xenophobia. This long-suffering female Job overcomes such tremendous obstacles as having been born white and Southern and possessed of impressive wealth and property, and who then lucks into owning a genetic freak who turned out to be faster and stronger than any racehorse ever foaled. And guess what? She triumphs anyway!

If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That's pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant -- and it's tough not to notice that he's one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol' horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.

To move from content back to form, let me repeat that there's a whole lot to like in "Secretariat." Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys' club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids' laundry. It's hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York's Belmont Stakes. It's a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich's screenplay runs out of let's-go-get-'em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat's four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).

Despite those thrilling sequences, you don't learn much more about the world of racing in "Secretariat" than you learn about Facebook in "The Social Network" (and a lot of the stuff about racing in this movie is wrong or misleading). (You won't learn anything about anything from John Malkovich's mailed-in performance as eccentric French-Canadian trainer Lucien Laurin.) Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power. Horses don't go to the movies, and this movie is about human beings, and our nonsensical but inescapable yearning to find the keys to the future in stupid ideas about a past that never existed.