JULIA ROBERTS AS WILL AND IDEA. Good heavens. I just saw half an hour of the movie Pretty Woman. I usually manage to avoid such cultural touchstones during their first run, mostly by what the scientists call natural selection ("A new movie with Julia Roberts or an evening drinking in a dank basement? The choice is clear!"). And when I do catch up with them, I am usually disappointed. I saw, for example, Forrest Gump years after its release and found it a depressingly easy and dim-witted sneer against twenty years of American cultural upheaval -- in other words, pretty much what I expected, which is never the desired result of a trip to the Fantasy Factory.

But this movie is genuinely astonishing. A poor but honest prostitute meets cute and makes nice with a sensitive zillionaire john! How could I have missed it in the coming attractions! I wonder if my old friend Professor Hurley has seen it. I'm sure he would appreciate it. The zillionaire woos the prostitute by letting her drive his borrowed status car (that the pedals are close together make it better for women than for men to drive it, she tells him, because "women have smaller feet -- 'course, I'm a size nine-and-a-half"). He pays her for a night of subdued romantic dialogue and sex. I thought it was a bit much that he got sex, too -- after all, $300 is far less than the authors were paid for the subdued romantic dialogue -- but he makes up for it by paying a further $3000 to take over her life for a week. What a catch!

The john is quietly amused (and, from the wisps of foreshadowing blowing through the early scenes, would continue to be quietly amused) by the reaction of his fellow aristos and associated bourgeois to this diamond-in-the-rough-trade. If I were a deconstructionist, I would call this a landmark in the hard bargain made by the powers that be to lure the masses to the consumerism that still afflicts us all: they would allow a great deal more latitude in the area of sexual fantasy if it could be inextricably linked to money. I wonder if Rick Santorum has seen it. I'm sure every hip-hop artist has.

I couldn't keep watching -- my bile-flap inevitably began to quiver -- but I am content that I got the money-shot, as it were.

Now one of these days I'll see My Best Friend's Wedding and really break it down.