Peter Falk stars as a 1950's script writer for a New Orleans radio station's soap operas. Apparently he dislikes Albanians and allows his radio soap operas to take strange detours into jokes at the expense of Albanians.

The movie also has a movie within a movie involving a romance between 36-year old Barbara Hershey and 21-years young Keanu Reeves.

The real star of the movie is the city of New Orleans and the amazing soundtrack of Wynton Marsalis. He really did a hell of a job with his compositions, but hey the guy is from New Orleans -- who better to set loose to write a soundtrack about his home city.

It centers around a young writer (Reeves) who becomes smitten with his world-weary older aunt (well, aunt-by-marriage -- they are not blood relatives). Barbara Hershey plays the aunt, who plays the lovely 36-year-old divorcee who finds herself attracted to this sweet 21-year-old young man. She thinks she wants someone "older" and "dull," so she can have some stability in her life. But, as her sister tells her later -- "You won't change. You're too wild." So she ends up falling for this younger man who has dreams of being a writer in Paris.

Their romance is sweet and heartfelt, but the true hilarity comes in the form of Peter Falk, who plays an extremely eccentric radio serial writer who is manipulating the whole town with his sensational writing. The town loves the tabloid-like melodrama he interjects into the plots; they are completely hooked. And Falk gets a lot of his ideas for the story by setting up Reeves and Hershey -- encouraging their romance (and then lifting big parts of their conversations to each other and putting it in the radio show). He also manipulates the whole town by targeting Albanians. Over and over, Albanian jokes. Albanian slander. The Albanians in town take notice!

The absurdity of the overripe plots of the radio serial are absolutely *hilarious*. We are taken into the "world" of the radio serial plot, where actors Peter Gallagher, Dan Hedaya, Elizabeth McGovern, John Larroquette, and Hope Lange play the "fictional" characters come to life in everyone's imaginations. These scenes are particularly hilarious, especially when you learn to wait for the Albanian jokes to emerge. And you *know* that they will!

One thing I will confess when I first heard about this movie: I was puzzled how they got the "incestuous" romance between Reeves' character and his "aunt" to work without creeping us all out. But, the "incest" thing quickly dispelled early in the movie. She's just an "aunt-in-law," of a sort. Not a "real" aunt. The story wouldn't have worked had she been a flesh-and-blood aunt, because we would have been too aware of the stigma that would exist in such a relationship.

This was a sweet, unusual movie. I really enjoyed it. I recommend it. It's silly, slapstick, and wait for the wretched Albanian jokes!