Imagine sitting in a theatre and laughing in a half-chuckling, half-hysterical way. And mulling over some basic tenets of eastern mysticism at the same time. And also feeling amazed and throttled by the most relentlessly verbal machine-gun Hollywood comedy since His Girl Friday. And also doing that outboard-motor thing against your lower lip with your right index and middle fingers and going, “Bee, bee, bee, bee, bee…” To say that I loved I Heart Huckabee’s (Fox Searchlight, 10.1) is putting it inadequately. I did love it, yes, but it also freaked me out a tiny bit. About 15 or 20 minutes in, I was feeling relief that I don’t get high any more, because if I was stoned I might have been shifting around in my seat with my palms getting sweaty and going, “Whoa…uh-oh…oh, wow.” Huckabee’s is easily one of the biggest whack-job, out-there films ever distributed by a big studio. “The whole thing is an existential meditation,” Russell told the New York Times. You will go into this movie as one person, and come out a little less constrained, a little more free. In the final analysis any movie that makes you want to find spiritual clarity or satori is, I think, a pretty good thing. Or don’t you agree?

Did ya read that Todd McCarthy review of Shark Tale? Whoa. “The fish aren’t fresh,” he begins in his Toronto Film Festival review. “It has [recently] seemed all but impossible to miss with underwater cartoon fare, but DreamWorks’ latest in-house animated effort finds a way to do just that by basing almost all its ideas on old movies. The odor around this one will result in the wrong kind of b.o. for what was obviously intended as a blockbuster follow-up to the studio’s summer smash Shrek 2.” Will Smith’s lead character, a “hyper-active, jive-talking hustler” named Oscar “proves a tiresomely familiar figure,” he adds. The most amusing voice-actor in the whole enterprise, says McCarthy, is director Martin Scorsese, who “machine-guns his dialogue and whose puffer fish is even drawn with the director’s trademark thick eyebrows.”