It seems, from the audience demographics, that I'm the only person under 60 who listens to PHC. Do I have any business reviewing what is, apparently, an older person's movie? Does one's tolerance for excitement diminish so much with age that I myself would consider this watchable 20 years from now? Can I ever trust IMDb user reviews again, after seeing an average score of 7.7 for this most awful of movies? And can I ever enjoy listening to PHC on the radio again, after suffering through the two most tedious hours I have ever spent in a movie theater?<br /><br />I went to see it with my girlfriend. She wanted to see The Lake House. I pointed out that it had gotten terrible reviews, and it wasn't on for 2 hours, and said that she could trust the Prarie Home Companion people. I've been a fan of the show since Reagan was in office.<br /><br />You would think that a 2-hour PHC movie could be at least as good as a 2-hour PHC radio show. But the movie suffered some major flaws relative to the radio show:<br /><br />1. You couldn't get up and iron clothes or file bills or do whatever you do during the musical parts of the show.<br /><br />2. The funny parts of the radio show, like the monologue and the skits, weren't in the movie.<br /><br />3. The movie didn't set any boundaries between reality and fantasy. In the radio show, you always know where the boundaries are between truth and fiction. The sketches are fiction; the actors are real. The movie was presented as if the sketches were real. Guy Noir is a real detective; Dusty and Lefty are real cowboys. A mildly amusing sketch about an orangutan, a rottweiler, a flock of geese, and a letter from an ex-lover - much the sort of stuff you might hear on the show - was presented as if the ex-lover bit was reality, so that it was not so much funny as pathetic.<br /><br />4. The movie couldn't decide whether it wanted to be slapstick or drama. Really serious things would happen to or be talked about by the actors, and I couldn't tell whether we were supposed to sympathize with them, or laugh at them. When Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep are talking about their family woes while Lily's daughter reads her bad poems about suicide, the stories are just outrageous enough that you can't tell if it's supposed to be a comic piece or character drama.<br /><br />5. I couldn't reconcile the supernatural elements of the "plot" with the familiar background of the PHC radio show. Not to mention that everything that happens, makes no difference, and you don't know what happens in the final scene. Also, a tip to GK for any future screenplays: Introduce the first plot event LESS than one hour into the show.<br /><br />If they had just presented a PHC show without the distracting and uninteresting "plot", they could have fit in more interesting stuff. If they really wanted to go with a plot, they should have cut 5 or 6 musical numbers out to give them a little time to do something with it. Instead, they gave us a pseudo-movie, pseudo-radio show with a pseudo-plot and pseudo-characters not developed enough to be called 2-dimensional. I writhed in my seat waiting for it to end, knowing that I would owe my girlfriend big-time for this. If I'd been there alone, I would have walked out. I tried to read a book, but she didn't have one and said I had to suffer with her.<br /><br />I have to look on the bright side. It was much worse for my girlfriend - she hates folk music.