Paul Isaacs

CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN
Starring Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt. Written by Craig Titley, Joel Cohen, Sam Harper and Alec Sokolow. Directed by Shawn Levy. (PG) 98 min.

Somewhere between 1992's execrable Housesitter and 1995's excremental Sgt. Bilko, Steve Martin simply gave up the comedy ghost and morphed into Wallace Shawn's better-looking older brother. Now strictly dividing his time between "quality" projects like writing fiction for The New Yorker and jerk-for-hire box-office trash like Bringing Down the House, Martin's career has reached an impasse: his comedy isn't funny enough, and his more considered work, like the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, remains too frivolous to be taken seriously. (The exception was 1999's underrated, Martin-scripted Bowfinger, a cheap but exceedingly well-aimed shot at B-movie-making.)

An unexpected compensation is that Cheaper by the Dozen, a Christmas bauble from hack director Shawn Levy (Just Married), more than benefits from lowered expectations. Martin plays Tom Baker, a football coach and father of 12 who transplants his kids from Podunk, Il. to Chicago when he's offered the dream job of coaching his college football team. The family barely touches down in the big, bad city when journalist mom Kate (Bonnie Hunt) is whisked off on a coast-to-coast book tour, leaving Martin alone to look after the manifold little bastards. Cue various bumpkins-in-the-city montages, group hugs and predictable agonizing from Martin and Hunt about whether to sacrifice their careers for the good of the kids.

What just about saves Cheaper by the Dozen from its moralizing is a surprising lack of sentimentality, a watchable slow-boil performance from Martin and all-round excellent showings from the tykes, who manage to retain distinct personalities despite their multitude. Only Hilary Duff cellphones in a vapid performance as fashion-obsessed Lorraine (which only goes to prove how much craft Alicia and Reese put into their clueless/blonde roles). Far more distressing than the movie's 1950s worldview is its troubled third act, which piles the punishment on Hunt and Martin to a dizzying degree. In some ways, it's the most depressing family flick since the pets-in-a-blender antics of Babe 2: Pig in the City.

Still, Cheaper by the Dozen's willingness to un-sugarcoat the pill is commendable, and its narrative is unusually well constructed and MTV-jump-cut free. As for the post-credits outtake sequence in which Hunt is french-kissed by Smallville's Tom Welling, who plays her son in the movie: that's the kind of sick move in which any filmgoer should rejoice.




BLANKETS
By Craig Thompson. Top Shelf Productions, 592 pages, $41.99.

2003 was the year comics finally shed their fanboy image, and ironically it was thanks to a movie, American Splendor -- in particular Paul Giamatti's terrific performance as comic book writer Harvey Pekar, a disgraceful mensch about as far from the stereotypical Spawn nerd as Tom Waits is from Ryan Malcolm.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether that interest can translate hipster cachet into sales. Just like owning Kind of Blue and some Astrud Gilberto doesn't make you a jazz buff, graphic novels tend not to occupy more than token shelf space in the average home. Which is a shame not only for the indie-comics industry -- which has barely pushed a profit in its almost half-century existence -- but for readers themselves, who are missing out on some unique and wonderful literature.

Three outright classics of the form were published this year: Joe Sacco's gonzo Sarajevo story The Fixer, Marjane Satrapi's Iranian memoir Persepolis, and Craig Thompson's Blankets. The latter, the sophomore work of 28-year-old writer-artist Thompson, is the industry's current great black and white hope. At almost 600 pages, costing more than 40 bucks and the size of a well-stuffed Christmas goose, Blankets is too unwieldy for most handbags or satchels, but it's worth the expense as well as the lower-back pain.

A veiled autobiography of the author's childhood in rural Wisconsin, Blankets is a straightforward but never straitlaced recollection of family and first love. To begin with, the teenage Thompson is numbed to distraction by the Christian life of his strict, religious parents, but when he meets Raina, a fellow outcast at Bible camp, their relationship forces him into a crisis of faith about God and -- even worse -- Mom.

If that all sounds rather Wonder Years, don't worry -- Thompson's writing is witty throughout (one roadside billboard proclaims, "God is the Only Fire Insurance"), and equally, his observations about teen-geek-love mark him out as a superb, Sedaris-esque commentator on simple human embarrassment. He's also a gorgeous artist, and the wilfully naïve illustration makes a wonderful mirror to his protagonists' bent adolescent emotion.

Like American Splendor before it, Blankets proves that great graphic novels can be written without recourse to pulp fiction, cute animals or radioactive strippers in tights. What the comics world needs now is a pledge of faith from book readers to go the distance and actually buy a comic. Blankets would make anyone's perfect first, third or 43rd purchase.




Terence Trent D'Arby
Terence Trent D'Arby's Wildcard!
Sananda/Universal

Even among the legion of egotists in the music business, Terence Trent D'Arby has a special room of his own. Ever the wallflower, the man who once described himself as "a genius -- point fucking blank" has now changed his name to Sananda Maitreya, a Buddhist phrase that means "saviour of the universe." Needless to say, Wildcard! won't rock anyone's world, let alone save it. Opener "O Divina," a banjo-led showtune, sounds like Calexico being mugged by Hall and Oates. Elsewhere, D'Arby runs the gamut from Embrya-ish electronic funk to straitlaced pop and '80s coffee-table soul ("Goodbye Diane"). Little of it fits, however, thanks to D'Arby's inexpressive Pop Idol vocals, paper-thin songwriting and a murky trip-hop production that even Dave Stewart would consider passé.