Will Ferrel’s workplace, with its vanishing point rows of identical florescent lights and desks, looks just like Jack Lemmon’s in Bily Wilder’s 1960 The Apartment.  The boulevard where Will Ferrel lives, with its modernist high-rise facades, and square picture window apartments, could replace any backdrop of Jacqes Tati’s 1968 Playtime.  Will Ferrel’s bedroom, with its earth-tones, unornamented right angles, and calf-high platform bed, could be photographed for a mid-century catalogue.

None of the characters seems to own a computer.  Maggie Gyllenhaal’s small business owner seems never to have heard of Quicken.  Lonely bachelor Ferrel never looks at internet porn.  Dustin Hoffman’s college professor never sends or receives an e-mail.  I can almost buy Emma Thompson’s eccentric author using an electric typewriter.  But her ultra-professional research assistant Queen Latifah never consulting a lap-top?  Un-hunh.

After all this, is it any surprise that Will Ferrel’s lifeless IRS agent is a collage of early Updike, middle Joseph Heller and late Billy Wilder?  Or that Gyllenhaal’s baker protests against war in general, without ever mentioning “Iraq” or “Bush”?  (Or for that matter, that she focuses on pastries, and not on coffee?)

Okay, look, yes, the sixties were the last good decade.  I wish I had been there.  It was fun.  But this is now the second movie in that many months that actually takes place there, while pretending to address contemporary social/personal/political concerns.  (See Little Children.)  I’m going to say now what I said then:  literature lags behind life, but movies lag behind literature.

How do you drag Stranger than Fiction into the present?  You can start by making Queen Latifah the writer, and Emma Thompson her assistant.  You can make Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character a man (keep the tattooes if you wish.)  You can have Will Ferrel work for homeland security.

Stranger than Fiction offers many pleasures.  I shivered every time Emma Thompson spit into a kleenex to put out her cigarette, or any time Queen Latifah, or that younger brother from Arrested Development, or Will Ferrel’s diminutive/dismissive female psychiatrist were on screen.  There is a visually lovely scene where an otherwise static conversation on a bus is turned into a dynamic thrill ride by having the characters sit in the middle of the accordion-shaped divider, and having the bus drive in sine-curves.

Mark Forster sure can direct.  And everybody in the movie can act.

But it’s 2006.  November 7th is history.  And the entire enterprise is either four days or four decades too late.

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There are three human body types, of which two are suitable for comedy:  tall, gangly ectomorphs like Buster Keaton, Jim Carrey or Cameron Diaz, who can trip over themselves and get tangled-up into scrapes, or fat, expansive endomorphs like W. C. Fields, John Belushi or Roseanne Barr, who can roll around, and burp and fart and jiggle.

Solid, muscular mesomorphs are not comic.  They are too grounded, too strong.  They have an ideally placed center of gravity.  They can’t just fall over:  they have to throw themselves.

Besides, how hard can you laugh at someone who can beat you up?

This may explain why A Good Year, starring mesomorph Russel Crowe, is not funny.  There may be many, many other reasons.  I’m not sure.  I was too busy watching the scenery.

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Those who have already seen Borat four or five times and crave another entertainment featuring a morbidly obese prostitute cannot do better than Pedro Amoldovar’s Volver.

Like every movie Amoldovar has made since Live Flesh, Volver belongs to a genre he seems to have invented:  the slice-of-life melodrama, in which a series of improbable, emotionally heightened events fit into a delicate, seemingly improvised, yet clockwork-precise structure.  I’d like to call this new genre film blanco--as opposed to film noir:  Amoldovar’s movies deal with murder, infidelity and human evil, yet they take place in bright sunlight, with colors as vivid and warm as his compassion for the characters.

All About My Mother is Amoldovar’s masterpiece in this genre--the first time he got everything right.  I thought Live Flesh was too convoluted, and the Hitchcokian Talk to Her and Bad Education too arch, too contrived (though each has many admirers.)

Somehow in Volver all the ingredients simmer together beautifully again.  It is a perfect movie, where every outlandish development feels natural, even improvised, and yet fits perfectly into the whole.

I loved every moment of it.  Somewhere in the middle, I asked myself, why now, why this one?  Why am I going so gaga?  Why can’t I take my eyes off the screen?

Penelope Cruz, duh.

Dmitry Portnoy can be reached at dmitry@fantasymoguls.com.