Fresh from his triumph as a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger re-ups as a hetero playing the world's greatest eighteenth-century lover. His comic flair is a big plus in a film that is fanatically busy and fatally sexless. The whimsical plot, involving Casanova's seduction of a cross-dressing feminist (Sienna Miller rivals the Venice locale for beauty), isn't helped by director Lasse Hallstrom's leaden hand. Oliver Platt is fun as the "lard king" with a yen for Miller, but he's just pineapple to the ham of Jeremy Irons as a bishop out to kill all erotic thoughts. No sweat. The movie does it for him.

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.