In theory, Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy seems like the ideal writer-director to bring Augusten Burroughs' 1970s-era memoir to the screen with all its delicious nuttiness and dark humor intact. But too much manic energy runs the movie off the rails. Annette Bening, having made a specialty of high-strung, neurotic women in Being Julia, American Beauty and HBO's Mrs. Harris, is dead-on casting as wanna-be poet Deirdre Burroughs, mommie dearest to young Augusten (Joseph Cross brings welcome restraint to the role). It's Deirdre who sends her only son to live with her shrink, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), and his wack-job family, including wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh) and their daughters, the cat-torturing Hope (a wasted Gwyneth Paltrow) and the sexpot Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood). Natalie's urges are of no use to the gay Augusten, who beds down with the much older Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes in the film's best performance), a powder-keg patient of Dr. Finch's. Burroughs made this comic house of horrors live and breathe on the page. Onscreen, despite actors who give their all, it lies there waiting for an animating force that never comes.

“Ambling Alp”

The "Ambling Alp" was the nickname of the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Primo Carnera. Though the song is named after the Italian-born 1930s heavyweight champion, Yeasayer are actually paying tribute to boxing legend Joe Louis with this first-person psychedelic dance-rock tune. “I was always interested in writing a song that had boxing mythology in it,” Yeasayer’s Chris Keating said. “It’s pretty fascinating: There were so many amazing characters, and it was so closely entwined with 20th century history.” Yeaseyer also invokes German champ Max Schmeling and hints at the historical significance placed on the historic bouts between the Nazi-era boxer and the African-American Louis.