Even a nice chianti couldn't help you wash down this lump of tear-jerking twaddle. Thank the gods that Anthony Hopkins is around to play Burt Munro, a New Zealander in his seventies who dreams of racing his 1920 Indian Scout motorcycle on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Naturally, his dream comes true, or there wouldn't be a movie. But did the movie, which features an exciting climactic race in which Burt sets a world record, have to include so many numbing and heartwarming encounters between Burt (he died in 1978) and a transvestite motel clerk (Chris Williams), Burt and a randy widow (Diane Ladd), Burt and -- oh, I can't go on. Writer-director Roger Donaldson (The Bounty) can't seem to resist the obvious. Luckily, Hopkins can. He finds the humor and grit in this deaf geezer who overcomes his bad ticker and swollen prostate to beat the odds.

“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.