Thirteen Days, starring Kevin Costner, takes on another hefty topic (Oscar loves those): the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. OK, it sounds like a TV movie. Worse, Bruce Greenwood as President John F. Kennedy and Steven Culp as his brother Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, speak with phony Boston accents. So does Costner in the role of Kenny O'Donnell, Bobby's classmate at Harvard and now the special assistant to the president. Know what? As soon as U-2 spy-plane photos reveal the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, you forget the accents, and the film takes off. It's up to the Kennedys and O'Donnell to save the world. Some historians are spitting bile at screenwriter David Self, claiming that O'Donnell was nowhere near the major player the movie makes him.

Maybe so. But Costner doesn't hog the show, the Kennedy bonding still fascinates, and director Roger Donaldson makes a lively business of watching politicos, diplomats and military brass go at each other in verbal combat. You don't see too many Y2K action films that focus on the spectacle of men thinking.

“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.