Blending fantasy and reality is a tricky business. Director Jon Amiel has managed it splendidly, first on TV with The Singing Detective and later in his first feature, Queen of Hearts. But even the gifted Amiel stumbles in this misguided film version of Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel Aunt Julia and the Scripter. Writer William Boyd doesn't so much adapt Llosa's novel as use it as a springboard for less imaginative inventions.

At the core of the story is sexy Aunt Julia, a twice-divorced Manhattanite played with wry humor by Barbara Hershey. Returning home to New Orleans in 1951, Aunt Julia doesn't expect to fall for her twenty-one-year-old nephew, Martin (Keanu Reeves), or have her ardent conversations with Martin turn up on a radio soap opera. It seems the soap star is a cross-dressing, Albanian-hating, bomb-throwing wacko named Pedro (Peter Falk), and he has been eavesdropping on them. Falk crushes any nuance that the other actors and Amiel try to build into the film. Like Falk's overbearing performance, Tune In Tomorrow soon wears out its welcome.

“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.