Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Number one in the country over the holiday weekend.

Duh.

I am an idiot, and forgot I cut Capone’s last review off and had it in this word file where I edit articles. My apologies to Capone. Maybe now that you’ve all had a crack at seeing this one (a lot of you, according to those numbers), what did you think? I’ll let Capone kick off the conversation:

I had a sneaking suspicion I'd dig ENCHANTED just from the trailer. I thought that if the filmmakers handled it right, the film could be a clever, funny look at how the idealistic world of fairy tales clashes with today's high divorce rate, rampant cynicism, feminism, and plastic surgery used to achieve ideal beauty. The good news is that the film gets most of it right thanks primarily to a little spitfire of an acting goddess named Amy Adams as a would-be princess named Giselle.

Giselle is every beautiful Disney heroine rolled into one. Her story incorporates bits from Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and a whole long of Cinderella. She can talk to her woodland animal friends, an evil queen is out to kill her, and her prince (the appropriately full-of-himself James Marsden) is on the way to save and marry her. But the biggest thing that makes Giselle fit right in with her beloved Disney peers is that she's animated, at least at first. After being rescued by Prince Edward from a horrible troll, Giselle prepares for her wedding day, when an old hag (Susan Sarandon's evil in-disguise Queen Narissa, who just happens to be Edward's stepmother) pushes into a magic well. Giselle pops out into a place where “no one lives happily ever after,” according to Narissa: New York City right in the middle of Times Square. Talk about Disney-fication. She's also gone from being animated to very much human, still in her puffy wedding dress.

Confused and scared, Narissa is befriended by handsome divorce attorney Robert (Patrick Dempsy and his daughter Morgan, who knows almost immediately that there is a real life princess in their midst. Robert just thinks she's weird but sweet and full of romance and hope. What follows is what you'd expect. Narissa shows Robert how to let love into his heart, while he teaches her how to survive in the cold cruel world. The problem in their obvious romance is that he's got a lovely girlfriend (Idina Menzel) and Prince Edward follows Narissa down the well to save her. Significant others are such a drag.

Adams (so good in JUNEBUG, TALLADEGA NIGHT, and a couple of great appearances on “The Office”) so completely sells her character, it's kind of unfair to the other actors. She doesn't hesitate to break out into song (a couple of fairly catchy ones from Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz populate this movie) or calls New York own special brand of woodland creatures to help in her time of need. Almost as good and maybe a bit funnier is Marsden, who marches through the Big Apple like he owns the place drawing his sword on anyone or anything that looks like a threat. Between winning turns in ENCHANTED and HAIRSPRAY, Marsden has really shown me he's a formidable comic and musical force. Timothy Spall is on hand as the queen's suitor and reluctant partner in crime. I'll admit, it's a bit weird that Menzel is in a movie featuring musical numbers in which she doesn't get to sing. But I find her wildly beautiful, so who cares?

Director Kevin Lima hasn't exactly dazzled me with his previous film work--102 DALMATIANS and the animated TARZAN--but he's taken the tired conventions of some of the less inspired animated works throughout history and turned them into something fresh and entertaining. Screenwriter Bill Kelly (BLAST FROM THE PAST and PREMONITION) has truly studied these films and dissected them in a fascinating way. You may think I'm overstating things a bit, and I'll admit the final confrontation between the Queen and the good people of New York is totally unnecessary and bloated, but most of ENCHANTED is right on the money. Certainly the swooning, oooing and aahhhing chorus of 13-year-old girls in my audience thought this was a real winner. And for a brief time, my inner 13-year-old girl thought so too. [One last P.S.: I swear that I wrote this review before I saw Harry's comments about his inner 8-year-old girl. Technically, I am older than Harry, so my inner girl deserves to be older too. That is all.]

Capone