See, where would you cultureless losers be without Mr. Cranky, who has actually seen Douglas Sirk's 1956 film "All That Heaven Allows," from which this film has so patently stolen? If it weren't for me, you all might be sitting in the audience thinking to yourselves, "What in the world is with all this melodramatic, technicolor crap?" It's kind of like getting the smell without the taste.

In Sirk's film, Jane Wyman is an upper-class, repressed, bee-atch. She falls in love with Rock Hudson, who's her gardener, and the entire town starts talking and she has to decide whether she wants her friends or true love. In Haynes's film, Julianne Moore plays an upper-class, repressed, bee-atch, Cathy Whitaker, who falls in love with her gardener (Dennis Haysbert), except in this version he's black. To make matters more complex, Cathy's pree-ick husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), is running around town making out with dudes. He's gay, but trying not to let anyone know. For those that have forgotten, Rock Hudson was gay too. So Haynes has tied all these relationships up with nice, little bows.

For those watching this film with none of this background, "Far From Heaven" just seems like a heavy-handed, melodramatic mess. Haynes is reminding us that the '50s weren't all they're cracked up to be, apparently because the black gardeners couldn't bang the white, repressed housewives and the grown men couldn't have gay sex in their offices without their wives barging in on them and being really shocked. We've come such a long way since then.