There is another creature, of course, that walks on two legs, cannot fly and counts itself separate from the birds and the beasts. “Dreambirds” concerns people more than it does ostriches, and mostly it concerns Nixon himself; it’s a personal memoir clad in exotic plumage. For Nixon, a native of South Africa who has lived in the United States for 20 years and now teaches literature at the University of Wisconsin, the ostrich is a shifting signifier, a symbolic presence that travels through the background of his story without ever coming clearly into focus. In the fable of the ostrich, he seems to see something of his own rootless, peripatetic nature. He departed South Africa in sudden and clandestine fashion at the nadir of the apartheid era, cutting himself off from his family and the haunting desert landscapes he had cherished as a child. He can return only obliquely, by retracing the route of an awkward, flightless bird that, like him, had wandered from Africa to the New World.

And so there is a great deal of material on the history of ostrich farming in “Dreambirds.” We learn about Max Rose, the Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who made and lost an enormous ostrich fortune in Oudtshoorn, the city in South Africa’s Karroo desert that became the center of the world’s feather trade in the years before World War I. At about the same time, 10,000 miles away in Arizona, a transplanted Canadian, Alexander J. Chandler, added ostrich ranching to his dreams of building canals and enormous resorts in the desert. (The ostriches eventually faded away, while Chandler’s other, almost accidental innovation, the desert golf course, would shape Arizona’s future.) We travel along with the great white explorers of the 1911 Trans-Saharan Ostrich Expedition, a quest to find the nearly mythical Barbary ostrich with its superior “double floss” feathers.

In the ostrich, with its teaspoon-size brain, its ornery nature (it has been known to kick would-be ostrich wranglers to death) and its implausible plumage, Nixon evidently sees the fragility, and the ludicrous beauty, of human dreams. It’s also clear that he feels a personal connection to the peculiar bird Carolus Linnaeus dubbed the “sparrow-camel” (Struthio camelus). Why shouldn’t he? He has vivid memories of riding ostriches during childhood visits to the Karroo — including the visit during which an ostrich ate his watch, a family heirloom — and his first published writing came, at 15, in a South African ornithological journal called, yes, the Ostrich. But the link between the actual world of ostriches and ostrich farming, full of fascinating minutiae as it may be, and Nixon’s touching reminiscences of his taciturn journalist-botanist father remains inscrutable to me.

Ultimately, perhaps “Dreambirds” is not a book about either people or ostriches but a book about writing. It is not ostriches themselves but Nixon’s desire to write about them that brings him to Arizona during an all-too-brief early-’90s ostrich boom. The Southwestern desert rekindles his childhood memories of the Karroo, opening the Proustian floodgates and allowing him to write about his father and the rest of his closemouthed family of Scottish immigrants. He’s marvelous on his subsequent return to South Africa, just before its first democratic election in 1994. Exiles like him have “all struggled in our own way with memory,” he reflects, “some forgetting this place too fast, others not nearly fast enough.” His first visit to the Karroo in 25 years is charged with both familiarity and unreality: “What I saw I recognized, but it had been so long I couldn’t quite make the memory mine. The whole trip felt suspended, as if occurring in a tense grammarians hadn’t yet described.”

“Things with roots have always bothered me,” Nixon admits, and for better or worse “Dreambirds” celebrates rootlessness and disconnection. When he describes an Arizona desert museum as “just things from here and there, coexisting in the deep present,” he could be describing his own book. His heroes are improbable wanderers and dreamers, Yiddish speakers in the veld, an eccentric hotel tycoon with a basement full of feathers, an Algerian-born woman he meets in Oudtshoorn who is a Paris-trained plumassihre and the great-great-granddaughter of the first ostrich farmer in history. Like Nixon himself, and like Allah’s ostrich, they are creatures who have chosen to be different and alone, and to live as they have chosen.

My children, it gets worse. “Keeping the Faith” is also Norton’s directorial debut, and he shows absolutely no aptitude for the medium. At least two members of the cast (Stiller and Milos Forman, who has a small role as a Czech priest) would have done far better, and hardly anyone could have done worse. The whole movie is shot with that bright, bland, pleasant lighting used in 1970s Wonderful World of Disney TV dramas, and there are several minor technical flubs. Furthermore, with no one around to direct him, Norton seems terribly ill at ease in his undercooked role as Father Brian Finn, a love-struck Catholic priest jealous of his rabbi best friend. (You heard that right, folks.) Trapped in the jittery, nervous, fourth-rate Neil Simon shtick of Stuart Blumberg’s screenplay, Father Brian and Rabbi Jake Schram (Stiller) barely seem to know each other, let alone like each other.

Brian and Jake grew up together in Manhattan, Jake collecting Heroes of the Torah playing cards and Brian instructing him in the “spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch” mnemonic for the Sign of the Cross. (I can already tell, people, that my version makes the movie seem funnier than it is.) Their third musketeer was Anna Reilly, a tomboy whom Brian recalls as “a cross between Johnny Quest and Tatum O’Neal in ‘Foxes.’” (OK, that actually is sort of funny.) But Anna moved to California, only to return years later, when both guys have become wiseacre clergymen who are reinvigorating their respective faiths in some totally unspecified way. All we know is that they’re planning an interfaith senior center that Brian describes as “‘Fiddler on the Roof’ meets ‘Lord of the Dance’ meets ‘Buena Vista Social Club.’” (Uncle, already! Uncle!)

As you will have guessed, brethren, the grown-up Anna (Jenna Elfman) is a big old babelicious problem. Jake, who comes off more like an unctuous Atlantic City comic than a rabbi, slobbers over her. He’s supposed to get married, since synagogue boards don’t trust bachelor rabbis, but certainly not to a shiksa like Anna. Brian, who comes off more like the Key Club president than a full-blown priest, also slobbers over her. But it’s clear that he’s not one of those priests, the ones who cash in on the collar to get laid. Within a few scenes, Anna jeopardizes Jake’s career and Brian’s vows of chastity, and compels both of these alleged pals to lie, booze it up, brawl and generally betray each other’s trust. Then they all say they’re sorry and the movie sneaks out through the only plot loophole it can find.

So peculiar is this movie, oh people of the multiplex, that Elfman’s mannered and superficial performance as corporate power vixen Anna, stuck between her two daffy clerics, is pretty much the best thing in it. Her cat-eyed cutie-pie thing either slays you or gets your goat, but at least she has an idea about what she’s doing and sticks with it. Everybody else in this talented cast seems to have read the script in the morning and shot his scenes in the afternoon, pretty much relying on generic acting chops for survival. Director Mike Figgis is generating a lot of buzz with “Time Code,” a film shot live in real time that comes out later this spring, but Norton has gone him one better. “Keeping the Faith” is so agonizingly slow, so full of endless, pointless scenes in which the viewer can do nothing except contemplate the yawning abyss of his own soul, that I swear to you it was shot in less time than it takes to watch it, and then stretched to feature length by diabolical means.

Brethren, I know what some of you are thinking. I too have heard that little voice telling me I must not be unappreciative of these nice people who work so hard to entertain me. As I left the theater after “Keeping the Faith” finally ended, muttering imprecations under my breath, fate put me behind a nice-looking couple who were congratulating each other as they put on their coats. They had laughed until they cried; they looked back longingly at the screen and pronounced the film delightful. Yes, children, we all have weak moments when we want to like Movies That Suck, especially when the people in them seem clean and charming, no one curses or dies and the stories they tell studiously avoid offending anyone. Do I need to tell you whose voice it is that tells us to like such movies? Of course I don’t; it is the devil’s voice. Do I need to tell you what lies down that road? Of course I don’t; down that road lies “Patch Adams.”

For me, it’s precisely the mushy, unspecific quality of Blumberg’s screenplay, and its determined effort not to hurt anybody’s feelings, that is most offensive of all. Sure, interfaith romance involving Christians and Jews is still a hot-button topic for some viewers, but please! The ’70s sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie” was way edgier and more honest than this relentlessly polite yet irritatingly soulless film. OK, I’ll admit that my personal history may be coloring my reaction just a little; have I told you the story of my third-grade girlfriend, Abby Greenfield, and why her parents took her to Israel? Some other time.

“Keeping the Faith” can muster only a vague and stereotypical impression of what a rabbi’s life is like (he is pursued by women) and even less sense of a priest’s (he eats in a wood-paneled dining room). The two religions are treated with a benign stupidity that is supposed to signal respect, as if they were adjacent departments in the spirituality mall that sold slightly different brands of the same product and made no serious demands on their adherents. Sure, there are rules: Jake can’t marry outside his faith and Brian can’t marry at all. But these are just zany complications, in line with the movie’s other stale gags: Jewish mothers are pushy, greedy prima donnas. The Irish drink. Jewish daughters are pushy, horny prima donnas. The Irish, um, drink. If the shtick is applied a little thicker to Jews than to Catholics, that’s only because Blumberg seems to know nothing whatsoever about Catholic faith and mores.

If either Jake or Brian is actually supposed to have religious faith that sustains them through thick and thin — the kind of faith that we here in our church have in such abundance, sisters and brothers — there’s no evidence of it. You don’t make a movie called “Titanic” without a big-ass ship, and you’d better not make a movie about clergymen without giving us some God. But then, “Keeping the Faith” has no faith in honest storytelling or believable characterization either, and provides absolutely no evidence that golden boy Norton (whose acting in “American History X” and “Fight Club” I’ve admired greatly) is ready for the director’s chair.

Join me in a brief prayer for Catherine Lloyd Burns (as Anna’s dippy assistant) and Ken Leung (as a karaoke salesman); their agreeable comic bits are wasted here and they must await their reward in the next movie or the next life. As for Forman, Eli Wallach, Anne Bancroft, Holland Taylor (randy Judge Roberta Kittleson from “The Practice”) and the rest of this cast, well, we are all sinners. We must work to forgive and forget. Let the healing begin. In the name of Alan Hale and Hayley Mills and Bronson Pinchot, go in peace. Coffee and Bundt cake in the usual place.

For many years, one of the unspoken assumptions about the suburbs was that the people who live, work and shop in them — most of the U.S. population — must like them the way they are. With the late-’90s emergence of “sprawl” as a political buzzword, it became clear that things were not that simple. Those most concerned about the traffic-choked new malls and subdivisions sprouting in cornfield after cornfield, not surprisingly, were the people who lived next to them. Le Corbusier’s vision of the future had come true: “The cities shall be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree.” What that vision omits, of course, is the 5 or 6 million people in between, each with his or her own pine tree.

There are some significant political and philosophical differences between “Suburban Nation” and “Picture Windows,” but these two important new books agree that suburbia, as it exists today, was not the inevitable result of a seamlessly operating free market. Both sets of authors see the history of suburban development as a tragic story of greed, poor judgment and missed opportunity. Moreover, they are willing to buck conventional wisdom by suggesting that many suburban Americans would embrace a different, more community-based lifestyle if it were made available to them.

The world of suburban studies can seem topsy-turvy sometimes; at first glance it appears that the authors of these books must have switched agendas in a moment of “American Beauty”-style midnight weirdness. Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen are feminist academics who live in Manhattan — precisely the kind of people who wouldn’t be caught dead at the mall. Yet while “Picture Windows” may find the manner in which the suburbs were developed regrettable, it paints a nuanced and in many ways sympathetic portrait of life in suburbia. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, on the other hand, are prominent town planners (that is, people who actually design new suburbs). “Suburban Nation” is a furious jeremiad against a form of development that, they argue, is undermining the very nature of American citizenship, destroying the public realm and making virtual prisoners out of our most vulnerable citizens.

Although the authors of these two books may believe they have competing agendas (or at least Baxandall and Ewen think so), their concerns are quite different and they complement each other in fascinating ways. The apparent conflict between them, I think, is largely a matter of ideology rather than practical application. They disagree, for example, on the highly charged question of whether urban design can influence social behavior. (Many social scientists, scorched by the social-engineering debacles of Great Society public housing, have retreated to the position that it can’t. The authors of “Suburban Nation” respond, quite sensibly, “One does not have to believe that front porches encourage sociability to accept that unwalkable streets discourage it.”) And behind this lies an even more theoretical debate about the legacy of modernism, which neither book, frustratingly enough, engages head-on.

“Suburban Nation” is mainly an extensive account of the flawed land-use and design decisions, each apparently rational in itself, that created mass suburbia and made it into such an alien environment. “Picture Windows,” as its subtitle suggests, is primarily a work of history. Focusing mostly on Long Island, N.Y., America’s primordial suburban region, Baxandall and Ewen tell the dramatic story of its development, full of struggle, skulduggery and ambiguous, larger-than-life characters. Beneath its neutral, antiseptic exterior, they argue, “suburbia [has] always been a complicated place, shaped by conflict and community activism.”

It’s no accident that “Suburban Nation” has the angry, call-to-arms tone of a manifesto; its authors have been preaching the gospel of a design philosophy known variously as New Urbanism, neotraditionalism and “traditional neighborhood development” for many years. All three work at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., the Miami design firm behind new town-scale developments such as Seaside, Fla.; Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Md.; and Middleton Hills, in Madison, Wis. These unusually dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly developments remain controversial (and we’ll get to that), but they have proved to be a startlingly successful alternative to the typical, space-devouring housing tracts around them. In both Seaside and Kentlands, the authors report, houses and homesites sell at a significant premium over similar, or even larger, lots in nearby conventional subdivisions.

Whatever one thinks of DPZ’s solutions to sprawl, “Suburban Nation” provides a marvelously detailed critique of suburbia as it exists, a landscape most of us are intimately familiar with but few of us have thought much about. It’s a place where the roads are too wide, the traffic too fast and the buildings too low and too far apart, so walking is discouraged if not forbidden. (In the rare instances when suburban planners do build sidewalks, the authors write, the empty pavement becomes “the physical embodiment of sprawl’s guilty conscience,” used only by indigents and stranded motorists.) Nearly identical houses cluster in enormous pods of uniform density, where vast amounts of open space are wasted in a bewildering tangle of curvilinear streets and cul-de-sacs. Titanic shopping centers sit amid vast oceans of parking; schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and other public structures are isolated on faux-rural “campuses.”

All of this, needless to say, depends entirely on the private automobile, which the authors of “Suburban Nation” call “a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device.” Suburbia claims to offer its residents a choice of lifestyles, but it really offers only one: “to own a car and to need it for everything.” Time spent in the car is specifically time not spent in the public realm, which has in turn been eviscerated, the authors argue, as urban planners have tried to lure car-culture suburbanites back to America’s downtowns. “Interstate highways were welcomed into the city core, streets were widened and made one-way, street trees were cut down, sidewalks were narrowed or eliminated, and on-street parking was replaced by massive parking lots,” they write. The result, of course, is that encounters between people of different racial and socioeconomic cadres — precisely the encounters that define the urban experience — become increasingly rare.

Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck write surprisingly pithy, elegant prose, and “Suburban Nation” is full of juicy insider observations drawn from the Orwellian world of suburban planning. This is a realm where traffic engineers define trees as “fixed and hazardous objects” and keep widening and multiplying highways despite ample evidence that increasing traffic capacity only makes traffic worse (because it encourages people to drive more and live farther away from their workplaces).

The obsessive single-use zoning of suburbia, stemming from the era when separating industry from housing was a crucial health issue, meticulously segregates every economic function from every other and, in particular, groups the rich, the middle class and the poor in their own homogeneous clusters. Those residents who are too poor, too young or too old to drive are subjected to virtual house arrest, while suburban parents are forced into the stereotypical multitasking “soccer mom” role.

Baxandall and Ewen are well aware that the American suburbs were founded on economic and racial segregation, and remain isolated and car dependent to an unhealthy degree. They agree with the “Suburban Nation” authors that the suburbia we see around us today resulted from highly specific decisions, and that something quite different could have been built instead. “Picture Windows” offers an account of how the private development typified by Long Island’s infamous Levittown became the dominant suburban form, and it is an attempt to resurrect some defeated alternatives. Still more ambitiously, it strives to transcend anti-suburban snobbery and rehabilitate the potent dream of “a place where ordinary people, not just the elite, would have access to affordable, attractive, modern housing in communities with parks, gardens, recreation, stores and cooperative town meeting places.”

As left-leaning social-science intellectuals, Baxandall and Ewen write, they “had been schooled in a tradition that celebrated urban culture and looked at the rest of America as a backwater.” When both began teaching at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, in the heart of Long Island suburbia, they became aware that their surroundings were far more diverse and complicated than the familiar stereotype of “an anesthetized state of mind, a ‘no place’ dominated by a culture of conformity and consumption.” In fact, the suburbs of Long Island were created and populated in numerous waves of 20th century migration, beginning with the Gilded Age mansions and “Gatsby”-era nouveau riche playgrounds of the North Shore and continuing to the present, when Long Island reportedly houses more Central American immigrants than New York.

This is a history with many heroes and villains, none of them simple. Unlikely as this may seem today, when the demand for housing exploded after World War II, many people believed that the government should build public rental housing for the newly minted middle class, composed of returning veterans’ families. It took hearings presided over by no less a figure than Sen. Joseph McCarthy, along with an extensive public relations campaign by the home-building industry, to enforce the idea that public housing was solely for the destitute and that private homeownership was the American birthright. The result, of course, was that the government subsidized suburban development with cheap mortgages and massive highway projects but left the design and building to rapacious private developers.

Of these, surely none was more influential than William Levitt, “the Henry Ford of housing,” in Baxandall and Ewen’s apt phrasing. Levitt and Sons pioneered the use of mass-production techniques in home construction, and the $7,999 ranch house they introduced in 1949 — essentially a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff designed by Levitt’s brother Alfred — virtually defined the future of suburban architecture. Undeniably, Levitt houses were passably well built and made homeownership affordable for many city dwellers who had never previously imagined it.

But Baxandall and Ewen view the Levittown legacy with what seem to be appropriately mixed emotions. Levitt openly discriminated against blacks and battled against Levittowners’ attempts to democratize the town and run it themselves. Levittown’s very name came to symbolize dullness and conformity, and as an automobile-based residential community with no downtown it spawned turnpike shopping centers, the ancestors of today’s enormous malls. (Architectural Forum magazine called the new shopping centers “markets in the meadows,” perhaps inaugurating the suburban language of denial replicated today in all the malls named after the geographical features they have replaced.)

“Picture Windows” is at its best when exploring the experiences of actual suburbanites, both those who felt that life in Levittown and places like it fulfilled their American dream and those who faced much more of a struggle. Baxandall and Ewen’s interviews with working-class suburban women, for example, paint a far more varied portrait than the “mad housewife” archetype perpetuated by misogynists and feminists alike. Their compelling chapters on the Long Island towns of Roosevelt and Freeport, loaded with original research, provide an invaluable chronicle of two crucial episodes in the history of suburban integration.

Roosevelt was “blockbusted” in the mid-1960s by real estate speculators who bought houses cheap from terrified whites and resold them at a premium to blacks who were not welcome in most suburbs. Ironically, the result of this fear-mongering and profiteering was a stable community, one of the first middle-class black enclaves in suburban America. When the same tactics were used in nearby Freeport, blacks and whites eventually joined forces to resist blockbusting and white flight. Some of Freeport’s methods have been controversial — the village government has been accused of allowing whites to buy houses at artificially low prices to maintain racial balance — but the result has been one of the few truly integrated suburbs anywhere in the country.

The major differences between these two sets of authors arise when they consider Lenin’s question: What is to be done? In fairness to both, you could say they’re really asking two related but separate questions: The DPZ planners ask what can be done, given the realities of the marketplace, and the academics ask what ought to be done, even if it’s impossible. Both claim a kinship to the godparents of urban sociology, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, and both find inspiration in the new town movement of the early 20th century, which produced communities such as Greenbelt, Md., and Radburn, N.J.

In fact, Baxandall and Ewen see Greenbelt, a low-income cooperative community built by the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal government agency in charge of relocating the poor, as the most poignant example of what might have been. Although they realize that under current conditions federal intervention is exceedingly unlikely, they suggest that it remains the only agent capable of reinventing suburbia for the newly diverse working and middle classes of the 21st century. “Updating the suburban dream,” they write, “requires visionaries such as those in the 1920s and 1930s, who saw social problems as questions demanding democratic, utopian answers.”

While “Picture Windows” does not address the geographical component of suburban sprawl in any detail, it’s hard to imagine that Baxandall and Ewen wouldn’t concur with Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck’s call for mixed-use, mixed-income developments designed to encourage street life and public transit and discourage isolation, traffic and waste. Yet they specifically excoriate them, comparing DPZ developments to theme parks where “set design takes the place of social imagination” and calling Seaside, DPZ’s trademark town, “a packaged collection of nostalgia from a past that never was — except perhaps on television.”

Even if it’s true that the small-town Americana design of Seaside looks like the set for “The Truman Show” (since, in fact, it was), how do we account for this vitriolic response to developers who are actually building a community-based alternative to conventional suburbia? Baxandall and Ewen even suggest that they prefer Levittown to Seaside, since at least the former is uncontaminated by nostalgia.

What we see here, I think, is the inevitable clash between modernism’s mistrust of the past and traditionalism’s mistrust of the future. For avowed progressives like Baxandall and Ewen, it may be impossible to abandon the Mumford/Wright dictum that Americans should embrace the clean, simple design of the machine age and purge themselves of their unhealthy and sentimental attachment to older styles. I doubt they really believe aesthetic choices should be imposed on suburbanites by some central authority; it’s more that suburban development only seems acceptably democratic and Utopian to them if it’s tied to the modernist project of creating a new, more rational social order. Never mind that the wood shingles, tin roofs and front porches of Seaside are apparently what home buyers want; they represent a reactionary “escape into the good old days.”

It’s certainly no secret that the DPZ planners have self-consciously modeled their new communities on old-fashioned urban neighborhoods, like Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown, or venerable American towns, like Alexandria, Va. As they concisely put it, “The design of new places should be modeled on old places that work.” In fact, the DPZ design guidelines are style neutral, and they point out that a neighborhood can be traditional in its spatial organization and modern in style, like Miami’s South Beach with its justly famous boulevards of art deco buildings. But Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck clearly have no interest in fighting the good fight for flat roofs and sliding glass doors. Architectural style, they insist, has almost no bearing on neighborhood function, so their developments employ styles that will sell. “All architecture is meaningless in the absence of good urban design,” they write. “Behind six acres of parking, a true cantilever is no more ethical than a fake arch.”

Accurately, if a little defensively, the “Suburban Nation” authors point out that while the European public may swallow modernism eagerly, Americans still don’t like it or trust it. “The vast majority of home buyers are only interested in traditional architecture or, sadly, the middle ground of damaged compromise,” they write. “It is hard enough convincing suburbanites to accept mixed uses, varied-income housing and public transit without throwing flat roofs and corrugated metal siding into the equation.”

Somewhere in the tension between these two books there’s a valuable discussion about the moral nature and purpose of urban design waiting to happen. One could certainly argue that principled planners like DPZ have a responsibility to strive for excellent contemporary style and to resist the kitsch and gingerbread that, they admit, often infect their developments. On the other hand, what is suburban sprawl, with its endless malls and subdivisions, but the bastard child of modernism, the nightmarish realization of Le Corbusier’s dream of a decentered “radiant city”? No matter what our politics are, I wonder if we owe that tradition anything except a vigorous effort to destroy it.

If the clueless twosome of wrestling fans played by David Arquette and Scott Caan have an obvious lineage that includes such previous duo comedies as “Dumb and Dumber” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (not to mention countless other pairings stretching back at least to Abbott and Costello), they do this Zen-moronic tradition proud. What really puts “Ready to Rumble” over the top into delirious delight, however, is the hysterical, completely deadpan performance of Oliver Platt as Jimmy King, a swaggering wrestling icon with a scepter, cape and pasteboard crown that would look cheesy at the Tulsa Renaissance Faire. Sure, this movie has some truly embarrassing moments (let’s not talk about Martin Landau’s performance as an aging wrestling wizard), but for each of those there’s another that’s laugh-till-you-puke funny. Obviously 12-year-olds across the country will be clamoring to see it, but “Ready to Rumble” should also have a long afterlife ahead as a late-night cult treat for cackling stoners.

Let’s be real clear about this: You’ve got to be suffering from some major trash-culture brain damage to enjoy a movie like “Ready to Rumble,” and if you’re more the “Red Violin” type whose idea of lowbrow fun is catching an episode of “Law and Order” every so often, then for God’s sake stay home. The phrases “ass juice” and “butt fruit” appear within the film’s first few minutes, as does the unanswerable question “If you only have one nut left, is it still your left nut?” Ahmet Zappa’s highly enjoyable cameo as a permanently pissed-off convenience-store clerk is highlighted by his reading of the line “I’m your bitch and you’re my daddy.” Enough said?

If “Ready to Rumble” never quite recovers from its amazing, hallucinatory first half-hour, it almost doesn’t have to. I won’t spoil the movie’s best jokes for you (as usual, several of them are already in the trailer), but let’s just say that if you’re as big an idiot as I apparently am, you’ll be cracking up so convulsively that the story can afford to coast for a while. Gordie (Arquette) and Sean (Caan) are a couple of Wyoming septic-tank men with a dream, or at least an obsession. That obsession, of course, is legendary WCW champion King; Sean has even made himself and Gordie a pair of leather bracelets emblazoned with WWKD (for “What would King do?” and if you don’t get the reference you haven’t spent enough time in Middle America).

Caan (who is the son of actor James Caan and has previously appeared in “Boiler Room” and Robbins’ “Varsity Blues,” among other films) is a likable, all-American handsome screen presence with some worthy bits of comic business, but there’s a slight I’m-just-kidding tinge to his performance. As Arquette proved in his increasingly central Deputy Dewey role in the “Scream” series, he’s incapable of that. There’s an almost scary intensity to his comedy, the kind of thing that makes the other actors stop what they’re doing and look at him askance for a second. Whether Gordie is telling a van full of nuns, “You chicks rock!” (they do, after all, join him in a rendition of Van Halen’s “Running With the Devil”) or furiously rejecting claims that wrestling is fake, his over-amped enthusiasm feels completely real; there’s no ironic separation between actor and character.

When Gordie and Sean actually rouse themselves from the steps of the convenience store — site of Gordie’s outlandish, sugar-fueled wrestling fantasies — it’s for their trip to Cheyenne to witness King’s championship defense against Diamond Dallas Page (the first of many appearances by, er, legitimate WCW wrestlers). Little do they know that slimy WCW entrepreneur Titus Sinclair (Joe Pantoliano) has picked that night for King’s ritual dethroning, a grisly “four-post massacre” in which even his previously loyal retainers will betray him. King struts into the ring, proclaiming, “Good evening, Cheyenne! We’re going to rule some ass tonight!” and intoning a verse from Run DMC’s “King of Rock,” but, tragically, he ends up stretchered out, his career apparently over.

Platt has something of Arquette’s samurai commitment to shtick; even if his Elvis-manqui King is a clown playing a caricature (or maybe the other way around), Platt doesn’t condescend to him just because he’s ludicrous. “Ready to Rumble” doesn’t ask us to believe that wrestling is a legitimate sport, nor to believe that anybody thinks it is. (Even Gordie, in his heart, knows the truth.) When Gordie and Sean finally catch up to the defeated King, who’s hiding out in women’s clothes in an Atlanta trailer park, he extorts $30 and a six-pack out of them and patiently explains the business: “We’re just circus clowns, with dancing and a little soap opera.”

Gordie and Sean’s response is not just the central question behind “Ready to Rumble” but behind the remarkable rebirth of wrestling in general: “How can you be fake if we believe in you?” It should be obvious by now that wrestling’s very fakeness is the source of much of its popularity. If sports in general are a form of symbolic drama, then wrestling is a Grand Guignol puppet theater that appeals to our deep-rooted fatalism and desire to believe in conspiracies. Quite seriously, I think it expresses some of Americans’ finest qualities: We may be morons who revel in high histrionics and low slapstick, but we can always appreciate a joke at our own expense.

Needless to say, Gordie and Sean persuade their fallen hero to attempt to live up to their vision of him, and they sneak him back into Sinclair’s empire and turn the WCW’s scripted “works,” to use industry parlance, into “shoots” (i.e., spontaneous events). As wrestling fans will note, WCW has no visible leader like Sinclair, and in fact Pantoliano’s weaselly character seems like a jibe at the megalomaniacal McMahon, who has made himself an increasingly important figure in the WWF’s running plot lines. If “Ready to Rumble” becomes far more predictable as it enlists popular wrestlers like Page, Goldberg, Sting and Sid Vicious in a number of arena-scale battles along King’s path back to his throne, it never loses its outsize, trashy sense of humor.

Luscious indie goddess Rose McGowan has an unfortunately brief role as the sirenlike Sasha, “the Nitro-est of the Nitro Girls,” who has a Keane-eyed portrait of herself in her bedroom and toys mercilessly with Gordie’s affections. But this isn’t a movie about growth and change and adult romance (as if that needs saying); it’s a movie for the towheaded, malicious inner child who cherishes the precious American freedom to be a dumbass. Or, as Gordie puts it in one of the great motion-picture lines of all time: “My dad sucks, man.”

No, chaos in its purest form may be the incomprehensible plot of this unintentionally hilarious Ivy League thriller, filmed through a yellowy haze perhaps intended to convey the golden light of the groves of academe, although what it actually suggests is a terrible ragweed season in Connecticut. I suppose “The Skulls” is vaguely meant to cash in on popular curiosity about George W. Bush (if there is any) and his purported connection to the secret Skull and Bones society at Yale. Surely it’s also meant as a vehicle for Jackson, a star of TV’s “Dawson’s Creek,” who in fact bears a slight resemblance to the young Dubyah. But if this attractive young man wants a vehicle, he should head out to Auto Row and buy himself a Lexus. This one’s a pile of crap that won’t start.

In the hands of someone with a real appreciation for sleaze and an appetite for the barely submerged eroticism of this world of Gothic architecture and secret brotherhoods — like Gus Van Sant or Paul Verhoeven — “The Skulls” might have yielded a delicious haute-bourgeois fantasy. But director Rob Cohen (whose unimpressive risumi of films includes “Daylight” and “Dragonheart”) seems to have little idea of what he wants; the movie is chaste when it should be randy, boring when it should be mysterious and rambling when it should be tightly plotted. You get the feeling that John Pogue’s script was written on the fly, as a series of tenuously linked “dramatic” episodes. At the climax, Luke announces that the way to break the Skulls’ malevolent power is to enter their sanctuary alone and challenge a rival member to a duel. But no one in the movie, including Luke, can offer a coherent theory about how that’s supposed to work.

If Jackson comes off poorly in this starring role, he gets plenty of help from Pogue, whose screenplay sets up Luke as an opportunistic shit-heel all too eager to bail on his real friends the moment the Skulls come calling. A star rower on the crew team that has brought Yale (clearly the setting, although it’s never named) three straight Ivy championships, Luke is recruited by the |ber-double-secret Skulls even though he’s a townie with a juvenile delinquent background. He’s heard that the Skulls will pay your way through law school and that’s good enough for him, despite the warnings of his black friend Will (Hill Harper): “All I know is if it’s secret and it’s elite, it can’t be good.”

Willowy Chloe, the object of Luke’s unfulfilled crush, is similarly opposed. Chloe is supposed to be a prep-school girl turned rebel, although the only tangible evidence of this is that she hangs out with Luke and Will in some sort of knockoff “Jules and Jim” sexual-frustration arrangement. Once initiated into the Skulls, in a supremely boring ceremony conducted in a torchlit underground chamber straight out of dozens of martial-arts video games, Luke is paired with his new “soulmate.” This is Caleb (Paul Walker), a privileged pretty boy whose dad (Craig T. Nelson) is both the Skulls’ grand pooh-bah and a federal judge angling for a spot on the Supreme Court. Walker, whose previous credits include “She’s All That” and “Varsity Blues,” has the right male-model looks and dissolute mannerisms for the role, but his thick Valley Boy accent is distracting even to a California boy like me. “Please don’t give them a reason” comes out something like “Pleezdoangimmareezn.” You feel like Walker’s method acting is focused on not saying “dude” after every sentence.

There are about five minutes in the middle of “The Skulls” when the fancy dinners, T-Bird convertibles, long-legged chicks and mysterious $10,000 deposits the Skulls can provide are made to seem alluring. Then Will’s attempt to investigate the secrets of the Skulls for the school paper goes awry, leading assuredly into the standard coverup-and-chase plot from numerous military- or corporate-intrigue movies. Think “The Devil’s Advocate” minus Al Pacino frothing at the mouth, or “The General’s Daughter” minus John Travolta and all those shots of a naked, spread-eagled woman. Eventually, when the plot goes completely adrift, Cohen and Pogue seem to throw up their hands in despair, surrendering to one of those pseudo-profound thriller endings announcing that All Is Not What It Seems, and indeed that Life Itself Is an Illusion.

Several decent actors are dragged down in the undertow here: Harper has better credentials (“In Too Deep,” “Beloved,” “He Got Game”) than any of the leads, but can do nothing with the do-gooder role of Will. Moonlighting from his excellent work on ABC’s “The Practice,” Steve Harris never seems comfortable with an ill-defined role as a possibly corrupt cop. Only the veteran Nelson, with his enormous forehead and his repertoire of sinister slow burns, seems to appreciate that no amount of hamming is too much in a movie like this. For his skillful efforts to redeem these lost two hours of my life, I will always be grateful.