It's high time for little gem like 'Get Low'

Despite being victims of Hollywood ageism, my wife and I do still try to go to the movies every week.

Most of the time we are disappointed, but we won't be discouraged. Even when we can't find anything we'll even remotely tolerate and have to settle for a DVD and home-popped corn.

Why? Because we love that big-screen, 400-seat shared experience of watching a movie in a theater filled with strangers. So we keep on keepin' on.

Sometimes we're rewarded with something that's not too bad. And every once in awhile we stumble onto something terrific, something that reminds us why we love this particular storytelling medium so much.

Such was our experience a couple of weeks ago with "Get Low."

You say you never heard of it? You're not the only one.

Before going into the auditorium, I stopped by the concession stand, and the perky young teen behind the counter asked what I was there to see. "Get Low," I said.

"What's that?" I told her it's a movie about old people, and that my wife and I feel the need to support movies about old people so they might make more.

She laughed and asked, "So who's in it?"

"Well," I said, smiling, "a couple of older actors you probably don't know, Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek." She looked quizzical. "Oh, and Bill Murray." She was still quizzical. "Really? You don't know Bill Murray?"

"I might have seen him in a comedy. Is he a comedian?" She asked.

"Didn't your parents ever show you 'Ghostbusters'?" I asked. She shrugged. "What About Bob"? "Groundhog Day"? She shrugged again.

I haven't felt so old since the last time I turned on the radio and didn't know any of the bands.

I was afraid to ask if she'd ever heard of "Casablanca" or "Lawrence of Arabia"; I quit while I was behind.

So the rest of this column is for the girl behind the counter. Here's the answer to the question you didn't ask. Duvall and Spacek are Oscar-winning actors with a wide array of sterling work behind them, and hopefully much more in front of them. And "Get Low" is a little comedy-drama that belongs on the list with the best of them.

Set in rural Tennessee during the 1930s, with the Depression in full swing. "Get Low" stars Duvall as Felix Bush, a cranky old hermit who hasn't left his farm more than a handful of times in the past 30 years, occasionally engaging in one-sided conversation with an aging mule and a mysterious snapshot on the wall.