Bad Movie Alert!

Years too late and far past its sell-by date, its seems a Prairie Home Companion movie will be inflicted on us soon.

Shooting begins Wednesday on a film version of Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion," bringing him together with director Robert Altman and a star-studded cast including Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan.

Two words quickly sprang to mind: turgid and humorless.

Keillor's "wit" has curdled in recent years into a clotted and smelly nastiness far removed from the warm, homespun and gentle humor which made his name, such as it is. Numberless comedians and humorists are tempted in their lives to twin their talents with their politics. They think themselves able to make their polemics palatable under a sugar-coating. If they are past their prime, like Keillor (who seems to have turned after his failure to rise to the next level when he moved to Manhattan, forcing a humbling return to Minneapolis), the result is painful because the politics subsume whatever "comedy" may be involved.

This news is as welcome as someone passing you on the way to the bathroom saying, "I wouldn't go in there."