The Scottish Tale

Writer-director Mackinlay Polhemus's quirky romance starts with a clever idea and goes straight downhill from there. Built around the play whose name is unspoken in theater circles (don't think too hard--the lovers' names are Mack and Beth), the story begins with three old aunties toiling and troubling over a pot of bubbling tea leaves. They give Mack three prophesies that will stop his brother's wedding to the gal Mack loves, thereby ruining whatever suspense might have been found in the tale's thin plot. Beyond that, The Scottish Tale has an oddly unfocused feel, due in large part to the inexplicably deadpan acting by the film's two leads (Josiah Polhemus and transplanted Twin Citian Ann Boehlke). What could have been an intelligent, literary Four Weddings and a Funeral ends up as the story of two sad, uninteresting people stuck in a movie whose pot-brownie jokes and skunk gags just aren't funny. Nicholson Hall, Sunday, April 20 at 5:15 p.m.