Now that the stalled Lone Ranger film starring Johnny Depp as Tonto and and Armie Hammer as the masked man is back on track, it amounts to a trendlet: Revisionist movies in which the minority sidekick of yore gets upgraded to central figure.

Earlier this year, Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet had Seth Rogen as a dim Britt Reid upstaged by bright light Kato (Jay Chou). Which other classic stories might profit from making the sidekick the central character?

My favorite movie of all time? Glad you asked, It's Sherlock, Jr. (1924). Lucky for all of us, this masterpiece from Buster Keaton, screens next Sunday on TCM (at 8 pm) as part of the cable station's month long tribute to film's greatest magician and metaphysician.

The tale of a projectionist who dreams of being a sleuth and who literally walks into the movie he's projecting and solves its mystery, Sherlock's subject is the mystery and magic of movies. It is Keaton's most exhaustive -- and hilarious -- investigation into the perils of what happens when someone from the three-dimensional world penetrates the two-dimensional universe of film. Behold the granite-faced guy in his dressing room, primping before the mirror, gamely striding through the looking glass and into the infinite possibilities of motion pictures. Sublime.

It's a film that influenced many filmmakers, including Groucho Marx (see the mirror scene in Duck Soup) and Woody Allen, who wrote and directed The Purple Rose of Cairo under its influence.

Your favorite Keaton? Alternatively, nominate your favorite film ever.

Join Carrie Rickey, George Anastasia and Glen Macnow for a chat about gangsters and the movies 11 a.m. Wednesday. On a mobile phone? Click here.

The 20th Philadelphia Film Festival will open on October 20 with Like Crazy, Drake Doremus' award-winning feature about young lovers who encounter via problems. Though the 15-day festival officially ends November 3, its closing night gala is The Descendants, Alexander Payne's tack-sharp comedy with George Clooney as a fuddled father reconnecting with his children.

Other highlights of the Festival include two movies about moviemaking, Simon Curtis' My Week with Marilyn (starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe) and Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, a Cannes favorite, a black-and-white silent film set at the dawn of talkies.

Other gala screenings in the cinextravaganza including 120 features are Butter, Jim Field's Smith satire set in the competitive world of butter carving, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Jay and Mark Duplass' comedy about family dynamics.

Masters of Cinema, a festival within the festival, highlights new films from David Cronenberg (A Dangerous Method), Lars von Trier (Melancholia) and Chen Kaige (The Sacrifice). PFF will spotlight new films from France and Spain.

Though Jonathan Demme will accompany his hurricane Katrina documentary, I'm Carolyn Parker and Peter Berg will come for a revival of Friday Night Lights, the biggest star announced so far is Elmo, star of Constance Marks' Being Elmo.

PFF includes a sports-movie sidebar, including documentaries about two boxers who went toe-to-toe with Muhammad Ali: The Real Rocky, about Chuck Wepner, the guy who inspired the character of Rocky Balboa, and Joe Frazier: When the Smoke Clears.

PFF will post a complete schedule tomorrow on its website, 

http://www.filmadelphia.org/content/philadelphia-film-festival

Which movies are you most psyched about?

Once upon a time, in 1999 it was, Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy co-starred in Bowfinger, a very meta, very funny, and very forgotten spoof of the movie industry. Today Martin, the drollest Oscar host of the past 20 years, sent a letter  to his onetime co-star advising him how to host the upcoming Oscars. (Hat tip, Anne Thompson).

In this playful missive, Martin advises the manorexic Murphy to slim down before the Oscar ceremony because Murphy looked a little paunchy in Norbit.

What would you add to Martin's pointers?

In the spirit of Amy Poehler and Melissa McCarthy who tweaked the television academy at this week's Emmys by delivering a "It's been a good year for men on TV" speech (a gender-reversed version of the patronizing "it's been a good year for women" moment), Murphy should do a sketch that's a race-reversed version of The Help.

Your ideas?

Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote novel: Love it. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Audrey Hepburn movie: Don't get it. Do you?

It was the first "grownup" movie I ever saw. I was 8 or 9. Adored Hepburn. Yet even then this fairytale about Holly Golightly, the Manhattan geisha who falls for aspiring writer George Peppard, did not have the emotional impact or erotic pull of Splendor in the Grass or West Side Story, to name two Natalie Wood movies released that year. Wood singed with sexual heat; Hepburn was a playful doll.

Blake Edwards' 1961 urban love story turns 50 tomorrow. I'd argue that the extent to which this tale of Manhattan geisha Holly Golightly is timeless is for the most part due to the eternal appeal of the Hubert de Givenchy-designed LBD -- Little Black Dress -- that makes Hepburn resemble a tasty stick of black licorice. To a lesser extent its appeal is due Henry Mancini's "Moon River," the love song about huckleberry friends.

Sam Wasson, who wrote Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany's, would argue that if not for Holly Golightly, the free spirit from the sticks who makes Manhattan her playground, there would be no Carrie Bradshaw and Sex and the City. I say Wasson should look at The Best of Everything.

You say?

Why is Hollywood perennially fascinated with Howard Hughes, the figure known for his fast planes, faster women and sudden mood drops?

The subject of Max Ophuls' Caught, Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard, Martin Scorsese's The Aviator and the forthcoming Warren Beatty project was an aviator, oil tycoon, engineer, industrialist, moviemaker and playboy millionaire.who died at 70 in 1976, a codeine-addicted hermit with Fu Manchu fingernails and a net worth of about a billion bucks. Hughes is so popular a subject because the guy contained multitudes.

Ophuls' fictionalized portrait, with Robert Ryan as the subject, painted a picture of an insecure tyrant who bought friends and wives and treated them as slaves. Demme's larky story with a grizzled Jason Robards as the late-life Hughes framed the billionaire as an eccentric fairy godfather to Everyman Melvin Dummar. Scorsese's epic about the young Hughes conjured him as a modern-day Icarus who flew high on wings of wax and crashed because of his numerous phobias, including OCD. Presumably Beatty's version, which the actor/filmmaker/ladies' man has been working on for nearly 40 years, will highlight Hughes' numerous conquests, which include Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn -- among others.

Your favorite Hughes movie? Why are filmmakers so obsessed with him?

Saw the nine-minute trailer for David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last night, with Rooney Mara resembling a pierced cockatoo and Stockholm resembling a glistening city of forgotten dreams. But I also saw the satirical trailer for another movie,The Pig With the Froggy Tattoo, and have to say it's an equally good tease.

Froggy Tattoo trailer embedded below. Who wears the tattoo better, Lisbeth Salander or Miss Piggy?

Chuckling as Sarah Jessica Parker juggles husband, kids and high-powered job in I Don't Know How She Does It  -- a movie that has a smile rather than the teeth of its source material -- I thought fondly of prior Hollywood movies where Her pinstripes are wider than His.

Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark. Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac. Diane Baker in The Best of Everything. Diane Keaton in Baby Boom. Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Sanaa Lathan in Something New.

One could chart the modern history of women in the workplace through these films. Though there were many female professionals in pinstripes in 1930s films, the genre really exploded during the 1940s when women were manning the worplace front during World War II.

1940s heroines juggled love for job and love for Joe. Think of Mitchell Leisen's great tryptich, Lady in the Dark, with Ginger Rogers realizing in therapy that all her life she has dominated men and now she has to find a man to dominate her; Take a Letter, Darling, with ad exec Roz Russell letting her assistant Fred MacMurray be her collaborator; and No Time for Love, with photographer Claudette Colbert hiring blue-collar laborer MacMurray as her assistant.

With the exceptions of Judy Holliday in Solid Gold Cadillac who got the job and the guy, and Doris Day in The Pajama Game the union leader who fought for a raise and married management, the typical 1950s heroine had to choose between love or work. Consider the gals of The Best of Everything (Martha Hyer, Hope Lange, Diane Baker, Joan Crawford) who learn that there is love and there is work but there is only one heart.

In the 1970s there were the empowerment narratives such as Norma Rae, with Sally Field as the textile worker who helps unionize her shop and have a homelife, and Faye Dunaway as the television exec in Network who invents reality TV and uses men for sex instead of vice-versa.

In the 1980s, Baby Boom showed Diane Keaton overcoming the prejudice against working moms in the corporate world and Working Girl  Melanie Griffith a working-class employee overcoming the class prejudice against her becoming an executive.

In the best working-gal movie  of the new century, Sanaa Lathan is the African-American exec who battles racism in the workplace and her own racism about dating a white guy in Something New.

In 1980 I met Ginger Rogers who told me about the "odd" experience of showing Lady in the Dark to a feminist audience. "In 1940, the audience thought my bosslady character so modern and daring. In 1980, they laughed. You know, Carrie, times have changed!"

Have they? Your favorite gals in shoulderpads and pinstripes?