Crazy in Alabama (1999)

Of all the patronizing white-witness movies made in Hollywood about the civil rights movement, Crazy in Alabama has to be the loopiest. Meet Lucille (Melanie Griffith), a sweetly deranged housewife who beheads her abusive husband, flees cross-country to Los Angeles, and lands a guest-star role on her favorite TV series, ''Bewitched.'' (The lame excuse for not showing her interacting with the show's original cast à la ''Forrest Gump'' is that Lucille films her work as cutaways, opposite stand-ins.) Interwoven with this ridiculous odyssey is another story line that has Lucille's young nephew, Peejoe (Lucas Black, the kid from ''Sling Blade''), standing up with a group of Alabama blacks against a duly bigoted sheriff (Meat Loaf Aday).

Griffith's husband, Antonio Banderas, making his directorial debut, lays on the lessons with a heavy hand. He actually has Peejoe talk about injustices to black ''pay-puhl'' as another boy crushes ants near the edge of a whites-only swimming pool. By the time Rod Steiger shows up as a judge, carrying on like Marlon Brando in ''Apocalypse Now,'' the whole enterprise has collapsed into something as campy as a flick by Banderas' evident artistic mentor, Pedro Almódovar.

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