DEEP SOUTH Dangerfield’s Dud, Billy Bob’s Triumph;

I really didn’t intend to see Meet Wally Sparks; I was between engagements and it was the only movie playing at the right time. Even so, there is something exciting about seeing a movie that looks disreputable — first because at a time when everything is permitted, only violations of taste seem at all dangerous and alluring. And second, because there is always a chance, however slight, that you might come across a hidden gem. That is one of the greatest of pleasures for a connoisseur of any art form, high or low — the feeling of discovery, that you have been witness to something extraordinary that has gone unappreciated.

Alas, Meet Wally Sparks lives down to expectations. It’s a remake of The Man Who Came to Dinner, the wonderful 1930s play about a world-famous New York sophisticate who is forced to spend three weeks in the home of an Ohio Babbitt and ends up turning the entire Midwest upside down. (There’s a charming movie version out on video that I recommend most highly.) Meet Wally Sparks reverses field: Danger field is a trash-talking New York TV host who invades the home and privacy of a high-born and courtly Southern governor in hopes of landing an interview that will save his job.

Dangerfield did once make a very amusing movie called Back to School, and with better writers and director, Meet Wally Sparks could have been terrific. But in the end, it resembles nothing so much as a Beverly Hillbillies episode with jokes about things that break off statues depicting Greek gods (and I’m not talking about noses). The most interesting thing about the movie is that Sparks’s foil, the governor, is a Moral Majority type, and yet he is a wholly sympathetic character.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8. You want to talk about feeling as though you have discovered something extraordinary? The movie is called Sling Blade, and it is the story of a retarded man in a small town in Arkansas who becomes the soulmate of a small boy he must rescue from an abusive adult. I know, I didn’t want to see it either when I first read about it, but you must trust me that Sling Blade is a singular achievement — so singular that to describe it is to make it sound horribly cheap and exploitative when it is neither of these things.

I don’t ordinarily go in for comparisons between movies and novels, but Sling Blade is closer to the experience of a Thomas Hardy novel on film than any movie ever made from a Hardy novel (that includes Roman Polanski’s Tess and the recent Jude). Like a Hardy novel, Sling Blade is set among ordinary people living far from the madding crowd. It features a surpassingly strange character at its center, and moves with stately inexorability to a powerful and profoundly moving conclusion.

By turns unsettling and predictable, funny and humorless, grandiose and grand, Sling Blade was made for $ 1 million by a writer-director named Billy Bob Thornton, who also plays the central role. Thornton is Karl, whom we first meet in a mental institution on the day he is to be released after a 25-year stay. With jutting lower jaw and strangulated bass voice, Karl delivers a chilling monologue to a college newspaper reporter about the crime he committed when he was 12: He killed his mother and her lover with a scythe (the “sling blade” of the title). It will turn out that this is not the first crime he committed as a child; indeed, as the movie unfolds, it turns out that Karl is not at all what he seems to be. He is kind-hearted, and mechanically gifted, and the possessor of a very hard-won wisdom.

Thornton is, I think, really more a writer than an actor; his performance as Karl is the perfect realization of a character that was wonderfully conceived and written. Karl has a very stunted vocabulary; he assembles sentences from cliches and words spoken to him by others. The phrases “all right then” and “reckon I could” and “quite a bit” dot each conversation, and come to seem almost like poetry. As a result, whenever Karl says something new, it leaps out, a jarring insight from an unexpected source.

Thornton co-wrote and co-starred in a marvelous movie five years ago called One False Move, which begins as the story of three violent criminals on a killing spree and ends as a full-scale character study of a loquacious sheriff in a small Arkansas town that features as many secrets and epiphanies as the town in Sling Blade. One of the beauties of Sling Blade is that the rest of the movie is as sharply observed as Karl is. Karl works with two good-hearted good-ol’-boy mechanics who tell each other dirty jokes neither understands. A fatherless boy whose mother is involved with a violent drunk is so hungry for a caring adult man that Karl becomes his constant companion. And the villain of the piece, the violent drunk, is not a terrifying monster but a pathetic bully who so needs to express his dominance that he will push around a guy in a wheelchair.

Forget the man from Little Rock who read his unmemorable verses at Bill Clinton’s second inaugural; Billy Bob Thornton is the true poet laureate of Arkansas.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11. The Oscar nominations were announced this morning, and even though I have scolded myself for years about it, I am still capable of being made happy or furious by them. This year, the nominations are terrific: Not only was Jerry Maguire properly recognized, so was Fargo. More important, The People vs. Larry Flynt was denied a best-picture nomination, which is not the only suggestion that even Hollywood is tiring of its radical-chic image; because of new nominating procedures, there isn’t a single piece of Commie agitprop nominated for best documentary, either!

Best of all, Billy Bob Thornton received two nominations for Sling Blade, one for screenplay and one for best actor. He won’t win either one, but at least I can say I was onto this guy three days before he became at least semi- famous.

Billy Bob Thornton gets two Oscar nominations the same week O. J. Simpson is found liable. How much more can one ask?

Deputy Editor John Podhoretz is a regular panelist on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.