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Brimming over with sadism and the occasional touch of kink, Blancanieves piles on the pathology that's the birthright of any fairy tale worth its salt. Yet it's still a tale of lost innocence, and Berger keeps faith with a prototype revered by the Disneys and the Grimms alike: the resilient, enterprising girl who overcomes wave after wave of adversity. Blancanieves gets a lot of help on her journey through life, but her salvation, such as it is, will turn out to be the twin performance arts she inherited from her parents.

And so it should be. I'm fond of the helpers, but a girl has got to be able to look after herself. If this Snow White becomes a superstar in her own right, it's because she followed Dad's advice and learned never to take her eyes off the bull.

Occasionally, as when David realizes that one of his daughters has a heroin problem, he feels moved to step forward and help without revealing his identity; in other cases, he simply feels a certain joy in getting to know these strangers who are just a little like him. (Though very few of them actually resemble him.)

David's initial dismay at having launched so many lives turns into elation, temporarily distracting him from his debt problems and gradually preparing him for a more involved kind of fatherhood. Huard doesn't overplay the big transformation, and his performance may be the key to the movie's effectiveness. (The picture is being remade in Hollywood under the title The Delivery Man, starring Vince Vaughn.)

David is a guy hoping to sprint through middle age: He still plays football — the European kind — regularly, but you can sense the soft thickening of his middle beneath that track suit. He shaves only intermittently, and the thick patches of gray in his beard make him look both slightly distinguished and a little tired.

But Huard's David is also a man who's still capable of surprise, and of change — even his rather dull job, as a delivery man for his family's butcher business, ends up providing a solution to one of his chief problems.

There are certain plot points in Starbuck, it's true, that either don't make much sense or are simply underexplained. But the picture is so breezily warm, without being too insistently ingratiating, that those flaws don't matter much.

How many kids are too many? The Monty Python guys once sang, ironically, that every sperm is sacred. In Starbuck, charmingly enough, it's actually sort of true.

The Standard & Poor's 500 stock index broke new ground today, closing at 1,569, an all-time high that erased the record set on Oct. 9, 2007.

The S&P joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which broke its 2007 record earlier this month.

Both indices have now recovered all the losses they suffered during the Great Recession.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

"The S&P 500 had flirted with its closing record for two weeks before finally vaulting over that level Thursday. It had come within five points of the closing high in seven of the past 10 sessions.

"'The market has been trying and trying, and we finally crossed the line,' said Quincy Krosby, a market strategist at Prudential Financial, PRU -0.20% which manages roughly $1 trillion in assets. 'Having the Dow reaching new highs was good, but the S&P 500 is broader, it's bigger... it's an important message for investors.'"

March 28, 2013