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Every week in the paper I write for in Chicago, I compile a 5 Films To See Now list; next week’s will have one movie five times: that’s how much I liked Adaptation, which I’ll write a little about next week. So many people have written so much and it doesn’t matter. There’s even more to dig out of this life- and art-affirming Moebius strip of doubling and singularities. This week, a little about Evelyn, and Wayne Wang’s take on being hired to direct Jennifer Lopez.

Evelyn is a much more modest affair, a tidy tearjerker from melodrama journeyman Bruce Beresford. What’s Irish painter and decorator Desmond Doyle (Pierce Brosnan) to do when his wife scoots out on him the day after Christmas with an Englishman, leaving him with two young boys and a small girl? Bruce Beresford’s Evelyn, from a script by Paul Pender (and developed and produced by Brosnan’s company, Irish Dreamtime), offers the answer: hold your breath, worse is coming. Based on an actual groundbreaking 1950s family-law case in Ireland, Evelyn traces the efforts of the single, but not widowed, father to reclaim his kids once they’re taken away and imprisoned in what lawyer Stephen Rea dubs “a cozy conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the Irish government.” The story also has a sly subplot about the power of publicity before it became as perverse as the law. It’s all low-key melodrama, which Beresford’s usually good at, with the spectacle of stern nuns who, though hardly as cruel as in Peter Mullan’s upcoming The Magdalene Sisters, still call little girls “ya dirty little tinkers” and, when challenged, reflexively boxes an angelic child’s ruddy cheeks. It’s Desmond’s last straw when his daughter Evelyn is abused, and the law’s his only hope. There are dashes of deeply rueful Irish humor. “Well, David beat Goliath in the book I read,” a weary-looking Brosnan intones; he also observes, “I like Yanks, I do, most of them are Irish, anyway.” Even with the year’s most dubious heart-tug—beware the “angel rays”—Evelyn is a small, sweet picture that touched me, a heart-warmer that manages to shy from schlock. With Alan Bates, who’s kinetic standing in place, Julianna Margulies and Aidan Quinn.

A colleague teased me for my flip answer to what I could possibly like about Maid in Manhattan: “Jennifer Lopez’s cute little ears.” “I’m gonna be wondering about your aesthetics,” she said, laughing. But I’ll always concede I’m a sucker for movies that showcase effortless charm, even when the vehicle is flawed. While Wayne Wang doesn’t do for Lopez what Steven Soderbergh did in Out of Sight, the often-indie Hong Kong-born veteran still brings an unlikely combination of standard romance and working class-verisimilitude to what could have been just another Pretty Woman wannabe. Lopez is a chambermaid at a ritzy New York hotel (actually the Waldorf-Astoria, working the big screen as “The Beresford.”); a series of fairly inoffensive contrivances lead her into romance with damply patrician politician Ralph Fiennes. The side characters are notable, like a Preston Sturges ensemble, bringing their own weight to what would otherwise be a weightless fantasy. Stanley Tucci is coming timing itself as Fiennes’ advisor; Bob Hoskins admirable as a butler who shepherds Lopez’s ambitions, and a nutty cameo by Amy Sedaris as a too-tan society ninny.

Talking to Wang about the project a couple of weeks ago, I asked if Lopez has the stuff to do work beyond wish-fulfillment, class-empowerment fantasies. She does this well, but audiences are notoriously fickle when stars are overexposed. “I hope she takes some chances and does some really great roles. I think she’s got the chops for it. That’s where she needs to go, rather than just keep playing the tuff that the studios want her to do. Maybe this is talking about me more than about her, but I’m trying to drag myself back to doing Asian films, too. I loved [Jennifer in] Mi Familia, Selena. There’s gotta be a great role for a Latin woman that gives her something substantial. For me, I’m also trying to get back to something that’s really Asian. I’m having a hard time, I’ve been working on it for years, have a wonderful script, but I can’t get financed.” So what about your adaptation of David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day? “I’m getting closer. That one’s interesting. Oddly enough, with that book being so popular and David selling out across the country, I’m having a hard time financing that still. The film world is [playing it] very, very safe. This is a bad time for independents.”

Maid in Manhattan was a big surprise for Wang. “I wanted to work with a big movie again, but I didn’t expect to be offered this.” He laughs. “After Center of the World, I couldn’t get arrested! The reviews [on that movie] astonished me. I learned more about the critics and all their hang-ups. In the middle of the big computer boom in Silicon Valley, I was in the middle of all these kids who were in more of a romantic comedy than this by five hundred times. They thought the whole world was at their fingertips, at the keyboard.”

Ralph Fiennes, so often cast as dark and damaged, also seems like an unlikely choice. He had a lot of trepidation. He says, ‘I don’t know how to do a romantic comedy,’ I said, ‘I don’t either!’ So that’s why we get along.” And Wang is off on one of his regularly scheduled disarming giggles. “We said, let’s treat this as a drama, y’know. Let’s not think about it as a romantic comedy, let’s think about the characters, let’s think about the situation, make the dialogue real and go from there. But he’s actually very loose and good in a romantic comedy, I think. He underestimates himself in that [regard].”

Maid has a gorgeously produced and lit hotel room romantic consummation that’s simultaneously luxe and almost comic in its extravagance. “I’d just come off Center of the World, and almost the whole film is in the bedroom. It’s always artificial, with all these people hanging around. The jewelers who loaned us the jewelry were sitting right next to me, making sure it didn’t get stolen! But somehow these actors block it out and get into it. Those are the hardest scenes, to sell the fantasy and sell the romanticism of it.” It’s an ultra-chaste scene, especially in contrast to Wang’s previous endeavor. “The interesting thing was that we shot some pretty hot love scenes and they all got cut out. In the previews, the audience didn’t want it. They wanted the fairytale. They just wanted them to fall in love and love each other but they didn’t want to look at it! We shot, the first cut we had, it was a really hot love scene. I liked it, but y’know, that’s Center of the World!” He laughs.

There’s a couple of not-too-indecent jokes about Lopez’s backside. How do you find that balance of humor and taste? Wang giggles again. “I just decided to use just one.” It’s a centerpiece of the TV commercials, set in Central Park, with Lopez sitting down on a New York magazine cover with Fiennes’ face on it; she says, “I’m sitting on your face!” “At first I wasn’t sure. I shot it, I did it, Ralph did a really good job keeping such a straight face with it. I wasn’t sure it would work until we put the whole thing together. I think the reason why it works is because the magazine was stuck to her ass, you saw a little piece of it on the wide shot when she got up. You could hear the audience go ‘Hoohoohoohoo!’ waiting to see if it’s going to damage her [ultraexpensive borrowed coat]. Those things are always such a crap shoot. But I’m glad that one worked out.”

Does she mind? “She didn’t seem to care, That particular one, she played into it straight-facedly. But she does have, y’know, a good… whatever!” He giggles. “The better shot is when she comes down the stairs [in a party scene] in that dress that’s almost transparent and it’s a shot from the back. That’s the great shot, you see. If you see the film again…” More boyish laughter.

Maid in Manhattan has a lush twinkle to it far removed from the DV smear of Center of the World. “I still love film. Film has a luminosity that will never be matched by digital. But I also like digital because it’s artificial. And it’s easier to work with. It’s fast. I like them both. I hope that both can exist. Each has their own unique characteristics and you have to use them for what they are. Maid in Manhattan was shot on film, in anamorphic widescreen, and it has a luminosity about it that digital will never come close to. I hope Kodak doesn’t change their stocks. They’re changing their stocks because silver is so expensive, and [film] may lose some of that. But on a great print, this film looks beautiful on the big wide screen.”

E-me: Do you forgive a movie you’ve shelled out eight or ten dollars for if it’s kinda charming? Or do you shrug and say, “Ah, it’s just a Hollywood movie, what do you expect?”