Usually, the heroine is the exact opposite of the man. She is either adorably shy, naive and innocent or she is outrageously free-spirited, outspoken and affecting. She is usually terribly poor and spunky or tremendously rich but no one would know because she holds herself in "that way" (which is regal beyond wealth and is the way the poor heroine holds herself too). The heroine is always very sensitive and has confidence problems, doubting herself or her love.

This combo is a winner. With shyness or gumption, our heroine breaks down the mysterious barriers around our hero's heart. Thus he is able to live life more fully than he ever could with the vacuous model-like females he was always dating (or marrying) and the trillions of dollars in his bank account.

Give the hero a quirk (for example, he is so bored with life's challenges he has taken to stealing priceless works of art from large metropolitan art museums) and your heroine a gimmick (she has a remarkably unbelievable job and manages to only make you snicker, rather than burst out in total hilarity, when she walks into a surveillance room dressed in a $20,000 outfit and drinking green sludge), and your winning combination has moved up a notch.

This is basically The Thomas Crown Affair.

Man gets bored with life. Man decides to become art thief. Art thief bounty hunter woman needs to capture man. She is new challenge to him. He is new challenge to her. She runs around a police department trying desperately to look like she is too cool and tough to be there. Man and woman meet at a party. She goes back to police department and tries again to convince other detectives that she is even more cool and tough. Woman and man meet at another party, where she is wearing a see-through dress.

They do what might be the most embarrassing, confusing and possibly ludicrous tango/samba/ salsa-type fiasco in cinematic history. This leads to them fucking each other in his house: in the hall, on the stairs, a few more stairs up, a few more, on a desk, under that desk, on a chair, beside the chair...in Martinique, and so on, and so on. Challenge turns to something stronger. Girl trusts boy. Boy trusts girl. Should they?

Pierce Brosnan plays our quadrillionaire, Thomas Crown. He commits an act in Hollywood that will forever gain this reviewer's adoration. He, as producer, hires a woman that has wrinkles around her eyes and somewhat matches his age. This woman is the incredibly gorgeous, never-looking-better Rene Russo.

Two pluses of note here: one, Brosnan is, well, Brosnan - as dashing in a well-cut suit and bowler hat as he is in nothing but faded levis; two, Russo o gets better looking as time rolls by, and is so glamorous you almost forget she can't act.

The story is totally unbelievable and, because of that, loads of fun. The two leads are so good together and stunning that it doesn't matter that their performances (or at least Russo's) aren't anything to phone home about. There are a couple of twists and neat scenery and Faye Dunaway pops up here and there. There is also Denis Leary who is so damn Irish-looking you want to serve him potatoes, and has a gap tooth but, nevertheless, manages to be highly beddable in spite of (or maybe because of) his deeply cynical smart-assedness.

I dig movies about romance - the more impossible (Pretty Woman, The Cutting Edge, Ever After), the better. The Thomas Crown Affair had a leg up before it even started. But it was more than cool locations and pretty clothes and sexy men. It held my interest because it was fun and it was dreamy and it was a fantasy that I sure wish I could live.

Without that awful tweed suit Russo wore in the rain, of course.