Are YOU a person who might only see one movie this summer?

Do YOU like to laugh?

When watching people who obsessively compete over a rather picayune pastime, will YOU laugh just a little bit nervously because you can identify with these people and think "I, too, could see that as a competition I would have a good time at"?

Then YOU need to go see Wordplay.

The Pleasant Reason for my frequent trips to Ann Arbor of late is, fortunately, the holder of a degree in English, and as a result has a fascination with words that is probably even more severe than mine. The good news is that this means she not only tolerates, but finds it cool, when I say, "Hey, let's spend an hour and a half of a beautiful Sunday inside watching people work crossword puzzles on a projection screen!" The bad news? Well, my days of winning Scrabble appear to be over.

"Wordplay" features John Stewart, the Indigo Girls, Mike Mussina, and Bill Clinton and Bob Dole talking about the crossword. (Dole is, as ever, self-deprecatingly funny: "The whole [1996] election was a puzzle to me.") But the real stars are the people who actually play to win the annual crossword tournament. (They make a pilgrimage to Stamford, Connecticut, in the winter, to do this. I would make some comment about who the heck goes to Stamford in the witner, but others make pilgrimages to similarly -- actually, probably more -- desolate places in the winter.)

There's the college student who wants to be the youngest to become the crossword champion, the woman who's won it before and been to a bunch of them (I frankly found her a little full of herself), and the guy who always ends up in the top three but never has won. Think of a story about a characters n the sports team merged with a bunch of pocket-protector-nerd types, and you've got "Wordplay."

It's like this. Most of us will never have a chance at winning something like the Super Bowl or the Masters. Some of us never had a chance of being on a wining football team in high school. This lets us think, "Here's something that I could -- could -- be good at." That's "Wordplay."

I highly recommend it.

PS: Insofar as it's a documentary and not made by Al Gore or Michael Moore, you may have difficulty finding it in a theater. You may have to travel to somewhere like Ann Arbor, where bookstores and showing of documentaries are some good reasons - although not nearly qualifying as the Pleasant Reason - to go there. (I just ignore the Wolverine paraphernelia everyone seems to have to fly there.)

PSS: Here's hoping the soundtrack to this movie comes out soon. Some of the songs were pretty entertaining!