King of the blurbs

WHILE most people know him as the man who's interviewed everyone from Bill Clinton to Anna Nicole Smith, in my neck of the woods Larry King is famous for liking movies. In fact, if you're a habitual reader of movie ads, you might say that CNN's indefatigable talkmeister is famous for liking movies too much.

Even though he's quick to disassociate himself from the reviewing rabble -- one of the first things he told me at lunch was "I'm not a critic!" -- you don't have to look very far these days to find a glowing King blurb somewhere near the top of a movie ad, kicking you in the pants right toward the nearest movie theater.

If you look at the ads for "The Good Shepherd," you can find King shouting from the rooftops: "The Best Spy Movie Ever!" The only problem is that King often heaps a towering inferno of accolades on unworthy films. Or as critic Richard Roeper put it in his roundup of 2006 Hollywood trends: "Al Gore was bigger box office than Lindsay Lohan. Borat lapped Jack Black. And Larry King liked everything."

King sees movies every week, often catching a noon flick before heading over to CNN to do his show. It must keep him young. At 73, he's slim and trim, almost boyishly petite. His hair, once gray, is now a dry brown, like the trunk of a palm tree, with gray at the temples. He seems to see everything, describing the movies in blurb-like bursts, from "Letters From Iwo Jima" ("Loved every minute of it!") to a film about Turkish genocide called "Screamers" ("Very well done!").

"I know they're only looking for a catchphrase," he explained the other day, ensconced at his favorite table at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, where he orders a spartan salad for lunch ("Don't give me any eggs!"). "If I like the movie, I give 'em a quote. If I don't like something, I'm not gonna rap it. Sometimes they don't even use it. I gave Clint a big rave for his movie and they didn't even need it."

However, it turns out that King sometimes will even blurb a movie he didn't like. At lunch, he told me of the time he and Shawn Southwick, his sixth wife, took their two boys to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." "I had no idea what was going on," he says. "I turned to my wife and said, 'What is this movie about? I don't get it!' "