I finally watched "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" which is summarized by Yahoo Movies as:
"The true story of a Bohemian "St. Francis" and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild green-and-red parrots: Mark Bittner, a dharma bum, a homeless street musician in San Francisco, falls in with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life--unaware that the wild parrots will bring him everything he needs. Mark was born and raised in southwestern Washington State. His ambition as a teenager was to be a Great Novelist, but Mark was alarmed by the uniformly miserable fates of all the writers whom he loved. So he decided to pursue a career in music instead. After hitch-hiking through Europe in search of experience, he moved to San Francisco determined to sink or swim as a poet-singer-songwriter. He sank. Completely bereft, he turned to spiritual seeking and ended up on the street where he spent the next fourteen years. Ultimately his search led him to the wild parrot flock, which, in turn, led him back to writing, and his first book: "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill." The hardcover edition, published by Random House, was a best seller; the paperback edition comes out in late January 2005."

I put this movie in my Netflix Queue quite a while ago, after I read the review by Roger Ebert (he and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone are my favorite film reviewers), and finally watched it. It is wonderfully sentimental, unapologetically anthromorphic, and a nice reminder to open our eyes to what is around us - both in nature and in human beings.

Addendum - I also watched Brokeback Mountain this weekend . . . how was this movie, with a universal theme of loneliness and unfulfilled passions, that controversial?