You'd also need a very specific take on reality that isn't currently found in the DSM-IV.

What, you don't think Batman is a narcissist? All of his self-flagellation can, with a little interpretation, be taken as turning a whole city into his private psychodrama. Talk about ego!

I thought Spy Game suffered from unintentional silliness. I don't have any specific objection to Redford or to Pitt in it, but the whole motivational structure of the movie, from start to finish, was just Too Much. Also, although it's realistic, watching someone manipulate world events by dint of a telephone is just not as sexy as watching a fistfight.

The funnest part of the Bourne guest-casting was being like Oh! That is what those guys look like when they're at home! LOTR actors out of their wigs look very different -- I hardly recognized either one at first.

I thought Spy Game suffered from unintentional silliness.

Dude, your take on reality is that it's unnecessarily silly. Using the nostrum "Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel" as a diagnostic tool, I suspect you may be the thinkiest person alive.

Perhaps, but I don't go blunderbussing around rural Chinese prisons, do I? I mean, I also do not sell the girlfriends of my proteges to rural Chinese prisons.

Generally speaking, I think selling a supermodel to China, only for China to hide her in a rural prison, is the nadir of foreign policy silliness. It wanted only Richard Gere holding a sit-in in Tiananmen Square to be sillier.

I mean, I also do not sell the girlfriends of my proteges to rural Chinese prisons.

So you say.

cuts eyes suspiciously at Nutty

Also, although it's realistic, watching someone manipulate world events by dint of a telephone is just not as sexy as watching a fistfight.

Nutty, I love how you can say that the movie needed more realistic motivations in one sentence, and then say that the realism in the movie wasn't as sexy as a big explosion later on in the same paragraph.

(And I thought Redford manipulating the world via telephone would have been sexy for you, it seemed like your sort of thing)

Sometimes it seems like the demands you put on movies must leave the poor movies confused and frustrated, wondering how the night could have turned out so badly, and at just which point it all started to go south.

I don't remember liking Spy Game as much as I thought I would. Probably because of Redford's insistence on being a Golden Boy.

I watched Swimming Pool over the weekend, and really enjoyed it. (It's a very misleadingly marketed film, IMO -- it's not a thriller, it's a movie about a woman who's writing one.)

I can see why it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I absolutely adored the storytelling, and the performances and camerawork just made me swoon.

1. Telephone manipulation has its place; but front-and-center as the chief elements of moving the plot is not it.

2. While I do like the telephone, and the freedom it has given the modern thriller plot, I am not so enamoured of ear wax that I must witness lots of it.

3. If you are a serious movie about foreign policy unrest, you may use the telephone, but you may also be required to be directed by Costa-Gavras, or else take place in black and white. (See Paragraph 31-B for regulations involving documentary exposés.

4. If you are a not-serious movie about foreign policy unrest, shit must blow up in a regular basis, unless you have received Intimate Fight Scene Exemption #2, or Silly Chase Sequence Exemption #3. Please see Appendix Q for forms to apply for these exemptions.

I liked Swimming Pool. I watched it with a friend, and we spent over an hour afterwards discussing exactly when the narrative went from watching the writer to watching what she was writing and discussing the color choices and so on.

I also liked that at the end, the protagonist was not shown to be a misunderstood curmudgeon hiding her heart of gold behind her crusty exterior. She seemed to be curmudgeon all the way through, bless her.

4. If you are a not-serious movie about foreign policy unrest, shit must blow up in a regular basis, unless you have received Intimate Fight Scene Exemption #2, or Silly Chase Sequence Exemption #3. Please see Appendix Q for forms to apply for these exemptions.

See what I'm talking about?

It's like you're a Rules Girl with movies.

t runs away