I have yet to see Batman Begins, but I just saw Layer Cake. Excellent caper movie with all sorts of twistiness, and fantastic acting. Daniel Craig looks eerily like Steve McQueen.

Unfortunately, this film completely ruined Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" for me in a way that Reservoir Dogs apparently ruined "Stuck in the Middle" for a lot of people.

Plus, Colm Meany! Good stuff all around.

Consuela and I saw the Batman. No Serenity trailer, and we both liked it, but didn't love it. Neither of us could figure out why it didn't grab us as much as it did others, other than neither of us are really superhero fans, plus it seemed predictable to me.

I finally saw Batman.

I honestly don't think a cinematic experience has ever given me a bigger payoff. And I think most fans of the comics must agree with me - it was just so RIGHT.

As everybody's said.

Also, I actually liked Katie Holmes. I didn't like her character very much, but in some ways I blame the writing for that: she was forced to deliver a lot of the movie's Inspirational Messages, which I never love. Even when Bale was delivering such lines (Trailer Lines, I call them sometimes) I didn't love it, but they were a much smaller percentage of his dialogue.

I saw not one but two trailers for Chocolate Factory. The first was one I'd already seen, with the goofy song. The second one made it look like an actual movie, although I still have reservations.

Anne, I loved that film! I was SO in love with Daniel Craig after it.

"Would you like to see my mask?"

Which made me think, "How do you like my darkness now?"

Katie Holmes is suffering in comparison with Bale, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Liam Neeson. It's not that she did a bad job at all, I just don't think she's an Oscar-worthy talent like everyone else with a speaking part in the movie.

Tonight the local Fox News broadcast aired 5-second interview clips with Bale and Caine and did a story about the film. Hilariously at one point they said "Christian Bale plays the part of the hero and Tom Cruise's fiance... Katie Holmes plays his childhood friend" with about a three second pause where the elipsis is. Either it was really odd phrasing or the newspeople were making a dig at the Greatest Love of All.

The thing I didreally like about Katie Holmes is that she's not uber-pretty.

I liked the fight-scene style, for not being able to tell what's going on. Made it scarier, though, yes, frustrating.

We saw Howl's Moving Castle last night, which was good. We were debating the cultural Pedigree (I assumed the original author was British, which, it turns out, yes). I think that explains a lot of the difference from Myazaki's other stuff. And, after the preview for Mirrormask (which, omg I must see), I was thinking about how differently it would have played as a Henson (or BBC) film.

Katie Holmes is suffering in comparison with Bale, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Liam Neeson. It's not that she did a bad job at all, I just don't think she's an Oscar-worthy talent like everyone else with a speaking part in the movie

Point.

It's not that she did a bad job at all, I just don't think she's an Oscar-worthy talent like everyone else with a speaking part in the movie.

I agree. I even liked her character, and the role she filled. (I really liked that she rejects him in the end. ) I agree with the argument that she fills the same role as Harvey Dent could have, and in that sense it's a shame she's there when he's not, but at the same time, without her, the only women in the entire movie would have been Bruce's dead mom, Rutger Hauer's secretary, and the two hookers he takes to the party. So I didn't mind seeing an original female character with some agency of her own beyond her role in Bruce/Batman's story.) I think the role could have been better played by someone like Carla Gugino.