Spidra, thank you so much for the Cary Grant autobiography! I've just spent the last hour and a half reading and reading and annoying Hec and Emmett with one excerpt after another.

What a lovely, sad, exciting record of his childhood and youth. Hardly any Big Stories, just anecdotes, one small sketch after another: hanging up his stockings at Christmas, his own everyday stockings, black or gray with a little white band just below the knee; the magic-lantern party with tangerines and nuts and blancmange; his cousin's Italian beau with the beautiful new motorcar from which Archie was banned after he scuffed the back of the front seats with his boot-heel; his father's garden, with daffodils and a vegetable patch and wild strawberries; the warnings from his schoolmates that anyone who liked daisies was a pansy and anyone who picked dandelions would wet the bed.

The day his mother wasn't there when he came home from school, and all the days after, and his not learning until many years later that she'd had a breakdown and been sent to a sanitarium (he didn't see her for twenty years, and she didn't recognize him at first). Volunteering as a Boy Scout to help in the Great War, and standing on the gangplank handing life preservers to boys scarcely older than he, about to cross the Channel, and seeing the moment of blank fear in each one's eyes. Wandering the streets on the night of the Armistice, when everyone was out walking restlessly but no one was celebrating; every family in town had lost someone, and the town was too relieved to sleep but too full of loss to be joyful.

Hanging out at a local theater and spoiling a magician's illusion with clumsy spotlight management. Walking around town with his father the night after his first professional performance, just talking quietly and holding hands. Crushing on a vaudeville dancer during his troupe's visit to New York, buying her a violently gaudy and inappropriate winter coat for Christmas, and then losing his nerve and never even succeeding in touching her hand. Deciding to become a talking actor, haunting the vaudeville circuit, and modeling himself after Zeppo Marx.

And endless generous little digressions about this or that director or actor or friend of his father's, amazed and delighted at people's talents and strength and kindness.

Just utterly wonderful. Thank you so much, Spidra!

You're welcome, JZ. As I said, I got sucked into that and had to turn the TV off because it was clear I wasn't going to have time to watch "The Awful Truth". It's very interesting to me to see the vulnerability of people we admire. Their admissions of insecurity, failures, etc. make it easier to deal with my own. You figure that it's just part of the human condition.

Wow. It sounds like I'll have to read that book.

Saw Match Point, finally. I liked it a lot. The last act went on far too long, but this is the first movie of his since Sweet and Lowdown that I haven't walked out of wanting my 90 minutes back.

(The only major complaint I have is that he didn't get a British co-writer -- if it was obvious to me that this film was written by an American, I can only imagine how awkward it must have sounded to British ears.)

GLAAD needs to chill. One of Shalit's kids is gay, at least three of them are active in gay causes. He's more than familiar with gay people and gay behavior and if he felt a straight character periodically tracked down and seduced another character he'd say so.

Do you think Twist was a predator? And do you think having gay kids automatically confers credibility?

Given Cheney's example, I'd say that's a big no.

Refresh my memory... doesn't Ennis actually initiate things? And just about break the front door down in his eagerness to get going on all those "fishing trips"? While Jack Twist takes the moral low ground for running around on his wife, I don't actually see anything he directs toward Ennis being objectionable unless one has a blanket objection to homosexuality in general.

There's a HUGE difference between "pursuer" and "predator". Just because Jake was more agressive in pursuing the relationship doesn't make him predatory.

I think Jack pretty much initiates, but Ennis never really objects; and he certainly could have. But in any case, I doubt Shalit said the same thing about, say, The English Patient, or dozens of other movies about straight men pursuing reluctant women. Which is not to say that I think Shalit is necessarily homophobic, just oddly hypocritical here.

While Jack Twist takes the moral low ground for running around on his wife

Ennis is married too, at least for the first several years of their relationship.

Jack does initiate the first sexual encounter, but Ennis doesn't need any convincing, and I believe he's the one who comes to Jack the next night. Plus, as Matt says, when Jack comes back into his life, he's all too eager to continue the affair. There is a scene in which Ennis says (paraphrasing) "I wouldn't be like this if it weren't for you," but I doubt we are intended to take that as fact. So I hardly think that "predator" is the right word to describe Jack. It's a strange thing for Shalit to say, but I think GLAAD is strongly overreacting.