I caught Van Helsing on TiVo and watched part of it. It was really bad and Kate was worse. Lordy she was awful.

Other recent harvestings from TiVo need to be shared with particular Buffistas.

DXM! Have you seen Miyazaki's Porco Rosso? Holy shit, is it beautiful. It's one of the best movies I've seen about aviation. Like so many of his movies I just wanted to move into that world. But the flying and the aviation detail was incredible.

Jilli! Have you seen The Tomb of Ligeia with Vincent Price? It's the most faithful adaptation of the gothic romance I've seen put on screen. Dark and perverse and lush. Vincent wears these really cool antique sunglasses, and all the men ponce about in High Victorian fashion, and the ruined Abbey is Totally Gothic and the story is filled with cruel little touches and brooding gothery and it's well written and the lead actress, Elizabeth Sargeant, was strong and spirited.

This was not Franco's prettiest movie. He's been better. Geez, he was even better in "City by the Sea," if I'm remembering what he looked like correctly. Man, was that a funny movie.

Have you seen Miyazaki's Porco Rosso?

Not DXM, but I *love* this movie.

Birmingham, if memory serves.

Yeah, probably not all that early, then. The rest of Michigan isn't all that different from the middle of the country, as far as film is concerned. I'm still a little puzzled as to why Ann Arbor ranks so high in film markets, but it does. Or did, anyway.

I taped Porco Rosso the other night, but haven't watched it yet.

I saw Captain Blood today, and it was swashbuckleriffic!

I do heart that movie. But you would have known that in advance.

Porco Rosso is a wonderful film. I recorded Whisper of the Heart off TCM this week, but haven't yet had the chance to watch it (I haven't seen this week's Lost or either Stargate, either. Life intervenes). We had a pretty, sunny day last week after a couple of days of storm. My son pointed at the puffy clouds in a deep blue sky and called them "Miyazaki clouds."

Well, after today's viewing I can mark Brokeback Mountain off the date movie list, as guys tend not to find weeping particularly sexy.

I realize that as a gay man who used to ride and spend time on a horse ranch when I was a kid, I may have a slightly easier time identifying with the main characters than the average viewer. But I'd expected that being familiar with the Annie Proulx story would lessen the impact. Clearly, I was an idiot.

The last entertainment that managed to break me like this was the original broadcast of "The Body." And I was not alone - the full-to-the-gills theater that had been silent enough to hear people's breathing through 2 hours of movie started crying en masse when Enis made that phone call to Lureen and heard the details of Jack's death .

t hands Matt an industrial-size box of Kleenex

No, really, just keep it. You'll need it. Brokeback has the strongest hangover of just about any film I can think of; it'll keep rattling around in the back of your head for days afterward and you'll be in line for the copy machine at work or checking your pockets for change at the stamp machine or doing who knows what completely random thing and another image will cross your mind and you'll be broken all over again.