I watched The Testament of Dr. Mabuse this weekend.

I watched the first fifteen minutes of this on TCM about a month ago, but it was starting at 2:00 am, and I just couldn't stay awake for it. I've always loved Metropolis quite a bit, so I was excited to see it, but the sandman had different ideas. What I saw only strengthened my opinion that Lang is one of the all-time top-tier geniuses of the medium.

It's currently in our Netflix queue. what comes next is always getting tweaked a bit, but it's hovering near the top, and will hopefully be selected soon.

I've always loved Metropolis quite a bit, so I was excited to see it, but the sandman had different ideas. What I saw only strengthened my opinion that Lang is one of the all-time top-tier geniuses of the medium.

I've never seen Metropolis. M was good stuff, though.

I think M is a great combination of sound and silent film--there is that incredible speech by Lorre at the end, but there are also so many great extended scenes of just views of sets with no sound at all, including background noises or music.

there is that incredible speech by Lorre at the end, but there are also so many great extended scenes of just views of sets with no sound at all, including background noises or music.

I wrote a five-page paper on the Elsie montage.

M is also in our Netflix queue. Actually, so is Metropolis, as S has never seen it.

I saw Stranger Than Fiction last night and urge Buffistas to go. I didn't love the film, although I definitely enjoyed it, but it's worth it for Emma Thompson's performance alone. Her character is smart and dark and funny and a has a real inner life and is beautifully played. It's such a rare treat to see a female role that's a complex character dealing with all kinds of issues, none of them having to do with relationships to men or to family and I want to support that at the box office.

At my wife's bidding, we watched X3 last night, which was a predictably embarrassing piece of garbage. I liked the first two movies pretty well, but this one had a bullshit script (for instance, everyone always says exactly what's on their mind), an uninspired director, and a cast that seemed to be pushing death scenes into their contracts just to get away from this shit (except Halle Berry, who was suddenly the co-star of the movie, and she couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag). Bad bad bad.

this one had a bullshit script

There is only a certain amount of "Isn't that cute! Completely pulling geography and physics out of your butt!" and then it stops being cute.

Also, I think I am over the time in American culture when it was okay for PMS to be the villain of the piece.

No kidding. Also, between the 2nd and 3rd movies, the bad guys grew invisible Snidely Whiplash mustaches and became, instead of terrorists, generic evildoers who do evil just because evil is fun, bwa-ha-ha. Another annoying thing: the Grand Guignol conflict was so dumb that it melted brain cells. If Magneto can levitate metal to get his people where they need to go, why not put them all on a stretched-out nickel and levitate them instead of moving a bridge so that the freakin' army could, I don't know, follow you? And why would the X-men care if Magneto attacks a research facility that produces the cure? And why in hell did the studio allow those hacks to just kill a bunch of characters randomly and without any emotional impact, like some sort of crappy video game? And giving Halle Berry a speaking role is a good idea why? I think X3 may have been worse than Highlander 2.

Also, I'm afraid that the fact that I put so much more thought into it than the people who made it means that I am incredibly lame.