Curse of the Golden Flower is MADE OF SO MUCH FUCKING AWESOME that there is no more awesome left. All your awesome are belong to this movie.

Ignore the Variety review, for they were clearly smoking the bad crack when they watched this film.

E's description after we saw it last night: "If Tennessee Williams had written Hamlet and set it in 10th century China, with ninjas*."

Chow Yun Fat = AWESOME. Gong Li = AWESOME. Cinematography = AWESOME. Hundreds of spider ninjas dropping out of the sky and attacking people with awesome curvy knives and bits of string = AWESOME.

I spent the last half of this movie with my jaw on the floor, it was that good.

(*Or whatever the Chinese equivalent would be. They're dressed in all black, they're stealthy, and they're really really good at killing, so I'm calling them ninjas.)

Hundreds of spider ninjas dropping out of the sky and attacking people with awesome curvy knives and bits of string

Did they kill people with paper clips and pocket lint too? Are these the Ninjas of the Intricate Order of the Not-So-Benevolent MacGyver?

I spent the last half of this movie with my jaw on the floor, it was that good.

Don't hold back - tell us how you really feel.

Seriously, though, did you like it better than PAN'S LABYRINTH?

No, they basically stick with their curvy-knives-on-a-rope technique. They look like like sharp metal boomerangs on bungee cords. Both the blades and the cords are used as weapons.

Seriously, though, did you like it better than PAN'S LABYRINTH?

Well, no. This was more fun than Pan's Labyrinth, but I wouldn't say it's the better movie.

For Christmas Story fans: [link]

Ha! Love the last paragraph:

Standing in front of the house holding a replica Red Ryder rifle, he discusses his future plans — which could include a nearby bed and breakfast — when, seemingly on a director's cue, a motorist passes, stops his car, rolls down the window and shouts, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"

FWIW, when my brother gave my nephew a BB rifle for Xmas a few years ago, I got to deliver the "you'll shoot your eye out, kid," line and then cracked up completely.

So far the nephew still has both eyes.

Last night's movie was Dog Soldiers. I knew it was about werewolves and the British military, but for some reason I thought it was about fighting Nazi werewolves in WWII, which would be a rocking movie and I need to go make it now.

But no, it's Zulu, just set in Scotland with werewolves vs. a handful of soldiers. They do actually cop to this at one point, which was amusing since I was in the middle of my standard spiel about how half the movies ever made are Zulu.

I don't know what I thought of it. It wasn't a very good movie - like a lot of EU movies it felt like it had been put together by committee. It turned into a comedy halfway through, sort of, for example. The acting was really very good but the writing was pedestrian and the direction was annoying. And the soundtrack was heinous - they must've just grabbed a handful of off-the-shelf soundtracks and plugged them in, no matter how inappropriate the music was for the scene.

What I mainly took away from it, though, was that it was an extremely HoYay movie. Now, I've been accused of seeing the HoYay where it isn't, but really, this was. Not only was the primary emotional relationship man-to-man (seriously, even other viewers were yelling "Just kiss already!" at one point), there was there a symbolic fellatio scene between the alpha male wolf and the main guy. And it was very negative about women, blaming PMS for evil to some extent.

So now I've seen werewolves as a metaphor for puberty, for menstrual cycles, and for heterosexuality. I still think Nazi Werewolves of WWII would be more fun.

I once saw a play called, "I was a teenage werewolf for the third reich." It was a musical, even.