Well...it makes sense in a way. What, Galactus is going to permabond swim trunks to him while coating him in silvery metal?

I saw The Good Shepherd today with a couple of friends. It took a 15 minute confab afterwards to figure out just how the plotlines intersected. At the end we all agreed that we wanted Angelina Jolie's character's wardrobe.

just finished Brick. the dialogue tried way too hard to be noir, but it was an okay movie. JGL has really come a long way.

I am so perverse in my movie tastes that immediately upon reading P-C's posts, I bolted to our DVD shelf and started watching Raising Arizona for the umpteenth time. At first I tried to remember particular lines to quote back at P-C to say, "See? How can you not love this? How can you not see how utterly fucking hilarious this is?", but then I realized that I would just end up quoting the entire damn movie line for line, so I gave up on conversion and just wallowed in it.

I would advise going back again in a year or so. Like many Coen Brothers movies, it gets richer with each rewatch.

Also, Hec informs me that I now *am* Holly Hunter as Ed, with the sudden crumply face and the gushes of tears and the howling "I just love her so mu-u-uch!" I don't think the baby-having is Ed's only purpose in life, but if it's something you want it can be (a) devastating to not be able to do it, and (b) ridiculously overwhelming when you do, whether naturally or via quint-kidnapping out the upstairs bedroom window.

I would advise going back again in a year or so. Like many Coen Brothers movies, it gets richer with each rewatch.

I did discover this with The Big Lebowski. The first time, I just didn't get it, and I fell asleep. (I also fell asleep during Raising Arizona, but I don't really blame the movie because I've just been doing that for weeks.) When I saw it again, though, I found it really funny.

Leonard Smalls felt like he came out of a different movie, which was very amusing. I think he should go around making appearances in all other movies.

I'm still pissed at them for making Tempe a cowtown instead of where I went to college.

Ooooo, just got back from Pan's Labyrinth. Easily the best movie I've seen at least since Mrs. Henderson Presents last February,and maybe better than anything since Brokeback Mountain. I loved how it was a very feminist movie, in that Ofelia and Mercedes were the bravest, most resourceful characters. Yet it avoided the trap of making them so in a way that wouldn't be appropriate to the period—they weren't superwomen, just very good at making do with what was at hand. Much as I love them, Joss' stories don't seem so good at empowering women without actually, y'know, involving powers. (Zoe Washburn being the one exception I can think of.)

Do not fuck with Mercedes or she will cut you !

Much like A Life Less Ordinary, I find that that movie is gold when Holly Hunter is on screen and very questionable when she's not.

The best part of the movie for me was that I was sitting in Florence, Arizona when I saw it.

I'd been told for years that it was the Funniest. Movie. EVAH!!!1!! so I guess there was no way it could live up to that. I was definitely "eh" on it.

You Raising Arizona haters are terribly misguided.

It's not even worth pointing out the movie's umptyjillion virtues.

Glad you loved Pan's Labyrinth, Matt. It's worth loving. I just watched The Devil's Backbone, to which it's a companion piece, and it definitely had its similarities. Del Toro uses a ghost metaphor instead of fairy tale tropes, but he's a lot more explicit about it, and the ghost is woven into the narrative much more effortlessly; you don't get that "two different movies" feel you sometimes get during PL. I like PL better, however, not only because fairy tales are more my things than ghosts, but because, well, fairy tales are a much richer source material than ghosts, I think, and so the metaphor becomes a lot more complex, and del Toro can be a lot more subtle about it. While it's pretty much all laid out for you in TDB, PL becomes better and better the more you unpack it.