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.

I saw The Prestige last night and I liked it, I have to admit I never guessed that Fallon was also Alfred until he revealed it at the end. Partly because I ignored Fallon most of the time and just considered him background (which I guess was the point). I couldn't figure out how he was doing the Transported Man trick, but didn't worry about figuring it out and waited until it was revealed. Also people kept getting up and moving in the theater so I would get distracted. I did know how Aingers was doing his trick and even though I know that he was drowning the duplicates it was still creepy to see them all lined up like that. I do want to see it again so I can look at Fallon and Alfred more and see where the changes are.

There is one thing I'm a bit fuzzy on -- I couldn't tell if Michael Caine's character knew that Alfred and Fallon were one person. At the end when Michael Caine's character is walking away from the theater and Alfred is walking towards it they sort of look like they acknowledge each other but I wasn't sure.

askye, I thought that when Caine's character discovered that Angiers was still alive as the Count, he had sympathy for Alfred because he was being imprisoned unfairly, and his daughter had been taken from him. He had thought up to that point that Angiers was really dead. I think the movie shifts sympathies at that point as well, because we start to fully see how Angiers has taken this well beyond the point of sanity.

Well, are we supposed to infer that Caine's character knew all the time that Alfred and Fallon were the brothers and he just kept the secret becuase of professional curtosey? And then when he realized what Aingers was doing he went to Fallon, to side with him?

I don't think anyone knew about the brothers. The secret was far too important to them.

You don't think the wife knew?

No. If she had known, we wouldn't have had all of that stuff about how sometimes when he said "he loved her" it was true and sometimes it wasn't. Did she figure it out? I wasn't left with that impression, but I don't remember enough detail about the screaming fight they had with the daughter outside the door.