I can't recall ever disagreeing with Frank about a movie, but I really didn't like The Truth About Charlie.

And, that was always the weird question of Firefly metaphors, wasn't it? If the good guys are the cowboys, and there definitionally aren't any indians, what kind of conflict are we really talking about?

I think the Reivers are the Indians, Nutty. The conflict of Firefly was the same as in a lot of John Ford's movies: the cowboys were trapped between civilization and barbarity.

Charade = made of win! What a great movie.

Norbit was the #1 movie over the weekend. Humanity is doomed.

I think the Reivers are the Indians, Nutty. The conflict of Firefly was the same as in a lot of John Ford's movies: the cowboys were trapped between civilization and barbarity.

Insanity: the last refuge of the writer looking for bad guys that won't offend whole ethnic groups. I guess my point is, The reavers don't represent a side, so much as the author's need for an antagonist. Nobody will be making a respectful movie about their Isandhlwana moment.

Which makes the story theme-poorer, to my mind. And begins to unravel teh logic for making it a western at all.

Jessica, did you or anyone else see 'Half Nelson'? It's one of those that was out in the states while I was/am abroad, and I haven't been able to see it, though I really want to. Which surprises me, given Ryan Gosling.

I saw Roller Boogie. Good cheesy fun in spots, but Xanadu is still the ultimate roller disco movie. Hubs was playing games on the computer, so he didn't see it.

Jessica, did you or anyone else see 'Half Nelson'? It's one of those that was out in the states while I was/am abroad, and I haven't been able to see it, though I really want to. Which surprises me, given Ryan Gosling.

I did, yeah. Very strong performances, kind of overwritten script, overall good. I honestly don't remember that much about it, but I'd say it's worth a rental if it turns up anywhere.

Insanity: the last refuge of the writer looking for bad guys that won't offend whole ethnic groups. I guess my point is, The reavers don't represent a side, so much as the author's need for an antagonist. Nobody will be making a respectful movie about their Isandhlwana moment.

Oh, I get you here. I imagine Joss & co felt like they were already riding the edges of bad taste by making their heroes analogous to unrepentant Confederates, and their Reavers (sorry for the misspell earlier) to Indians analogy is more Stagecoach than The Searchers. In the former, the Indians are an unknown force of doom. In the latter, it's the hero (an unrepentant Confederate) who is the force of doom.

Which makes the story theme-poorer, to my mind. And begins to unravel teh logic for making it a western at all.

Well, I don't know the backstory like many people here, so I don't know how much thought Joss & co put into Firefly, but some of the major later Westerns included a some-but-not-all approach to Indian & cowboy barbarity. Blood Meridian, for instance, featured a marauding band of cannibal Indians who mowed down anyone in their path regardless of race, somewhat like the Reavers. McCarthy tempered this view of savage Otherness quite a bit, though, by making sure that the reader understood that no one was exempt from this savagery. While the force of civilization was played by The Judge, a character of near-supernatural brutality, no one would describe the protagonist as having a heart of gold. The best I could come up with was "an amoral innocent." The kindest words that could be said about the protagonists of The Wild Bunch (aka "the best movie ever made") was that they showed a glimmer of nobility when backed into a corner by the forces of savagery (Mapache) and civilization (the railroad). However, the question of whether one could act morally in an amoral world was often the context of Peckinpah Westerns (even the ones, like Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, that set the protagonists into the Indian role), and I think that the impulse to make Firefly a Western came from the same place.

It's almost a messy accident that sympathetic movies can be made about the Indian tribes in the Wild West. I doubt that was a concern of most of the early Western creators.

And since none of that was on-topic, I'll say that we watched The Science of Sleep the other night, which was a lovely mess of a movie. Gondry's commitment to making his dreams live on-screen is admirable, but he asks too much of the viewers when he wants us to see that Charlotte Gainsbourg puts up with his stand-in naif because she's filled her apartment with childlike crap. If he'd spent more time on her character, showing us, for instance, why she never filed a restraining order against Bernal's man-child, rather than focusing on Bernal's increasing retreat from reality, the movie might have more there there.