HMG I finally saw HOT FUZZ last night and it is made of AWSOME!!!

ita's shame is similar to my own as it reminded me how horribly familiar I am with POINT BREAK. So many references. Aside from the obvious PB one, they also totally did the foot chase scene, TWICE! Also, loved how the constant references to STRAW DOGS paid off in the Pub shoot-out.

Didn't recognize a ton of the actors that I recognized the names of, most shamefully Edward Woodward.

I saw it with the perfect audience at the perfect theater in my home town. It's a tiny independent I've been going to since grade school (under prior ownership, where they used to do two differnt films a day, and the films changed twice a week, I saw things as diverse as SUSPIRIA, ALTERED STATES, CHOOSE ME, DARK STAR, SMALL CHANGE - the list goes on and on - but they are still getting mostly the art house movies; in a weird way, I think HOT FUZZ fits that bill), and they've pulled out the first several rows of theater seats and put in couches (they also have a piano at the front so they can do live-music accompanied silent movies).

I saw it with the perfect audience

Does this mean they got the Chinatown reference?

I just watched Mean Streets. What the fuck was the point of all that? Some stuff happened, some people got shot, and none of it was all that interesting. Not my kind of movie, I guess.

Does this mean they got the

reference?

There were definite chuckles a half beat after the line, and not just from me. Since there wasn't anything else funny going on at that exact moment, I'm going with "yes".

We saw PotC3 last night. Very oddly for the middle of an urban area on what I would consider a weekend night, there were only fifteen people in the audience (I won a bet). Bob and I liked PotC2-- we saw it twice in the theatres. But this is what Bob said at the end of PotC3: "I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it was terrible. On the other hand, I had so little idea what people were thinking, what their motivations were, and what was supposed to be happening at any one time that maybe it was great." And I pretty much agreed.

It's been about 40% slower than we predicted this weekend. I really thought Pirates was going to kick Spidey's ass but maybe there's too much else going on this weekend. I bet it will hold a lot better than Spidey did... but I've been wrong before.

Pirates... Long. Any movie which makes me think about my lunch, not doing so well.

Tsotsi

The director of that voted for Serenity at the Edinburgh Film Festival audience awards: true. Tsotsi took the audience award.

Don't know if it's opened in the states yet, but 28 Weeks Later is excellent. It's the sequel to 28 Days Later, the British zombie film from a few years back. I went into it completely blind (hadn't seen any publicity) and it helped.

Brego, Aragorn's horse in TTT and RotK is recovering from emergency colic surgery.

I knew that he had been competed in dressage but for some reason had no idea that he was a Dutch Warmblood.

(Hopefully, he is quite well now.)

Link isn't working, sumi.

Saw Pirates this weekend. Long and disappointing. By the time Jack and Davy Jones were fencing on a yard-arm in the middle of a maelstrom I realized that (a) that sounds cooler in theory than in actual swordfighting interest and (b) there hadn't really been any swordfights up until then. Some general melee but nothing like the cool blacksmith fight in the first one, or the uber-choreographed waterwheel fight in 2.

It felt like they'd lost the thread of what was most interesting about the story, and the characters' motivations were so muddled and conflicty. It made the characters seem incoherent instead of complex.

I had liked the second movie a lot, but this one was far less fun, far less interesting. Keith Richards was perfect though. Liked that. Chow Yun Fat was wasted. Everybody should go watch A Better Tomorrow and see why he's so esteemed.

Keira Knightly failed to convince me of her action hero bona fides. All the plot turns were potentially interesting, but in the end felt like plot turns instead of character developments.