"That Thing..." was really cute.

I like Hanks. He strikes me as an actor who paid his dues and is a hard worker. He hasn't always made what I consider great choices in his roles but I like his range and have been impressed with his dramatic roles and depth.

That Thing You Do is one of my favorite movies and I like him in it.

Polar Express doesn't bug me, thank goodness, since Owen's watching it for the eleventieth time.

I love Tom Hanks, but I'm a total plebeian and shouldn't be referred to for issues of taste.

I'm so glad you all love "That Thing You Do" though! Because my boy Rick Elias did the music for it, and he is made of awesome underneath his standoffish exterior.

I kept expecting his Layered Cake/James Bond voice to show up, and then I get something that sounded... Midwestern? New England? Very strange.

???

afair, his accent was unremarkable in the movie. I may have to rewatch.

Matt, I totally think you should meet Gerard in person and establish whether he pings your gaydar. By which I most emphatically mean porn. (Have you folks seen Dear Frankie ? It's terribly charming. Probably my fav...oh, no, I just remembered Reign of Fire, which contains The Best Scene In Any Movie Evah, where Gerard Butler and his boyfriend Best Buddy In All The World, Christian Bale, re-enact the "Luke, I am your father" scene. Actually, I really quite surprised myself by how much I liked Dracula 2000 too. I was braced for much greater awfulness than actually happened onscreen. I mean, don't misunderstand, it's a BAD film, but still - really quite an enjoyable Crap B Movie, imho. Like Deep Blue Sea. And they actually gave the whole vampire mythos an original spin, which - whodathunk?

...why yes, my former flatmate did have a massive crush on Gerard Butler, and we DID watch pretty much everything he's been in, including (God help us) Atilla. Why do you ask?

I loath Tom Hanks movies, as a general rule of thumb. But sometimes there are exceptions.

Went to the pictures the other day, and ended up watching Enchanted because, well, it was on. Overall I thought this was a pretty calculated and unlikeable movie, struggling to catch up with the post-Shrek sensibility but there were several genuinely funny moments. (And, okay, one very enjoyable Big Musical Number. Sigh. I am a sucker.) And all of the actors (including the wee girl) were putting in perfectly good performances. It was just... charmless, for the most part, in conception and execution. But I have to say that I thought James Marsden was absofuckinglutely hilarious. Between this and Hairspray, I find myself liking him really rather a lot at the moment.

(...okay, and also I did find myself considering getting my tailor to make a variation on the vaguely Regency dress that Giselle wears at one point. Um.)

Timeline, Fay. Also has Thewlis. And some other people. But Butler, and Thewlis. Num.

This History Channel has been running a documentary about Charlie Wilson's War. I watched it even though I want to see the movie, so I think I can guess pretty much everything that's going to happen, but it doesn't matter. It's kind of like knowing the whole of Apollo 13 and watching it anyway. Charlie Wilson is such a character. I just want to see how much that will carry over in the movie.

Fay, if you really want to develop a crush on Marsden rent the movie Interstate 60 and listen to the commentary. He comes off as one of the most likeable performers I've run across in that. Which is true to some degree of all his interviews.

Watched Eastern Promises last night after the kids were in bed. Wow. It's a pretty good movie and the ending was MUCH better than the ending of History of Violence.

I think Mortenson and Watts both did excellent work and the storyline was compelling.

Dad and I just hung out yesterday, since no one else was able to come over and join us for the holiday. After looking at the TV options, we decided to go for an OnDemand free movie. Dad asked if I was in the mood for John Wayne (his favorite), I was rather "meh" on the notion, and then he saw a movie called Cowboy that he recommended as a good flick, so to make him happy, I decided to agree to the Western. I'm glad I did, because it was an excellent film!

Directed by the same guy who did the original 3:10 to Yuma, it co-starred Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon as the seasoned trail herd leader and the callow hotel clerk who become partners in the latest venture down to Mexico to pick up a herd to be brought back to Chicago. Along the way, Lemmon's character gets Ford's to get in touch with his humanity as Lemmon becomes a seasoned cowboy who turns hard as nails due to disappointment in love. But as Ford tells him, he's not becoming tough, he's becoming miserable, and by the end, they've both reached a much better place personally. A very good character study, and a film that doesn't glamorize trail life, either.

Slate talks about a movie I never heard of...

Go East, Young Man

Two-Lane Blacktop was supposed to be the next Easy Rider. But it went in a different direction.

Before it even saw the light of day, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop was already being immortalized. Months before the film's release, Rolling Stone called it "an instant classic." Esquire went a step further, publishing the entire screenplay and anointing it "the movie of the year." On paper, the prospects looked good. Hollywood in the late 1960s had discovered the youth market. The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde (both 1967) inaugurated the countercultural trend in American movies; Easy Rider (1969) marked its apotheosis. Hellman's movie seemed like a can't-miss proposition: a road flick from Universal's new "youth" unit about dropping out and driving fast. But when it hit theaters in the summer of '71, the kids didn't show up. The movie died a quick death at the box office and eventually slid into oblivion, not appearing on video until 1999.

How could such a sure thing fail so miserably? Perhaps because the hype primed the audience for a movie that Hellman was unwilling to give them. Unlike its contemporaries, Two-Lane Blacktop wasn't a sentimental celebration of restless youth. Refusing to play to its demographic, it offered an abstract and diffident vision of the counterculture. Unlike The Graduate, it didn't romanticize youthful disaffection; unlike Bonnie and Clyde, there was no cathartic violence; unlike Easy Rider, there was little sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Yet the reasons moviegoers rejected it at the time—its skepticism and rigor—are the same reasons the film, released this month on DVD by the Criterion Collection, has emerged as one of the great movies of Hollywood's last golden age.

The whole article's pretty interesting....