Gilding the Lily
What movies get wrong (and right) about gardening.

So there I was muttering, "Fraud, fraud," while watching Enchanted April.

It's a charming movie that sets very few viewers to grumbling. Oppressed women leave cold, rainy 1920s England and proceed to find happiness, peace, and sunshine in a rented castle on the Italian coast.

My complaint wasn't about the story line but about the fact that the movie's Portofino, Italy, hillside garden was bursting with flowers that wouldn't be blooming simultaneously. No garden in the real world would look like that—the blooms of high summer (roses, sunflowers, geraniums) right next to the flowers of April (daffodils, tulips, camellias). It's garden fraud.

Mostly, though, my memory is of that whole "Cousins! They're cousins, okay? COUSINS, damn it!!!" thing.

Cleolinda certainly did make that movie a lot more enjoyable in retrospect. I can't see a photo with Brad Pitt in armor and helm without hearing the smartass audience member yell "STELLAAAAAAA!" in my head.

But they are all extremely pretty. Especially in the midriff shirts.

Sean Bean as Odysseus is the best thing about that film, both in terms of acting and eye candy.

I'll vote for Eric Bana as Hector, at least in the eye candy category.

Paris was so much prettier.

True. And we got to see him mostly-shirtless a lot. Sean Bean was actually quite wonderful.

Sean Bean as Odysseus is the best thing about that film, both in terms of acting and eye candy.

Oh hell yeah.

I hear that, sister! [link]

Sean Bean as Odysseus is the best thing about that film, both in terms of acting and eye candy.

Oh my! (Haven't seen the film, but followed the link.)

"Cousins! They're cousins, okay? COUSINS, damn it!!!"

This totally gave me flash backs to Mean Girls. A film I love.

Vern is cracking me up over at Ain't it Cool News in his review of AVP:R

RESURRECTION and RATATOUILLE were already taken and they needed something that started with an R, so the title of this thing is REQUIEM. That might make you wanna ask who died, but you already know the answer: the remaining dignity of aliens and predators across the universe. Two proud races slandered and humiliated, on the Lord's birthday no less. And why? For what? What the hell did aliens and predators ever do to us other than entertain and delight us, scare us, fuck up our space colonies and skin some dudes in a jungle? Nothing. And for that we give them a franchise so lazy it can't even be bothered to spell out its own titles.