Sail, Hiroyuki, Shin Koyamada (Katsumoto's son, Nobutada), and Seizô Fukumoto (Bob), and of course, Watanabe, were what made The Last Samurai for me. It was all about the landscape (granted, NZ and second Middle Earth, but also fantasy feudal Japan) and the Japanese actors. Algren didn't even figure into the story, he was just a footnote, at most.

But then I'm a devoted fan of The Scent of Green Papaya, thus capable of eliminating story in favor of sensualism. The Last Samurai improves with that approach, IMO.

Speaking of Keanu, I learned today that Ana Lily Amirpour is making a movie with him. On my blog, I picked her A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as my favorite film seen in theaters last year and was already looking forward to what she would do next. But I didn't expect this. I have no words.

On my blog, I picked her A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as my favorite film seen in theaters last year

Ooh, me too!

Wild that she's working with Keeanu, but she's got SO much talent.

In a fit of insomnia, my mum watched The Tree of Life. I have never seen it. Now she wants me to explain it to her. From what little I've seen or heard, I doubt I'd be able to do that even with a viewing.

I'm not sure what there is to explain. It is weird mostly for the sake of being weird and though there is probably some deep meaning stuff happening that you could potentially get out of it, the weird jumping around and random dinosaur scenes aren't really confusing, just auteurish. The only plot point somebody might somehow miss is that Sean Penn is Brad Pitt's youngest son. Otherwise it is just a well acted and beautiful weird mess. Honestly I thought its circle of life message was kind of simplistic, kind of like the Love is All Around message from "Love, Actually" but with far less hilarious Bill Nighy.

I didn't love it, if that isn't clear; though I saw much of the beauty that the critical intelligentsia saw, I derived little pleasure or awe from it, and mostly just wanted to watch a drama with a coherent plot where Brad Pitt plays a bad dad married to Jessica Chastain. But I'm guessing that your mother probably understood everything in the movie that was meant to be understood; unless I'm missing something enormous myself I think a lot of the movie was essentially a mood poem.

I found it a weird movie. It seemed like it was driven by the thought experiment: what would happen if we made a movie where we left out all the most important plot points? I mean it's clear that things happen to these people, and eventually I figured out what happened and who it happened to, but even that's open to interpretation. Like I'm pretty sure I disagree with Gris about which son Sean Penn plays. Which, if you think about it, pretty much says right there why it's a weird movie.

Honestly I might just have forgotten. It was a long time ago.

Recently I saw someone on another message board commenting on some presumably bad romantic drama, and another poster said that it was still a better love story than Twilight.

I couldn't resist interjecting that Bluebeard was a better love story than Twilight.

Unfortunately Twilight is a better love story than Fifty Shades (only say unfortunately in that something actually is below Twilight).

Well, they're the same love story, so does that really count?