Finally got Garden State to the top of our queue. It's been there for months (I probably put it in there because Natalie Portman's in it), but we kept bumping it down...until we got addicted to watching Scrubs and figured out that Garden State was written/directed/and starred in by Zach Braff.

It's a great film, especially in light of Braff wearing 3 hats. His character is brilliant, and his performance subtle.

However, I now owe George Lucas an apology. I think I've been blaming him as a director a lot for Natalie Portman's performance in the sequels. Turns out, she just kinda sucks.

I'm sorry to be pedantic, here, but you keep spelling it Apocolypto and the editor in me can't hold it in anymore.

It's Apocalypto. Like Apocalypse Now. Apocalypto.

Thanks for the correction. I can't help it that Gibson spelled his made-up word incorrectly.

Enter Search Term: Eragon

Result: Sorry - no matches on LoT. Please try some different terms.

Why no love for the boy?

I haven't read the books. Strangely, "written by a 15-year-old" even if a precocious one isn't much of a selling point for me; the fantasy fans I know who have read it say it feels like it was written by a precocious 15-year-old. It's bad enough that most of the adult authors in the epic fantasy genre write like precocious 15-year-olds.

That said, I'll probably get around to these books before I ever pick up another Terry Goodkind (who writes like a precocious 8-year-old Rush Limbaugh) novel.

I was still somewhat interested in the movie since simplistic dragon stories play out better on film than on paper (why must I be cursed with the shame of liking Dragonheart?) but the 14% rating at RottenTomatoes disabused me of that. I'll catch it on Netflix in a few years.

Alex - Sorry you didn't groove on the Kurosawa flick. He's certainly a director whose work can alternately enthrall me or leave me cold. While his movies always appeal to my film buff intellectual interest, when I'm not in mood, sometimes they can be a real chore to get through.

To prepare myself for Pan's Labyrinth, I've spent a couple of nights over the last few weeks watching Chronos and The Devil's Backbone. I had written off del Toro in '97 upon my first exposure to his work (I recall asking Heather,"If Mimic is supposed to be a horror movie, why isn't it scary?") and was amused enough by Hellboy to reconsider (but not to get the director's cut DVD). Now that I've seen his two Spanish-language films, I'm beginning to understand what he's trying to do. I'm not sure if I need to see Blade II, but I think I know his vocabulary well enough to appreciate "The Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema" on the 29th.

Man, I couldn't disagree with you more. Her performance in that movie is one of my all-time favorites. Garden State and Closer came out around the same time and I though she was a revelation in both. To each his and her own.

This weekend I watched Tennessee Williams' <i>Baby Doll</i> for the first time. I cannot remember the last time a movie had me so hot and bothered. That swing scene is going to be burned into my memory until the day I die as one of the most erotically charged moments captured on screen. Kazan captured a girl's sexual awakening in a way that manged to be simultaneously graphic and subtle.

Eli Wallach, you make me feel positively wanton.

She got better as the movie progressed, and while I liked certain aspects of her performance, her delivery was sorely lacking. Very forced and unnatural.

Interesting story about the power of art, expectations of decorum, etc.:

When I was at Berkeley in the early '80s, one of the theatre grad students directed 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, the one-act play on which Baby Doll was based. Apparently thinking there wasn't enough conflict in the play, she cast a black woman as the wife. The actress was a nice girl from a family of Jehovah's Witnesses. Her father came to see the play with a number of female relatives. As the syndicate owner starts making his advances, the father starts talking to himself in the audience, "You better keep your hands off her," and things to that effect. Eventually, he stands up, "You, stop touching her, and YOU get off that stage." As the mostly student audience around him tried to explain that it was just a show and that he should sit down, he said, "No, no. I've seen that kind of thing all my life. I don't have to see it in pictures." He walked out of his seat and started for the stage, but the women he was with talked him into leaving. The actress apologized, and she finished the play.