Not yet in theaters:

Here is a film clip (zipped. avi) of Janet Lane in Lucky Number Slevin. Poor quality, but a must-see scene.

New in theaters:

Here is a collage of LC's still captures from Sharon Stone's frontal nude scene in BI2.

Other Crap:

Bill Maher's Real Time Monologue March 31st

New York underground, a fascinating report from nationalgeographic.com

Here's the trailer for Clerks 2

Thanks to Dave Barry's blog for this one: "Thief gets away with Grateful Dead leader's toilet"

Alba Ropes Letterman

The "Budapest BoobieParade"

Patently Silly - The Humor of Invention

• "The following are all real patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office."

Ice Age 2 is hot!

• The kiddie flick took in an impressive $71 million in its opening weekend
• It was a crazy weekend in which there were four new releases and none of them produced results anywhere near the forecasts. Ice Age 2 and ATL did far better than predicted, while Slither and BI2 did far worse.
• Ice Age 2 and ATL did so well that they pulled the entire industry forward. Those two movies alone almost matched the entire Top 12 on this weekend last year! The final reckoning showed this year 40% above last year and almost 40% above last WEEK! It was more than 20% better than the previous best weekend this year!

What was her grade in this class? "A woman attending anger management classes became irate during a Wednesday morning class, threatened to kill a classmate, then went out to the lobby and broke a display case". I think the school administrators should have anticipated this from a class taught by Naomi Campbell.

 

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

As I am sure all of you know, this is the story of two cowboys who meet while summering sheep and fall into an affair. At the end of the summer, they part. Both marry women, but never get over their love for each other, and get together frequently. The story spans nearly 20 years, and is told in near real time ... at least, that is how it felt to me. The central relationship was the unique aspect of this film, yet occupied a small percentage of the running time. Since the film was based on a short story, the writers had to pad it to feature length, which they did by fleshing out the "normal" lives of the two men with their families. In both cases, the family relationships were not especially interesting. One was dirt poor, and his wife wanted more. Although she blamed his gay friendship, the real reason she divorced him was to find a better provider. The other managed to wed a rich girl, but she cared less about him than about counting money.

Had the two cowboys not been gay, there would not be enough of a story here. As I honestly do not care in the slightest whom anyone wishes to rub their genitals against, the fact that this was a story of a gay romance was a matter of supreme indifference to me. That probably explains why the film wouldn't make my personal top 2,000 list. Critics, however, were all atwitter over it; it won three Oscars; and was nominated for several others. IMDb readers say 8.0, making it the 250th most popular film of all time.  This is clearly a B, at least for the moment. I suppose the world was ready for Homo, Homo On the Range, and Ang Lee knows exactly how to craft a film. The cinematography is wonderful, and the score won awards, although I often found it intrusive.

Scoop's counter-notes:

Tuna said, "Had the two cowboys not been gay, there would not be enough of a story here."

Quite true, but I don't think there was a single reviewer (including me) who had the guts to point this out. If you locate this story in the South in the 1930s, make one of the cowboys a black man and the other a white cowgirl, make their love culturally forbidden, then the exact same story would have been moving, and an OK film, but would not have been winning every award under the sun. In essence, the film societies were awarding the THEME of the story and not the story itself, and it was a theme whose time had come.

I think it was good movie, and I was finally moved by the denouement (after being bored to tears by the set-up), but I sure as hell don't know why people think it was a great masterpiece worthy of "Best Picture." I think critics were afraid that the simple truth which Tuna wrote in the sentence above would somehow be construed as politically incorrect, or anti-gay, or at least insufficiently supportive of the recognition of gay rights, or something like that.
 

 

Anne Hathaway

Michelle Williams