Beltmann

We ditched greeting cards years ago, but mostly because it was just too time-consuming at the precise time of year when time is the most scarce. We also ditched gift bows, but mostly because bows make it too hard to stack up the presents! This year, we banned candy. The daughter was becoming ornery about her fix, so we cut her off cold turkey--at least until Christmas Day.

That's how I felt, too. Plenty of virtues, but overall a disappointment.

It doesn't, unless pedantry is your thing. Bon Iver will appear on my 2008 list.

I loved The Edge of Heaven, too. Have you seen Head-On or In July? As far as I'm concerned, Fatih Akin is one of the most exciting filmmakers currently making movies.

Beautiful and sometimes moving, but like many Jia films, often opaque and impenetrable--too often I feel like an outsider looking in. Which I suppose I am. Still, I liked this one much more than Unknown Pleasures or The World.

Just revisited The American President. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy that movie.

If time permits, tonight I'm going to watch Park Chan-Wook's I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK. GtrPlyr, I've been trying to see White Dog for years; now that it's on DVD it's in Netflix queue. I'm curious to see how race is handled in comparison to some of Fuller's other works, such as Shock Corridor.

In an effort to clarify that I wasn't starting from a place of zealotry, I just wanted to acknowledge that reality isn't always as neat and tidy as ideology, but in my haste I failed to indicate that those "certain circumstances" were more theoretical than anything else. We're in complete agreement.

Andrew Sullivan, a few weeks ago: I agree with Sullivan. This is a major issue for me. At the same time, I have to concede that I, like bleedorange, might be willing to look the other way in certain situations. The trouble is, most of the people tortured at Abu Ghraib weren't known to be guilty and known to possess necessary information; they were tortured to establish guilt. That is indefensible--especially since the majority of the accusations were flimsy in the first place.

Our neighbor is an elderly, widowed veteran. If I have time, I always snow blow his driveway, too. (Tonight he actually tried to give me $10 for my trouble!)

If he's into all kinds of anime and not just the sci-fi stuff, then a box set of Studio Ghibli movies can't be beat. There are various editions out there, ranging from 5 to 21 titles.

Happy Birthday!

I dunno. Mongol mostly feels like an Asian Braveheart--which means it's entertaining and smoothly realized, but also rather repetitive and lunkheaded.

Kids always lose it when I show the last 30 minutes of The Crucible, while a bunch of them are clearly working overtime not to lose it. Others deal with the emotion through nervous laughter. Sometimes I use the moment to talk about why it's beneficial--important, even--to let art get to us.

Years ago I showed that movie to a class of high schoolers, including the quarterback of the football team. Near the end, when that Nazi guard came around the corner, alone, the quarterback dropped his jaw and shouted, "Are you kiddin' me!!" He then started to cry.

Happy Birthday, Matt!

A Christmas Tale is one of the best of the year, I think--even better than Desplechin's last great movie, Kings and Queen.

The Times of Harvey Milk won the 1985 Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. When I first saw the documentary (about 10 years ago), it made a huge impact on me. I remember thinking that the story would make a great feature, so I wasn't shocked when Van Sant eventually announced such plans--although I was surprised to learn that it was one of two competing productions. Obviously Van Sant finished first; the Bryan Singer one is still scheduled for release next year. Can't wait for Milk to arrive in Milwaukee.

Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze is an interesting documentary about the impact of China's Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world. It weighs the national benefits of such a large-scale public-works project against the human stories of those pushed aside for the sake of progress, including those impoverished residents forced to re-locate due to the new flooding.

I watched that tonight, too. One of his best documentaries, I think. Mesmerizing.

I watched Torturing Democracy over the weekend. While it's a coherent, well-researched, well-documented, and easy to digest examination of how the United States shamefully practiced torture as part of the War on Terror--and willingly sacrificed its moral compass in the process--it covers very familiar territory in very familiar ways. I'm not sure it adds anything new to the conversation that wasn't presented better in films like Taxi to the Dark Side and Standard Operating Procedure (or even broader Iraq films like The Road to Guantanamo, No End in Sight, and Why We Fight). Those films foun

I watched Tod Browning's The Blackbird (1926) over the weekend. Lon Chaney in one of his most memorable roles.

Rachel Getting Married is vibrant, humane, and true--plus, as usual with a Demme movie, it has fantastic music throughout. (Robyn Hitchcock and Tunde Adebimpe both sing, among others.) It's probably my favorite Demme film since Something Wild, which is one of my all-time favorite movies and also, incidentally, showcases Sister Carol East.