What the hell is the point of view of young people? Blow jobs, that's what they're doing out there. They're out there getting oral sex all day long, that's what they're talking about.

• Layer Cake - A fantastic Guy Ritchie-style British crime thriller, with plenty of humor, violence, great dialogue, wonderful English accents, surprises, twists, turns, and double-crosses. One of my favorite movies so far.



• R-Point - The first half of this one I was pretty pleased with; it was fun to watch a good old ghost story movie with all the comfortable cliches, but in a different language (Korean) and a different setting (Vietnam, during the war). But then the movie kept going on, and kept piling on the cliches (including horror movie, war movie, and Vietnam movie cliches!) and the overacting and the melodrama, and I just got bored. Overall, not so good.



• The Big Red One - mouserobot already mentioned the fire alarm fiasco during this film on his journal. The fire alarm has gone off and interrupted a good movie for me multiple times at the Ritz East theater, and I'm beginning to get tired of it. I wish they'd fix the damn thing. (I also wish I'd thought to take the comp they offered so I could give it to poppy! D'oh!) Anyway, luckily The Big Red One is very episodic and missing 15 minutes of it wasn't a big deal. It also didn't seem to decrease the running time at all, which is roughly the actual length of WWII. Well, okay, it's really only two hours and forty minutes (this was a restored cut with a whole hour of new footage added in), but late at night after a long day of movies and condo-shopping (but no working--I took the day off), it seemed much longer. Despite these complaints, however, I must make clear that The Big Red One is an excellent film with great acting (especially from the man himself, Lee Marvin; and Mark Hammill was surprisingly good, too), an engaging story, interesting characters, and a lot of moving tragedy and hilarious comedy. It ranks right up there with the great American war films (of which, admittedly, there are quite a few).