The Guermantes ticket stub

• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (5/26, Crit)--Didn't particularly want to go, but the reviews cleared the low downtown bar, so I did. Look, the first one was brilliant great fun, but that was apparently all the fun the franchise had in it. Please let it die now!
• In the Land of Women (4/20, Crit)--Another one that barely reached the downtown bar--but this one also had the selling point of a Stephen Trask score. Well, whatever: waste of time.
• Becket (1964) (3/17, Crit)--Remarkably, I'd never seen this. Not great in any way, but geez, Burton and O'Toole--you know you're gonna have fun. I notice that this is the same year as Burton's filmed stage Hamlet that I watched a few weeks back--and of course he's only a year or so into the romance of his life. Also a kick to see (briefly) a young Siân Phillips--later Livia in I, Claudius.
• Ocean's Thirteen (6/9, Crit)--Yeah, this franchise is getting a little long in the tooth, too, but if the first one wasn't as much fun as the first Pirates, the last two at least haven't made me wish I were somewhere else.
• The Namesake (3/23, Crit)--This works the culture-confusion bit nicely for the first two acts, but it staggers gasping to the finish line, if I may work the metaphor-confusion bit.
• Amazing Grace (2/25, Crit)--Excellent, moving historical piece. But is there any way we could petition to see more of Michael Gambon? Yeah, yeah, he's got the Dumbledore gig now, but I mean real roles in real movies.
• The Birds (1963) (3/18, Crit)--Oh, this is a good one to see in a crowd, many of whom are first-timers. I had intended to see this a year or two earlier, the first time the Criterion showed it as a Sunday morning Movies and Mimosas feature, but I had a guest and ultimately went to something else a couple of hours later--just as this was getting out. I told everyone leaving that a bunch of sea gulls were congregating on the Green . . .
• Gwoemul (The host) (3/24, Crit)--Oh, yes. Have I used the word fun too often in this post? Well, too bad. Anthony Lane on the monster: "It looks like Broderick Crawford crossed with a Venus flytrap."
• Cobra Verde (1988) (4/7, IFC)--Nobody has ever been better at playing a lunatic-with-his-own-logic than Klaus Kinski, and nobody was better at directing him than Werner Herzog. This was their last film together, Kinski's last film but two, and, I gather, his last that wasn't a mistake. Watch it for free on your computer if you're a Netflixer (and if you aren't, what are you doing here?).
• Colo(u)r Me Kubrick (4/7, IFC)--Is it just me, or is it a little weird that a guy who is at the center of a film about nobodies inhabiting a somebody's being later stars as a nobody inhabiting a somebody's being? Whatever, it's not a great film, but it's a tour de force for Malkovich--a one-joke movie that, at < class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">minutes, doesn't overstay the joke's welcome.
• Offside (4/7, Quad)--Subversion of Shari`a restrictions on young women's public behavior in the context of Iran's final game to clinch a place in the 2002 World Cup--what the hell more do you want?