Those Crazy Holidays...
Now Playing: Even-more-abbreviated Sunday update
ALEXANDER (2004, Oliver Stone)- pretty dire, to be honest; Stone & Co. take a compelling character and turn him into an Icarus, destined for an early demise because he lives such a high-flying life, though it's never been established whether the Icarus of myth had titanic mommy issues. Shrill and overbearing, like just about everything Stone's done in the last decade, and is basically only better than ANY GIVEN SUNDAY because Alexander the Great is inherently more interesting than pro football (and naked Rosario Dawson is certainly better than naked anonymous locker-room football dude). Rating: *1/2.

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003, Sofia Coppola) [seen on DVD]- liked this well enough the last time I saw it, but found it pretty unbearable this time around, mainly because I was perpetually annoyed by the two main characters- Bill Murray's natural coolness aside, Bob is pretty insufferable, and Charlotte (has there ever been a less convincing philosophy major?) is rather a blank here. Since Coppola only really allows us to see the two of them through either their own or each other's eyes, the film has to succeed or fail on the basis of how much we identify with them, and I just couldn't, given my impatience for people who are visiting a new place but don't display much curiosity about it (my big problem with the final reel of THE TERMINAL, come to think of it), Bob's supposedly witty offhand remarks about Japanese culture being the most glaring example of this ("short and sweet, very Japanese"- yeah, cute). Some delicate moments, and the central night-out sequence, in which they're allowed to be themselves, is still pretty good, but honestly this just isn't the film for me that it is for others, so pay no attention to the grumbling dude in the corner. Rating: *1/2.