I usually don’t notice these things, but today’s IMDb Daily Poll question caught my eye:

Who would win in a fight: Abigail Breslin or Dakota Fanning?

For awhile I thought I was the only one who found Dakota Fanning annoying and — dare I say it? — a little creepy, but it seems like I’m seeing a lot of Dakota backlash lately. How did her managers manage to let things get this way? By the way, if you missed seeing Amy Poehler in the “Dakota Fanning Show” on SNL last week, catch it at YouTube.

P.S. I voted for Dakota. I mean, I loved Little Miss Sunshine, but if push came to shove I could see Dakota fighting dirty before Abigail.

“What is it that you like about this movie?” Denise asked, and I believe that she meant that in the most loving way.

She was patiently waiting as I finished watching the last few minutes of “Time Bandits”. After having it sit on my Amazon.com wish list for several years with no hope of rescue, I finally went out and bought myself a copy. Had to use up that Madison Square Mall gift card somehow.

I was seriously into this movie as a pre-teen, and I’ve wanted to own a copy of it for awhile now. It’s a little disturbing to see the movie’s somewhat dark ending (no spoilers!) and have no memory of finding it disturbing when I was a kid. But other than that, it was a lot of fun to see it again and see how much of I still remember after 20+ years. I guess “Time Bandits” was a kind of gateway to Monty Python for me, because I don’t remember knowing about the Pythons before seeing this movie. It was also the first Terry Gilliam movie I ever saw, and although he’s one of my favorite directors now, I don’t think that the fact that he directed “Time Bandits” meant anything to me at the time.

If you didn’t see it then, well, you’re probably not going to get much out of it now. I’ll readily admit that a big part of my enjoyment is the whole nostalgia factor. But if you saw this movie as a kid and loved it like I did, do yourself a favor and rent it sometime.

We just got back from seeing the 4:30 show of “The Queen” at the Carmike Cinemas (which, by the way, seems to have become increasingly ghetto since the Rave opened up in South Huntsville last year.) So that makes two Oscar-nominated films that I’ve seen, which I believe is two more than last year.

We thought for awhile that we were going to be the youngest people there, but a group of teenaged girls showed up at the last minute during previews.

I had not read anything about the movie beforehand and so I didn’t know what to expect, but I highly recommend it, even if you aren’t particularly interested in the comings and goings of the British Royal Family. The movie covers the week following the death of Princess Diana and presents what I thought was a very sympathetic portrayal of the Queen. Helen Mirren deserves her Oscar nomination, but I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more buzz about Michael Sheen, the fellow who played Prime Minister Tony Blair. They (whoever they are) also did a great job of mixing news footage from the time with the action in the movie — it was really seamless and made the whole thing more believable. Of course, a lot of the private conversations that the movie shows have to have been fictionalized, and so you wonder how accurate it really is.

Anyways. Good movie, go see it if you can.

Whenever Denise is out of town I have a mini-film festival, where I rent and watch the movies that she has no interest in seeing. Past entries include “Kill Bill” and “Mystic River”, for example.

Last night’s screening was “Napoleon Dynamite”, which is one of those stupidly funny movies that’s destined to become a cult classic. Unless you just take yourself much, much too seriously, you will probably laugh out loud at least a few times, and isn’t that worth the four bucks it will cost you to rent this one? On tap for tonight is “Hero”, unless of course I decide to watch Napoleon one more time.

After a month’s reflection, I have decided that my favorite Christmas gift from 2003 was a copy of “Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns”:http://www.giganticfilm.com. It was an especially significant gift for me since it was given to me by my mother-in-law, who personally went into her local Suncoast store and asked for this DVD.

??Gigantic?? is a documentary about the band “They Might Be Giants”:http://www.tmbg.com, and the two Johns are John Linnell and John Flansburgh, the band’s core members. I’ve been a fan of TMBG since 1989 or so, when my friend Gene Hwang introduced me to them. They’ve made a lot of great records since then, of course, but “Ana Ng” (from ??Lincoln??) will probably always be my favorite TMBG song.

For me, the best thing about the film is the footage from various concerts. I’ve always wanted to see Them perform live, but unless they get inspired to add some Alabama tour dates one of these days it seems increasingly unlikely that I’ll have that opportunity. The interview segments that appear throughout the film are also nice, and they illustrate how humble and unassuming Linnell and Flansburgh really are about what they’re doing. The DVD’s bonus features, such as the music videos for a lot of their early songs (including “Ana Ng”), are the icing on the cake. Probably the only thing I didn’t like about the film was the inclusion of various actors performing dramatic readings of the lyrics of TMBG songs. For example, we get to see Michael McKean reciting “I Palindrome I”. I understand what they were going for, and I’m a fan of McKean and some of the other featured actors, but it just didn’t work.

If you’ve never heard They Might Be Giants, and you’re looking to expand your musical horizons a bit, you might want to pick up ??Dial A Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants??. This is a 2-CD anthology, released in 2002, and features 52 of their best songs.