So what did you think of 10 Canoes, Mo?
The dvd turned up last week and I've been eyeing it, and then keep forgetting to look it up on IMDb.
Worth seeing? What was your main impression?

TEN CANOES is excellent but should be seen on the big screen. Definitely worth seeing.

I agree that HARD CANDY is a dynamite little movie with one of the scariest vengeful teens you'll ever meet.

Inability to sleep this morn causing me to lie in bed watching movies, and inspiring me to make a couple of acting observations.

Charade - one of Audrey Hepburn's best movies, but not, oddly, one of her best performances. Her dry drawl sounds like it came out of a can. The only time she sees to be really warming up is, oddly, when she's pretending to find sixty-plus Cary Grant sexy.

The Philadelphia Story - you know, once upon a time, the dear old Academy could get it right, even if it seemed to be getting it wrong. Jimmy Stewart's Best Actor Oscar is generally clucked over, especially in light of nascent Grant and Kate Hepburn cults, and indeed they're exactly in tune to the material, perfectly timed, like smooht running motors. And that's where Stewart beats them; his rhythms are slightly off, he stretches his bit of the cinematic space like elastic and then snaps it back with a flick of yawing wrist.

I watched The New World today. After the traumatic experience of The Long Boring Movie - er, The Thin Red Line, I was so down on Malick I did not watch Badlands, a film I love, from the time of that comeback until just last week. I had watched Days Of Heaven a few months ago, and I liked it a lot, though it had problems - stilted voice-overs, jumpy storytelling - I found prescient of TTRL's excrementous exposition. To my relief, The New World was a major return to form - an odd thing to say about a guy who's made four films in thirty-five years - a lovely, sinuously poetic study that almost miraculously manages to escape tawdry Weeping Indian cliches and Disney horseshit. It's not perfect, but he pulls off the feat of making a symphonic piece of visual story-telling, musical in its flow and structure, and managed to make a genunely intriguing and original statement that was neither Western triumphalism or PC guilt-mongering, but a statement on the nature of change and adaptation. A new world, indeed.