What is SWD or SW Django? I'm clueless. Thanks.

Sukiyaki Western Django. Takashi Miike. Spoof of spaghetti westerns (actually close to a remake of Django).

EDIT: there's the t-shirt. It lives in a ziploc bag in my dresser, next to the Springsteen for Senate t-shirt (long story there).

Caught Frost/Nixon tonight with Earl. A mundane movie that goes by the ABC book of dramturgy, i.e., Frost has to become Nixon, Nixon has to become Frost, both are shown at their worst and both get a kind of redemption (though obviously Frost is reclaiming the top of his profession and Nixon going the other way). All the performances are stylized (read "unrealistic/cartoonlike," Kevin Bacon is probably the worst of the leads, but they're all guilty) and there's nothing new to learn about anyone. The pseduo interviews with people who made the interviews happen are ridiculous (because we never believe we're watching interview footage). No depth, no insight. Proficient, but nothing more.

I may have liked it a more than Joe did, perhaps even enough to recommend it, but not enthusiastically.

My main problem was the disconnect between the early scenes, which showed Frost as a "lightweight" interviewer, and the climax, in which he suddenly becomes an intellectual dynamo of a journalist who won't let Nixon get away with anything. If Frost had those kind of interviewing chops all along, then what was up with those early scenes? No way he developed those skills in a two or three day cram session as the movie seems to imply.

That said, however, the climactic encounter does make for a riveting scene and both actors played it superbly.

More to the point is the quietly playful approach of the director, Arnaud Desplechin, who seems to be demonstrating that "A Christmas Tale" is a movie that could have been made in several different tones, and showing us how he would have handled each of them.

Sometimes he [the director] seems to looking for ways to distract himself.

For long stretches "A Christmas Tale" seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so.

There was nothing sudden about Frost's energy boost during the last interview. Much like the training scene in Rocky, we see him enlisting the help of Sam Rockwell's character and gettin' down and dirty with the books.

I really liked the film a lot. It was wonderfully directed with the perfect balance of pacing and pathos. Never so slow that it dragged, never so fast that I lost the essence of the characters. Again, using the Rocky metaphor (which I did in my original review of the film), it was all about the battle between two warriors, each in perfect opposition to the other. In personality, background, values, Frost and Nixon couldn't have been farther apart, and yet there they were, two guys locked in a mental death match, both fighting for their professional lives. That this was a true story only added to the intensity. I thought both Sheen and Langella were superb and have Langella as my pick for Best Actor Blanche.

"It was a two-and-a-half-hour pretentious piece of shit," I answered. "I'd have been much, much better off going with you to see Milk again."