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With their hokey way of talking and hillbilly ways, they annoy me. And, as Huned points out, Brother and Sister get along way too well to be remotely interesting.

Like in the episode “Out for the Team”:

Brother and Sister are good baseball players and both sign up to try out for the Bear Country Cardinals. The problem is, there’s only one position left on the team. Worried about the humiliating possibility of losing to his talented kid sister, Brother backs out of the competition. Sister has some encouraging words for Brother which inspire him to stick with it. The two cubs practice for the big tryout together.

I mean, COME ON! I don’t know about you, but growing up in my family, that episode would have gone something like this:

Brother and Sister are not terrible, but not great either baseball players and both sign up to try out for the Bear Country Cardinals. The problem is, there’s only one position left on the team. Worried about the humiliating possibility of losing to his talented kid sister, Brother beats the shit out of his Sister after she steals and destroys his baseball glove. Sister has some encouraging choice words for Brother which inspire him to stick with it just so he can show her that she is inferior. They forget their differences soon after the big tryout when they are immediately absorbed in their next big adventure: Who hid the Oreos?

Though my kids seem to like them, I think that is merely a byproduct of them just wanting to watch whatever is on. Since PBS Sprout is still their channel of choice, that means the Berenstain Bears is often what is on. Ugh.

At least they are better than Caillou (don’t get me started on that one). And I have, so far, completely avoided letting my kids watch Barney. At least that I know of.

Long been on my to-see list, I watched “The Lives of Others” on the plane — until my battery died right at the moment (spoiler alert) they came to search the apartment. I had to wait 7 hours thinking about all the possible endings til I arrived in Dublin, bought a plug converter and found a non-smashed outlet to use during the layover.

The movie is now in my top 5, if not top 3. Set in East Berlin, 1984, the plot centers around a playwright, his actress girlfriend and his artist friends with the most complex character-study being that of the career Stasi officer assigned to keep them under surveillance.

The acting is subtle, mesmerizing. The cinematography is stunning. The set design and costumes impeccable (I actually caught myself wanting one of those East Berlin apartments and admiring some of their clothes and furniture).

The movie, without a doubt, deserved the Oscar it won for best foreign language film.

Yes, you should see it. Great cast, great acting, well-written and cute plot. I’d see it again. Plus, the story that the writer was a stripper with a blog who wrote a screenplay that required no re-writes and was filmed almost verbatim is pretty awesome too.

I under anticipated the mental and physical toll this movie would take on the viewer. I sat the entire movie with my shoulders hunched up around my ears from stress and I have felt so sad and useless since.

The movie, though, was excellent. Excellent acting, directing, filming, etc. I am a new fan of Leonardo after seeing The Departed and he was as amazing in this film as he was in that one, accents and all. Djimon Hounsou, simply amazing. And though I have never gotten Jennifer Connelly despite all my male friend’s ravings and found her a bit unbelievable in this role, it was not so much so as to distract me.

There were two nagging details about the script - not the overall story (which of course is a bit unrealistic) but in a couple of word choices. In two scenes where Danny Archer (DiCaprio) is delivering clever barbs about reality to the idealistic Maddy Bowen (Connelly) I was struck by two things he said as being out of sync with the year the story was supposed to have taken place (late 90s). One is the term “bling bling” - was that so ingrained in colloquial English that a Rhodesian diamond smuggler who had never left Africa and had little exposure to Americans would have picked up and thrown into conversation? The other is when he was saying how people like her come with their “little bottles of hand sanitizer.” I am an admitted addict to those little bottles and I never saw them in wide use until the last couple years.

There were other details I could discuss that I liked or would like more discussion about, but hard to say what they are without totally ruining the whole movie (though it is somewhat predictable anyway).

A disappointment was at the end when the credits say that it is up to the consumer to ensure that the diamonds they buy are conflict free. That was totally lame. Up to the middle-American 16 year old who goes to Zales at the mall and blows their savings from working at the local video store on some ugly sapphire and diamond flecked ring? Come ON. Why not say “don’t buy diamonds because you never really know where they come from” which was the WHOLE POINT of the movie?! Or “all diamonds are blood diamonds?” Or SOMETHING.
Anyway, have a look at Human Rights Watch site on what you can do about child soldiers.

We went to our local indie cinema to see “The Departed” on Wednesday. It was GOOD. Great acting. A few loose ends, like (spoiler alert) how Markie Mark figured it all out. And what was in the envelope given to the character played by Vera Farmiga. But mainly the acting was so good by all characters that they could have gotten away with even larger plot problems.

The best support roles were played by Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin - they were just all so funny and really rounded out the cast of characters.

And I came to realize, for the first time, that not only is Leonardo DiCaprio a great actor (I have thought so since seeing What’s Eating Gilbert Grape - don’t let that disaster Titanic movie lead you to think otherwise) but he is a hottie too - no wonder he can snag all those super model girlfriends (I mean, he dated Gisele - the most beautiful woman on the planet - for chrissakes.).