I want to write about my weekend but my week is getting in the way!

Thank goodness bunj and I dragged ourselves out into the not-quite-so-inhospitable weather on Saturday to see El laberinto del Fauno so I had something to root for last night. And good choice, too, since every win led to a reward of stocky, bearded Hispanic men taking the stage. Guau guau! So sad Guillermo del Toro was not among them, even though they showed him in the audience like 235,957 times, but Nuphy was so estatic at seeing Das Leben der Anderen carry off Best Foreign that I didn't begrudge von Donnersmarck his glory. Besides, he may have had only the one good movie in him, whereas del Toro may well get the nod again before long.

Thanks to Adriana Barraza's nomination, we also got to see quite a bit of her escort Arnaldo Pipke, which is all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. Nuphy and I were both as shocked at how altered Deneuve looked as we were mesmerised by Helen Mirren. (Nuphy made some particularly unflattering comparisons between her and wind-blown chipmunk Cameron Diaz in a dress that looked hacked away to reveal her shoes.) It was really too bad that I had to put monshu in a cab and get him home before her acceptance speech, which promised to be the best of the night, and I wish Baba Wawa had spent at least twice as much time with her as she did. We wanted more dish! Leave the clowning around with Eddie Murphy to late-night talk-show dweebs!

Normally, we would've blown off the spectacle altogether, but Nuphy wanted to show off his new big screen high-def TV and we were seduced by the thought of an Oscar party actually within taxi range. Unfortunately, the little man had an inordinate amount of trust in Joy Yee's ability to deliver our dinner when they said they would, which left the three of us standing around like assholes in the foyer of the restaurant while DeGeneres began her opening monologue. She was reason to keep watching: We treasured her refreshing little bits of silliness, from her pretend gaffe about Judi Dench's cosmetic surgery to getting Stephen Spielberg to retake his botched photo of her and Clint Eastwood "for MySpace".

All in all, we found the "wintry mix" outside far less nasty than had been predicted. At some points--such as strolling 18th Street with mollpeartree and jakflak on Saturday night or waiting for the busses to take us down to Nuphy's on Sunday--it was simply gorgeous; the flakes falling in Pilsen in particular may have been the largest I've ever seen in Chicago. Unfortunately, unpredictability ruled: A half-hour after that experience, I was being sandblasted by bits of prickly ice and ice-cold rain as I fought a headwind on Randolph to reach the express bus stop. Also, poor drainage and borderline temps made every sidewalk a morass of slush.

But I was glad to get down to Nuevo Leon for tamales and language talk and glad again to get to someplace where I could diss the would-be divas with someone while monshu contentedly fell asleep on the sofa. Not to mention how refreshing it is to see a film that actually lives up to its hype.

Friday night double feature

The Brothers McMullen Got this because I'd heard bunj talk about it and it sounded like a reasonably diverting rom-com; had I known earlier about it winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, I wouldn't have bothered. princeofcairo is known to complain that all the men in Hindi films are tools, but these feckless wankers have nothing on them! To the extant that we identified with the females (and we did, outside of the two depicted as amoral, materialistic, manipulative bitches--one of whom is the only Jewish character, natch), we wanted them to flee as far and as fast as they could. We both found Burns utterly charmless, but I actually liked Mulcahy until the inexorable adultery subplot seizes him and he becomes a spineless weasel. It also joins the long list of films that bollocks up the depiction of Catholicism by presenting it as some fucked-up mishmash of arbitrary rules that no sane being would obey for more than ten minutes. There's no sense at all of the twisted but seductive weltanschauung that comes with being raised even in a not-particularly-observant RC household. On top of all that, it wasn't even funny; I get more laughs out of a typical 30-second spot for Vonage than I did out of this entire film.

Ghost World This, on the other hand, had me laughing almost non-stop for the first ten minutes. I loved the girls from the very start even though I knew I'd pay for it later in cringing at their self-destructive behaviour. I told monshu he wouldn't like it because I thought too many of the arch cultural references would pass him by and Birch's story arc of frustrated potential would annoy him, but in retrospect I'm sure he would've found it more satisfying than cowardly Irish-American man-children: At least it would've been a teenager who was acting like a teenager. (Kudos, btw, for casting young actors who were actually the ages of the characters they were playing.) Personally, I'm glad I hadn't read the comics first since I imagine that would've led to my being annoyed by the movie's focus on Enid at the expense of Rebecca and the promotion of Buscemi's character from walk-on to central role. At least there was little of the wish-fulfilment I expected from two hard-core geeks authoring a film about a buxom 18 year-old becoming fascinated with a misanthropic nerdboy. So many incidental details and observational bits in this rang true that I was left feeling appropriately nimrodic for having ignored Eightball all these years.