DID I SAY THAT OUT LOUD?

Amidst all the pre-Christmas madness, I think I'm actually going to try to get out to a movie sometime before Saturday. Since my choices are pretty much limited to what's in the Glendale-Burbank area (largely by my unwillingness to brave holiday traffic to get to The Life Aquatic or Million Dollar Baby, which are still in exclusive west-side runs, where all the real people live, don't you know), it's starting to look a lot like House of Flying Daggers or Ocean's Twelve might be among the last movies I see theatrically in 2004. Of course, I'll use the excuse of trying to come up with a timely top ten list to see as much of what's left on my wish list as I can, including the Wes Anderson and Clint Eastwood movies, as well as A Very Long Engagement and Bad Education, before I actually undertake that task. I also have some new DVD releases at the ready, including Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate and the highly regarded action thriller Infernal Affairs (which, unless it happened while I blinked in mid September, was scheduled for a theatrical run from Miramax that it never received... Hmm, where have we heard this one before?) So I'm projecting a top ten list to be posted here sometime the first week of January, and while I can in no way pretend that I've seen everything there is out there to see (and what year has that ever been true anyway?), at least I'll have enough under my belt to make a reasonable stab at a list that might actually be worth looking at. And now it's off to the movies... I hope!