If Behind the Candelabra is indeed Steven Soderbergh’s last film (he’s now calling it a sabbatical), then I’d like to make the argument for Soderbergh being one of the five best filmmakers of the past twenty-five years. At the very least, he deserves to be known as one of the most freakishly diverse. It’s sometimes difficult for me to imagine that one filmmaker is responsible for Traffic, The Informant!, Behind the Candelabra, and Magic Mike. A quick look at his filmography still makes me feel as though I’m looking at eight or nine different filmmakers.

I'm not surprised they’re remaking Weird Science. What does surprise me is that they haven’t remade every single one of John Hughes’ movies by now. It’ll happen. I have to imagine it will.

And I probably won’t care.

Finally buying one of Roger Ebert’s books was simply something I had been meaning to do for ages. Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert just seemed like as good a place as any to start.

Either this is just a very slow period for movies I really want to see, or my depression is such that there isn’t a whole lot in the world that’s going to cheer me up to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong. There are movies coming out on DVD that I’d like to see, movies I’m perfectly willing to waste my money on that exist on my Amazon.com wish list, and even a few movies coming to theaters over the next month or so that I’d up for going to see (enough to pay ten or more bucks for it? That’s another matter), but my overall enthusiasm for movies right now is experiencing a rather severe ebb right now. 

I guess the J.J. Abrams/Star Wars thing is a pretty big deal. And it is, but I can only put so much emotional investment in Episode VII, or prequels featuring Han Solo and Boba Fett. I do love Star Wars, but that affection is really just limited to the original trilogy. I can sit through the other three, and I can enjoy elements of them, but if I never get another chance to do that in my life, I’ll probably be okay. And I’ve seen roughly ten or fifteen minutes of Clone Wars.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by the Academy Award nominations, but I wanted to be. I wanted to be surprised to find The Dark Knight Rises had scored a nomination, or that Christopher Nolan had perhaps picked up a Best Director nod. I had a hard time believing that in the ten-film Best Picture field, there couldn’t be room for one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of the year.

I don’t like Christmas, but I do seem to be a big fan of Christmas movies.

That makes sense, right?

Actually, I know a lot of people who think like that. I don’t know what their reasons are, but I guess that in my case it means that I like the concept of Christmas, or at least someone else’s concept of the holidays, much more than I like the actual execution of a time in the year that is getting dangerously close to screwing with Halloween.