Coixet has a history of crap endings. Most notably The Secret Life of Words which has the single-most nullifying ending of any movie I have ever seen. When I watched it (in Madrid) people actually booed. I think she has a lot of promise, but she needs more courage to let the story be.

Please expunge the word "flyover America" from your lexicon. Do you have any idea how elitist and condescending it sounds? People live there who don't fly over it. Their votes could very well decide the next election. St. Louis and Missouri used to be a Democratic hotbed. It could be again, but it won't be if the lefty media continues to treat the whole middle of the country as if they were monolithically devoid of interest and protagonism.

Here are a few others:

Goshu the Cellist (in Japanese, but virtually no dialog)--a must for kids with creative tendencies. Beautiful animation, music...

Heidi--the wildly popular (everywhere but the US) 52-episode adaptation of the book--one of Miyazaki's first jobs. Fantastic storytelling. Another one is Marco, but it's more heavy-duty...for older kids.

Monty Python--My parents took me to see these a three-movie Monty Python marathon when I was a little kid and I loved it. Not for the squeamish.

Etre y Avoir--My son loved this one about a one-room schoolhouse in France.

Be Kind, Rewind--I thought this one was great for kids.

Rear Window--funny you should mention it... I remember my mom taking me to see this when I was around 10--the day that my dog died. Great movie, not such great timing.

Beautiful. As anyone (or everyone) from a dysfunctional family knows, peace is complicated, tenuous, and precious. I hope that traveling through your past brought you peace, Señor Dorfman.

Love you. Need you. But this has to be one of the least humorous times to live in... I'll be going back to Don Quixote now.

The problem with the basic tenet of this piece is that (right or wrong) people hold memoirs and nonfiction to a much lower literary standard. The memoir is the weakest and fluffiest of all the subgenres. These writers pass their fiction off as nonfiction because nine times out of ten they aren't good enough writers to meet the basic literary criteria that fiction requires. The minute the work passes into the realm of fiction it's subject to a completely different set of rules and criteria.

Of course the false memoir is a literary genre in and of itself, but I seriously doubt anyone will be reading the books in question over four hundred years later. Forget about this trash and read Lazarillo de Tormes.

> Government v. Private "promotion" of beauty standards

> private fashion types enforce their conceptions of beauty by inviting people

> to their fashion shows and making magazines available for purchase,

> while government enforce their ideas with coercive bans on certain models

No one seems to understand (or report it correctly in the American press). In Europe, fashion is considered culture and cultural endeavors are often subsidized by the government. The ban on models in Madrid isn't for private fashion shows. It is for the city sponsored and funded biannual fashion shows (Pasarela Cibeles). The fact that the government subsidizes the shows explains the regulation. There were some egregious examples of severely ill women in past shows which prompted a huge number of complaints from taxpayers who felt their money was being ill-used.

What does he mean when he says "Get those spectators either in the playing field or out of the arena, really, that's how I feel about it". Is he going to euthanize the nonbelievers?

Maybe I should clarify... when I said that we used bottled water because our tap water was tainted, I meant the kind of bottled water that gets delivered in the big refillable 5 gallon bottles. I would never consume all (or really any) of my water out of tiny disposable plastic bottles.

And, yes, we could have installed a filter, but with our lead count being so unhealthy and having a baby in our home, I didn't want to take any chances.

I grew up drinking amazing well water (we lived right next to a natural artesian spring that bubbled up right out of the ground from one of those sandy aquifers). I'm not opposed in any way to tap water (and I do drink it most of the time now that I live in a different country and city). But I fear that with the infrastructure of the US being what it is, the water coming out of the tap may not be nearly as safe as we have been lead (no pun intended) to believe.