I just watched this strange tale about a French dysfunctional family, and while parts of it were alternately funny or fascinating, and some of the actors were impossible to ignore, the movie left me both puzzled and annoyed. What was the point of the score's use of Mendelsohn's incidental music to "A Midsummer's Night's Dream"--and Paul's viewing the famed Max Reinhardt film of that play on TV? Of course I caught the quote from Puck at the end of ACT, but the shadows haven't offended, they've just puzzled.

More importantly, the family is split in part because Elizabeth has "banished" her brother Henri but there is never any real understanding of why she did it. Ivan says there was some "insupportable" letter Henri wrote her, and we even see her give Henri a letter addressed to her, as his Xmas present, but not letting us know what the truth is here felt like cheating the audience. If the point is that, well, families are irrational, so what? Even knowing French didn't make this movie less opaque.

Try reading this NYT review which makes the movie sound like the dreary holiday kitsch the trailer made me think it was:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/movies/25marl.html

Andrew, it's not a masterpiece, not remotely, and I speak French. It was overlong, wandering, diffuse, and unclear, not remotely as compelling, beautifully filmed or acted as this year's "Un Secret." I enjoy Mathieu Amalric and Deneuve both, but even the delights of watching them grew stale quickly because the story just doesn't work. The sister "banished" Henri (Amalric) from the family, but we never understand what the hysteria is all about. Their brother Ivan suggests that Henri wrote Elizabeth a terrible letter, but Henri denies it. Then we see Elizabeth give him a letter addressed to her (inside another envelope) as his Christmas present. It's simply cheating the audience to make the major rupture in the family about this letter and then not reveal what's in it. If the point is that families are crazy, even French ones, that's not a real point, but a cliché. My heart wasn't broken for one moment here, though I did pity some of the characters at times. Had they been less frozen and more richly drawn, I might have felt more, but the movie was cold, cold, cold. And dull, dull, dull.

Te other really annoying thing about the movie was the constant referencing of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Twice the mentally ill son Paul is seen watching the famed 1935 Max Reinhardt movie of the play. Then the score bubbles up with Mendelsohn's incidental music to it way too often. Finally, and most dismally, the angry sister quotes Puck's "And if we shadows have offended" in the movie's last moments. Well, the movie isn't magical or especially witty or even funny. Calling up the spirit of the playwright, the composer, and the director threw the flaws of this movie into much too high relief.

Of course tastes vary, Andrew, but you did say, watch it and "tell me it's not a masterpiece." You're not, btw, the only critic to rave about it and set up some viewers, at least, for a big disappointment. Perhaps "masterpiece" is a term to be used more sparingly.

Holder's now on record as affirming an obvious truth: waterboarding is torture.

Torture is against U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions to which we are a signatory.

Administration officials have been involved in approving waterboarding.

Therefore when Holder is AG, his department has to investigate this apparent lawbreaking wherever that leads. It's that simple.

Plow them all under. They're not freaking out and dying fast enough. This episode was the epitome of the idiotic show Battlestar has become: heavy-handed, melodramatic, badly lit, badly edited, badly paced and just plain dull. I pray to the Gods to dispatch the rest of the cast soon. Watching the fleet drift through space, unmanned, would be a relief.

There was no Nazi-occupied Belarus. The Nazis occupied the Byelorussian SSR.

Anybody watching at home missed Gene Robinson, Joan, because according to Pam's House Blend, Joe.My.God, and AfterElton, Gene Robinson was cut from the show by the Inaugural Committee who consigned his invocation to the pre-show.

So his invocation may have been moving, but only people at the site heard him, and many of those didn't either, because of "microphone problems." I hope Salon will follow up and find out who made this atrocious, un-inclusive, Cheneyesque decision. I'd say censorship tried to steal the show.

His flat affect, and the zombie-like reading of his teleprompter (complete with weird pauses and weirder emphases), make his idiocies harder to take this week.

"Is Obama doing too much?" was one of his more risible questions. And he also badgered guests about the second oath. First, nobody had access, then when he was challenged because a handful of journalists were there, he said, "Well, there were no TV reporters," and finally, lamely, said something about not making too much of it. This was Blitzer at his worst: uninformed, totally off-base, and sounding/acting like a pod person.

I called him Blizter rather than Blitzer--but he really is a blister.

Glenn, it's not just his logic that's sloppy.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." is not just an aphorism, it's the opening line of L.P. Hartley's famous novel The Go-Between which I read in the 70s in grad school.

Cohen can't even attribute a quotation accurately, which goes to a certain fuzziness of mind and carelessness of craft.