On a minor note, Andrew Rasiej got his facts wrong about scurvy and the British navy -- although a Google search suggests that his is a common mistake. It actually took only 42 years, not 150 years, between the publication of Dr. James Lind's "Treatise on Scurvy" (which identified citrus fruits as a cure and preventative for the disease) in 1753, and the British Navy issuing lemon juice to the fleet in 1795. What took 150 years was the discovery of vitamin C, which is of course the active ingredient in citrus fruits. See the excellent article by David Harvie in History Scotland magazine (http://www.historyscotland.com/features/answerwasalemon.html).

This may bode well for the technical deficiencies of the White House!

My 7-year-old daughter was recently entranced by Jacques Demy's THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT, a candy-colored bauble which can stand up proudly next to any classic Hollywood musical. Some of her other favorites that no one has mentioned yet:

NATIONAL VELVET

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT

ANNIE (the Kathy Bates TV version, far better than the movie)

HAIRSPRAY (the musical, not the John Waters original)

THE POLAR EXPRESS (which I find creepy, but she loves)

THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD (the 1940 version)

THE MUSIC MAN

OLIVER TWIST (the live-action Roman Polanski version -- she's watched it over and over)

PETER PAN (the Mary Martin TV musical, sadly unavailable on DVD)

THE NUTCRACKER (the version narrated by Kevin Kline and featuring Macaulay Culkin)

THE WAY THINGS GO (an indescribable art piece which chronicles a 30-minute-long chain reaction involving ordinary household objects)

TARZAN THE APE MAN (the Johnny Weissmuller original, another movie that can provoke useful conversations about the historical depiction of Africans on film)

She's also nuts about the usual Disney and Pixar classics, as well as:

PETER PAN (the live-action P.J. Hogan version, which is as peculiarly magical and memorable as Cocteau's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST);

THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER, which is by far her favorite Muppet movie;

THE POINT, about which much has already been said;

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, ditto;

MICROCOSMOS, ditto.

For the record, she was either unmoved or frightened by several movies I love:

THE COURT JESTER

WAY OUT WEST

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

To each their own, I guess...

Everything you say is true -- but I think, in the end, it comes down to Cheney.

When the Republicans impeached Clinton, they knew that if they succeeded, they'd end up with Al Gore as President. They may not have agreed with Gore politically, but they respected him and knew he wasn't mentally unbalanced. The Democrats today are in a very different situation. While only people on the far left -- and the folks on "The Daily Show," bless them -- are willing to say it openly, I suspect many Congressmen would admit privately that Dick Cheney is not in full possession of his faculties. (Actually, there's one more group of people who are willing to acknowledge it: his former friends like Brent Scowcroft and Paul O'Neill, who have written and spoken at length about Cheney's metamorphosis into someone they barely recognize.) The prospect of President Dick Cheney is simply unacceptable to anyone who would want to impeach George W. Bush, and rightly so.

So if you're going to impeach Bush, you have to impeach Cheney too, in which case the Speaker of the House would become President. But the Congressional Democrats aren't willing to go there -- and although a part of me would love to see it happen, I think they're probably right. While impeachment may well be justified by the crimes Bush and Cheney have committed and authorized, and by their dereliction of their Constitutional duties, removing both the President and Vice President would look too much to all the world like a coup d'etat. (Of course, you can argue that the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was itself a coup d'etat -- I certainly would -- but at least Bush was one of the candidates!) For Congress to install Nancy Pelosi as an unelected President would open a can of worms that might never be contained. Besides, Congressional Republicans hate Pelosi more than they ever hated Gore, which makes this outcome extremely unlikely anyway. The Democrats know all this, and that's why they're holding back.

Many of Gerald Ford's obituaries quoted people who opposed his pardon of Richard Nixon at the time, but who now believe that Ford was right -- that he spared the country a great national trauma. I think Nixon deserved prosecution then as much as Bush and Cheney do now ... but sometimes the greater good is served best by restraint, as hard as that is for us to swallow. Sometimes, the most courageous act is not to act at all.

Alas, we'll never learn whether Hollywood would have leached the darkness out of Fabian Bielinsky's work. He died in June, at the age of 47. "The Aura" is his last film.