Driving to the movies, we passed a fast food restaurant that had put up a sign: "Life is short/Eat Now." I don't see how that follows, other than that anxiety might bring on a bout of binge eating. Or binge eating might result in a short life.

The woman in front of us in line at the theater bought a ticket to "Something's Gotta Give," which caused the ticket seller to announce into the loudspeaker mike that someone would need to run that movie. The ticket seller explained that they don't run the movie unless someone buys a ticket. Isn't SGG supposed to be a hit? I guess not around here.

We dropped into "Cold Mountain" for a couple minutes, enough to gather that it was badly written. You could tell the movie was going to be excruciatingly slow by the time it took for various minor characters to assert that Nicole Kidman was pretty. Get on with it!

The movie we'd come to see, though, was "House of Sand and Fog," which had a good script, the kind of story that works so well in a movie, where some little thing happens in the beginning, then one thing leads to another, with all sorts of extravagant consequences. At some point you have to just let go of the thought "Jennifer Connelly should have opened her mail" and follow the characters.