Do not miss The Last Station. Helen Mirren stars as Tolstoi's wife, Christopher Plummer is Tolstoi and Paul Giamatti is his chief acolyte.

Tolstoi's wife wages a battle with the acolyte over Tolstoi's soul and his legacy. The acolyte, Tolstoi and his daughter are writing a secret will that will put all of Tolstoi's works into the public domain. His wife wants the copyrights kept in the family to insure the childrens' inheritance. The pair love each other very much but have diametrically opposed social philosophies.

Crazy Heart is excellent and Jeff Bridges ought to get best actor for his superb job as Bad Blake, a down and out country western singer. Bad Blake is an alcoholic, chain smoker (lights new one with old one), with four ex-wives, reduced to singing in bowling alleys and dead end bars. He is a train wreck.

I rented a wonderful little film made in Canada called Strangers in Good Company. It follows a group of 8 elderly women whose bus breaks down in the Canadian wilderness who seek shelter in an old deserted farmhouse on a lake. All they have are their wits, their memories and eventually, after multiple failed attempts, some fish and frog legs they've caught. For several days the women share their memories, their life stories and their intimate thoughts.

I saw the film A Single Man today and liked it more than I thought I would. It is actually excellent. Set in L.A. during the Cuban missile crisis (1962) it deals with a gay man named George Falconer (Colin Firth) whose long time (16 year) lover has died in a traffic accident in Colorado while visiting his family. Also one of their dogs was killed in the car accident and the other is missing. The family of the lover refuses to allow him to attend the funeral services and don't even want to tell him about the death. A cousin sneaks in a phone call to inform George.

Saw the Spanish film Broken Embraces this afternoon. It is another in a life time career of stunning films by the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. My favorite film of his and one I would put onto anyone's MUST SEE list is Talk to Her. I would put this up amongst his best and all of his films are exceptional. None of his films are facile. All deal with difficult subjects, some very disturbing and hard to watch. All very deep in the emotion of their characters and the characters' stories. Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) is no exception. This is another Do NOT Miss film from Almodovar.

Saw The Young Victoria in Reno today. On the way down 80 through the Truckee River canyon, there was a beautiful finely coloured rainbow set deep in the canyon with the snow covered canyon walls and mountains in the distance behind it. Beauitiful!

Viggo Mortensen plays the Man.  In a post apocalyptic world , where there is little hope of mankind surviving and many have resorted to cannibalism to survive, the Man and his young son who is born on the eve of destruction, now about 10, are traveling to the coast in hopes of finding a better life.  Not withstanding the the subject matter, this adaption of Cormac Mccarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning book, tells a tale of a love between a father and his son, and his son for the father.  There are some very graphic grizzle scenes of inhumanity and pure animal survival, throughout

Sherlock Holmes is just another great venue and vehicle showcasing the amazing talent of Robert Downey Jr. Would someone just give this guy a best actor award please ! Maybe make a category just for him.

I rented a great flick from Netflix from Germany called Cherry Blossoms. It is about family, death of a loved one and how each of us best deals with the memory and grief of the loved one. In this film, set in rural Germany, Berlin and Japan, an older woman learns that her husband has a fatal disease that will kill him over the next months to a year or so. The doctors advise her to make his last months as happy as possible. She decides not to tell anyone, including him, of his condition.

Saw It's Complicated in Reno today. This movie stars Meryl Streep as a very successful divorced businesswoman (has a fabulous bakery/coffeeshop in Santa Barbara.) Alec Baldwin plays her ex-husband who now has a 32 year old wife who wants a child by him (she has a child from an affair she had earlier in the marriage). Steve Martin (looking very good) is the architecture designing an extension to her gorgeous house.