Sex and the City:  The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life.  There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good.  One thing is for sure:  it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming.  They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original.  The comparison is by no means coincidental:  legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life.  If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

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Can you handle another year-end top ten list?  Can you handle it?  We don't think we can, but the L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor is determined to try our patience.  At the very least, she takes a fresh approach to it:  in her run-down of 2007's most interesting on-screen characters, she rejects the conventional wisdom that this year's prime crop of good films reeked to an unseemly degree of masculinity and cites an unusually high number of strong woman characters haunting our cineplexes, from Catherine Keener to Lili Taylor.  She particularly bigs up Meryl Streep, who, rather than dominating Oscar fare as usual, turns the trick of having "redeemed two bad movies"; Amy Ryan's "hard but not cold" single mother in Gone Baby Gone, and, in an interesting defection from a number of critics who found the female characters in Knocked Up to be half-formed caricatures, Leslie Mann, who "brings to the controlling-bitch-wife role that makes women squirm a kind of cathartic, rhythmic lyricism" that's "full of hilarious menace".  The piece isn't exactly a vital chapter in the history of cinema circa 2007, but it does serve as a refreshing tonic to an increasing number or critics who praise this year's movies because of their unrelenting and unapologetic masculinity.

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I'm Not There: "The screen would be a poorer, smaller place without such ambition."

Hitman: "I am a lover of trashy, violent movies, and Hitman is an insult to violent trash."

The Mist: "Frank Darabont loves Rod Serling. I mean really loves him."

August Rush: "Even if you're not the musical type, you might suspend your disbelief long enough to be stirred."

Feed: "Despite a handful of choice moments (Jerry Brown snorting nose spray), there's not enough here to justify a seventy-six-minute run time."

Q&A: Lili Taylor: "These days, there's not a lot of stuff actors can use to protect themselves from the roles, and protect themselves from the audience's projections."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We'll be back on Monday.

Lili Taylor is one of our favorite actresses, and for nearly two decades has arguably stood as the reigning queen of independent film. She’s gone through a lot of changes in the last few years: she’s eight months pregnant, she's relocated to Brooklyn from her longtime home of Manhattan, and she’s coming to terms with what it will take to stay in a movie business that has fewer and fewer roles for older women. In an interview with Manhattan Movie Magazine, she discusses these issues and how they relate to her newest film, Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening, shot in a remarkable eighteen days. Discussing her role, she says "I think that any time we can see a human being really moving through things with some kind of depth, it is helpful for the human condition. For women, we get to see that less." — Leonard Pierce