bleary

I kind of like the fact that the films have been a little more iffy in this incarnation. 24 of the final 26 films in solo episodes with Devin got voted in, and that sort of monotony was more boring to me than seeing these more fringy films. That said, I agree that it can be a bummer when someone picks a personal favorite that they're too close to, because they tend to struggle to come up with objective reasons for inclusion in the Canon.

I saw Departed first and voted for Infernal Affairs.

You're right that he should have been given his due in 2003 and 2005. Hence in 2007, he would have been...

What makes this tough is that neither of these films are perfect. While Infernal Affairs is a little terse, The Departed is painfully bloated, and it seems like there's a version that could exist that is able to more adequately explain Lau/Sullivan's turn against Sam/Costello without adding 50 minutes. Anyway, I thought this was going to be close before the rewatch. I originally saw The Departed either in theaters or shortly thereafter and discovered Infernal Affairs around 5 years ago, and I enjoyed both versions. Watching them back-to-back this week made it clear which I found more Canon-worthy. When judging a film against its remake, the question is whether the differences in the remake add enough to overcome the deficiency in originality. Although I still enjoy The Departed, I feel like it fails in this regard. The change of setting from Hong Kong to Boston loses all the political complications of the British-Chinese transfer and replaces it with a boilerplate "Boston is racist" view. (Does Martin Scorsese hate Boston? Or are audiences supposed to applaud the constant homophobic slurs and people getting into fistfights over nothing? It just serves to make all the characters seem incredibly stupid.) As pointed out in the episode, the addition of the character of Dignam can almost be seen as a third-act plot hole, and seems to only exist so that someone is around to kill Sullivan in the end, which I'll get back to. And of course, why have three female characters when you can just have one? Yes, I know that the three females in Infernal Affairs are non-characters, and that Mary's debate about whether her protagonist is a good guy or a bad guy is as on the nose as, say, a rat running past the Massachusetts State House. But having Madolyn fill all the female roles doesn't make her any more of a fully-realized character. If anything, it makes her more of a plot device, as we see her only in relation to the (quasi-literal) dick-measuring contest between Sullivan and Costigan. Mary and Dr. Lee in Infernal Affairs at least seemed to have lives outside of their relationships to the main characters, even if those lives were not depicted on screen. And finally, we have the major character change from Lau to Sullivan. Lau is a guy growing up in a rapidly changing city wrestling with right versus wrong versus pure self-interest. Sullivan goes full heel, and is conveniently a bad guy the entire film. As such, there's zero conversation to be had about Sullivan's actions. When he turns on Costello, it's because he felt betrayed by the fact he was working with the FBI. When he kills Costello's other mole after Costigan is shot, it's to tie up another loose end. When he recommends Costigan for a medal, it's clearly posturing. Conversely, Lau praises Yan because he actually respects the integrity and bravery that Yan showed. When he kills Sam's other mole who shot Yan, it's almost as much out of disgust at Sam's network as it is out of self-preservation. And when he initially turns on Sam...well, like I said at the beginning, that is a bit underwritten, but I read it as taking revenge against the father-figure who disrespects him for killing the father-figure in SP Wong who was supportive of him. But overall, the ending with Lau living on in moral misery, as in purgatory or in hell, is so much more interesting than the ending where the bad guy gets shot in the head and the credits roll. So yeah, Scorsese took this film about Buddhist morality and turned it into a film about dicks. (Good guy - dick works! Bad guy - dick doesn't work! Gangster - dick works but sperm doesn't!) And again, I still have to say that this is probably one of my top 5 favorite Scorsese films, alongside Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, and Hugo. It has some great performances and some fantastic scenes. But it turns out that most of those fantastic scenes already existed in the original version. My vote goes to Infernal Affairs.

And yes, it's currently on Filmstruck.

I really didn't know how to feel about this one until Amy mentioned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, at which point I realized THAT is the version of Cry Uncle! that is as transgressive, satirical, and X-rated, but actually works as a film. Also, a couple people on here have mentioned the possibility that we should induct a true X-rated film into the Canon, but the Canon already has Female Trouble, which is a similar type of transgressive genre parody, but again, works much better as a film. To start, I felt that the laughs in Cry Uncle! were rather few and far between. A large part of that is an issue I have with much of the humor in transgressive films of the 60s and 70s, that it just hasn't aged well. Or maybe I'm just one of those social justice warriors that Lloyd Kaufman so dislikes. (I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and not lump him in with comedians who blame so-called social justice warriors for their own lack of comedic evolution, resulting in what was once seen as shocking and funny now seen as lazy and hack.) The scattered and confusing plot could be played as a satire of the overly intricate plots of the film noirs of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, but instead there's no indication that it's a joke at all, and it plays as a bug rather than a feature. So what would be the argument to induct Cry Uncle!? Among X-rated films, we already have Midnight Cowboy, Female Trouble, and it seems like this forum would rather debate a Russ Meyer film for an additional entry. Among the John Avildsen filmography, this film plays more like a curiosity than a touchstone. And even among the Troma films, it's hard not to see The Toxic Avenger as the logical representative there. I'll vote no on this one.

*clears throat* Infernal Affairs is also currently on FilmStruck.

I definitely don't agree with this premise, though I think it's possible that Gen-X filmmakers have a harder time writing and directing from a millennial point of view, even though John Hughes and Nicholas Ray were firmly in the generations being criticized in their films. As more millennial filmmakers continue to tell stories, maybe we'll see more of it. Thinking about millennial filmmakers reminded me that there's a lot of generational gap material in Lady Bird, and it's possible there'll be more in Wildlife and Eighth Grade, all of which are first films by millennial directors.

Boyhood is a fair point, but the generation gap aspect of it is so tiny. I'm also onboard with Amy's opinion of that film, which is that it's a remarkable achievement, but a rather uncompelling movie. I had the same thought about how most of the teen movies from, say, 1995-2010 seem to either ignore the parents, or have no conflict with them. I thought of American Beauty, but that's firmly from the point of view of the parent (he's the narrator, after all). The internet suggests Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, but I missed that one. Thirteen is a film that I've forgotten too much to comment on. More recently, The Edge of Seventeen has a little bit of parent angst, but most of the angst is spent on other targets and it lacks the communal commiserating about parents that Breakfast Club has. Friend-of-the-show Michael Weber's films also generally ignore the parents. It's been a while since I've seen Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I don't remember much parent action in that either. Last year's Columbus (which is fantastic, I can't emphasize that enough) has some conversations about the generation gap, but they're between Haley Lu Richardson's American millennial character and John Cho's Asian-American Gen-Xer, so they are coming at it from different points of view.

Probably best to skip this episode then. They do talk about the movie for almost the entire time.

To be fair, Hughes' ending of Pretty in Pink had Molly Ringwald's character winding up with Duckie, not Blane. (I feel like this came up in the Canon episode for Pretty in Pink 3 years ago, I'm having deja vu.)

I guess I'll start with the negatives. Amy and Christy are spot-on when they mention how tragically underwritten the character of Allison is. It's to Ally Sheedy's credit that she's able to flesh out the character as much as she does, and she makes Allison feel oh-so-close to people I knew in high school: the periphery people in each class who are just a general type of misfit, clever but not motivated enough to be a Brian, mischievous but not contemptible enough to be a Bender, who come up with biting, cynical, sarcastic criticism of Claires and Andrews but who know that the potential blowback of sharing such wit around anyone but their closest friends is not worth it. There are hints of that in Allison, but the missing pieces are filled in with "she's just crazy" in a really dissatisfying way, and the idea that she would fall for Andrew seems unearned. I feel like she would be uninterested in someone who as dishonest about who they are as Andrew is, and I would have bought a romance between her and Brian much more readily. As it is, her arc ends up looking like Sandy's in Grease: wear the right clothes and makeup, and you too can date a sleazebag. I get Amy's criticism of how Claire is treated as well. Although Claire is at least a more fully-realized character, she also lacks a great arc. Her "relationship" with Bender at the end feels like she's simply fetishizing his rebelliousness (and possibly his poverty) to achieve an effect on observing bystanders. I don't buy at all that she values him as a human being, and in that sense, she changes very little over the course of the movie, she's just switching up the window dressing on her dishonest facade. But I don't know how much I see this as a fault of the film. Not everybody can change in one Saturday, and maybe Claire doesn't get a breakthrough in this one. So I suppose I'll turn to the positives next. The comparison to Rebel Without a Cause is an interesting and apt one, as I can't think of any other movies that so adeptly analyze the generational gap from the point of view of the younger generation. While Rebel featured proto-Baby-Boomers as the angsty teens, The Breakfast Club now casts them as terrible parents to the new class of angsty teens. Could Jim from Rebel Without a Cause be Claire's rich dad, Bender's abusive dad, or Andrew's domineering dad? More likely I see him as Brian's dad, not knowing how to encourage his son without pressuring him, and forcing Brian to have a similar freakout as Jim did. While The Breakfast Club is not the masterpiece that Rebel Without a Cause is, I love how much Breakfast Club continues that conversation. (Anyone have recommendations for films from a Millennial point of view about clashes with their Gen X parents?) There's so much to love in the performances. As mentioned in the podcast, by allowing the actors to make a lot of character choices, they all seem like much more realistic characters and we understand so much about each of them from all the work done that's not explicitly in the dialogue, from gestures or eye-contact or avoidance of eye-contact or just the guarded way each of them addresses each other. This film works as well as it does because the five actors bring their characters to life in these ways. Finally, although I greatly enjoy this film and would probably vote yes into the Canon on that merit alone, the cultural impact of The Breakfast Club makes this a no-brainer for inclusion. Christy mentioned a "Family Guy" episode, while I immediately thought of the "Community" pilot, as well as a great episode of "Futurama" where Fry hides his good luck charm in his vinyl copy of The Breakfast Club soundtrack ("Don't you mean 'breakfast club sandwich'?"). It's undoubtedly one of the most often parodied films of its era, owing largely to how synonymous the film is with its theme, "Don't You (Forget About Me)". I am incapable of thinking about one of them without thinking about the other, and I mean that in the best possible way. This film (along with St. Elmo's Fire, which came out just a few months later) established the Brat Pack, for better or worse. And this film is largely responsible for making John Hughes a household name. I still would have loved a versus episode between Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, just to add in a little extra suspense. On a solo episode, The Breakfast Club has to get in. I vote yes.

I think I echo the rest of the room when I say that although The Exorcist III is a fine film that I enjoyed even more on this rewatch, I have to vote for the original.

Just caught this on Cinemax over the weekend and thought about how it'd make a great Canon episode, although I think a versus episode against Ferris Bueller would have been appropriately cruel. Anyway, this is on Cinemax on demand and maxgo.com if you're a subscriber.

I haven't seen the 2016 one, and I can't seem to find it online now, although there was a 2-disc BluRay release under the title "Exorcist III" that had both versions. Apparently the 2016 cut is markedly different, so I'd like to compare if I can find it. It's unclear which version is on Shudder and Amazon right now, but the length seems to match the 1990 version.

Interesting. I wonder if they'll be talking about the 1990 release of Exorcist III, or whether it'll specifically be the 2016 director's cut, which was released as Legion.

I'm a big fan of lists, so here's a list of Academy Award winning actors and actresses who have appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Cate Blanchett (Thor: Ragnorok) Jeff Bridges (Iron Man) Benicio Del Toro (Guardians of the Galaxy) Michael Douglas (Ant-Man) Anthony Hopkins (Thor 1-3) William Hurt (Incredible Hulk and Captain America: Civil War) Tommy Lee Jones (Captain America: The First Avenger) Ben Kingsley (Iron Man 3) Lupita Nyong'o (Black Panther) Gwyneth Paltrow (5 or 6 of them) Natalie Portman (Thor 1-2) Sam Rockwell (Iron Man 2) Tilda Swinton (Doctor Strange) Marisa Tomei (Spider-Man: Homecoming) Forest Whitaker (Black Panther) Plus, over 20 other actors in the MCU have been at least nominated for Oscars, including Avengers Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Jeremy Renner. Before I get into The Avengers, I want to mention that I agree in general with Amy about the eye-roll inducing nature of the "just at the last possible second" trope in action movies, while also saying that I don't think it's actually that bad in this film, since they don't waste THAT much time building suspense to something we all know is not suspenseful. Thor is only struggling in his Hulk cage for a matter of seconds. Ditto with Iron Man falling back through the space hole. I was much more annoyed by this with Ready Player One, whose climax is obnoxiously delayed by some van-shaking that any intelligent audience member knows will have no impact to the story. This was also largely why Inception infuriated me. So I'm with Amy on this in general, but I don't know if this is the movie I'd point to that's most guilty of it. At any rate, I'm very much on the fence on this one. On the one hand, I love the movies of the MCU. I don't consider them high art, but to me, the consistency of entertainment is at an unfathomable level. If I'm channel-flipping and one of these films is on, there's a very high chance I'll watch it to the end. But that alone is not Canon-worthy, since I can say the same thing about The Rock. (On second thought, I'd totally vote for The Rock into the Canon if it were oddly decided that we need a Michael Bay film in there. But also, we don't.) So then, is The Avengers the best modern (post 9-11) superhero movie? I'm inclined to say that both X-Men 2 and The Dark Knight are better, and for some reason tons of people pull for the terrible Spiderman 2. But the things that make X-Men 2 and The Dark Knight so successful larger overlap with what makes Marvel movies so great: they have good characters and allow them to have good character moments. None of those movies worked because of the plot. But you don't need the plot to be perfect when you have Heath Ledger giving such a breathtaking performance that it's just exciting to get to see him on the screen. But I also love the smaller notes in these films, like Halle Berry's Storm forming a connection to Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler in X2, or Michael Caine's scenes with Bale's Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight. This is a through-line for all the Marvel movies, that there's almost always some small thing that is so enjoyable to me that it keeps me into it, no matter whether the rest of the film isn't really working. For example, the plot of Iron Man 2 is a mess. But the scenes with Sam Rockwell and Mickey Rourke? Dayenu. Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones in the first Captain America. Michael Pena in Ant-Man. The Mjolnir-lifting contest in Age of Ultron. Letitia Wright in Black Panther. Marvel is successful because it cultivates deep benches of interesting characters, so they you care when they're on-screen and you care even more to see them interact with each other for the first time. So then, is The Avengers the best MCU movie? Again, I'm inclined to say no, but to the point above, it might be the Marvel-est of the Marvel movies, in that it is the most successful at doing the thing that generally makes Marvel movies more successful than the DC films or the Sony/Fox films. Personally, I'm partial to the funniest Marvel movies, like Guardians 1, Ant-Man, and Thor: Ragnorok. But I have so much respect for the breadth that the MCU has. The first Iron Man film is possibly the best superhero origin story film ever made, and certainly the best since the first Superman film. Winter Soldier is such a great action-thriller. Black Panther certainly deserves all the praise it's received. So while The Avengers is not my favorite MCU film, nor does it necessarily represent the full scope of possibilities in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's the best approximation. And it's a super enjoyable movie too. So I guess what I'm saying is that I talked myself into voting yes on this one.

I'm probably actually a soft no on this, but I voted yes just because I was bummed out at how one-sided the vote is so far. I mean, this is definitely a more Canon-worthy film than Point Break, so there's no reason that this vote should be so much more of a blow-out. And there's plenty to love about this film, which I generally really enjoyed, despite the rampant misogyny of the first half of the film. First off, Reginald Hudlin's quote about how insane it is that they assembled this cast is spot-on. Without knowing any of the cast before watching besides Eddie Murphy and Robin Givens, I was progressively more and more blown away seeing Martin Lawrence, David Alan Grier, Eartha Kitt, Halle Berry, Chris Rock, Grace Jones, etc. Before Black Panther, what $100 million grossing film had a cast of black stars as strong as this? Unlike Amy, I certainly didn't notice the lack of white characters, perhaps because I was so overwhelmed by how star-studded it was. I agreed with Amy and Marc that it is nice (and much too rare) to see these characters just be mostly competent at their jobs, and to have no humor mined specifically from race. Contrast that with Putney Swope, which I also enjoyed and which also took place in advertising, but where race is every punchline and plot point. And yes, Beverly Hills Cop is Canon-worthy, as is Coming To America and maybe 48 Hours, and I might argue for Bowfinger as well, but this isn't a versus episode, and I was extremely surprised by how much I enjoyed Boomerang.

I don't think the problem is his cadence, he's just terrible at delivering lines. Whenever I've seen him in interviews, he seems able to sound natural when he speaks. His line-delivery has just always been abysmal though. Anyway, I am unswayed by arguments that this film features an idiotic plot carried out by characters acting in idiotic ways because "that's the point." It just smells like a bad movie to me, despite being shot well by Kathryn Bigelow. I'm also unswayed by arguments that this film was a game-changer for the action drama. Please, someone tell me what films wouldn't have been made if not for Point Break? In terms of law-enforcement-centric action films, the game-changers in that era were Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. I mean, Point Break might be the reason that Keanu was cast in Speed, but Die Hard was the reason Speed got made. And as far as introducing the idea of taking beautiful people over bodybuilders as action stars... the James Bond franchise and the rest of the sexy-spy genre had that covered 25-30 years before Point Break. And finally, you're going to try to tell me that Point Break was definitively more of an inspiration for The Fast and the Furious than 1987's No Man's Land, which is even more similar to it in plot than Point Break is? I just don't see this movie's fingerprints on action movies to come, despite that being a relatively important argument people are making towards its inclusion in the Canon. I'm partially swayed by the argument "Kathryn Bigelow is a Canon-worthy director, this is her most popular movie and it's not her fault that it sucks." I haven't seen that many of her films, but in each one I've seen, her direction elevated it to a better film than it had any right being. I feel like we're waiting for her absolute masterpiece, and her recent films have been on the cusp of that. The Hurt Locker probably should have made the Canon in its episode. I think Zero Dark Thirty was a fantastic film (and I never really saw how people argued that it was in favor of torture, although I suppose it could have gone farther in its depiction of torture as horrific and pointless?). I thought Detroit was generally a very well-directed film, and my biggest complaint was that it never felt like it was her story to tell. I look forward to what she does next. There's a decent chance it will be Canon-worthy. But Point Break is not. Hard no for me.

I keep saying that La La Land is much better when you realize that the main characters are both awful people. Anyway, I'm definitely with Amy on this one: Umbrellas of Cherbourg is just okay. Part of my issue with it is that I didn't buy into the operatic nature of it. Jen suggested that she loved that such mundane pieces of dialogue were being sung so dramatically. I saw that as a bug rather than a feature, as it just felt stupid to me. Another issue I have is that it wastes a song as beautiful as "I Will Wait For You" by mocking the sentiment scenes later when she doesn't wait for him. Are we meant to think that sort of romanticism is juvenile? Or are we meant to think that Genevieve just kinda sucks for not waiting for him? The former undercuts the power of that song, and the latter is sort of the La La Land situation again, where you're stuck disliking a romantic lead. I do wonder if part of Damien Chazelle's inspiration from Umbrellas of Cherbourg was to intentionally make his romantic leads unlikeable, and moreover, overcome the imbalance of this film by making both of his characters fairly equally unlikeable. The imbalance in Umbrellas of Cherbourg taints the ending for me, because I feel bad for him and not really for her, since it was her decision to forgo their planned future. I like how La La Land gets around this by not actually showing how the dissolution happened, although the awkwardness of the meeting in Umbrellas of Cherbourg is much more realistic, as pointed out in the episode. Anyway, I expect that this will get in pretty easily, but it's a soft no for me.

Last night I was at a bar grabbing a drink before seeing a film, and I overheard a few women having a post-workweek happy hour chatting about relationships, and one woman said something to the effect of, "I'm not interested in looking for guys at the gym, since I want to meet someone with a certain amount of weirdness, and guys at the gym don't seem to have that weirdness to them." Her friend instantly replied, "Uh, there are plenty of weirdos at the gym." I thought about this when listening to Emily's arguments in favor of Punch-Drunk Love and realized that the part of the movie that resonates with me is that it's about weirdos finding each other and finding that their brands of weirdness are compatible. Moreover, most films about weirdos finding each other tend to be either super twee (like Me and You and Everyone We Know) or played for comedic effect (off the top of my head, something like Eagle vs Shark) or are more one-sided in the weirdness, such as every Manic Pixie Dream Girl/Guy movie. However, Punch-Drunk Love gives the emotional reality of that situation. Barry suspects he's weird in some way, although he's not sure because he doesn't know how everyone else is, which is such a real feeling to me. He tries to hide it by attempting to act like he thinks other people act, with varying degrees of success (and again, it's painful how much I relate to this. Amy mentioned the shot of him drinking/pretending to drink the coffee, when it looks like there's nothing in it, and it's perhaps unclear if this is an example of the typical filmmaking mistake to sub in an empty prop to represent a full one, or if the coffee is meant to be empty in the story. I absolutely assumed the coffee is meant to be empty in the story, and he's either pretending to drink it to look normal or he's reflexively making that motion as a nervous tick. The latter is something that I do on a regular basis in anxiety-filled situations, and then get more anxious about whether I seemed weird for trying to drink out of an empty cup for the fifth time in two minutes.) All in all, I guess what I'm getting at is that this episode of the podcast had something more absurd than anything in the film: Amy suggesting that Barry is an unrealistic character. And then what makes the film work is that everyone in the film is weird, and is hiding their weirdness or posturing in some way or pretending to be something they're not. They're just doing a better job of hiding it than Barry is (or perhaps, the film is meant to be from Barry's point of view, so it's just that Barry magnifies his own weirdness and minimizes that of others). So the answer to the question: why would Lena be interested in someone like Barry? Because she's a weirdo too! As roflscooter pointed out above, Lena is a person who saw a picture of a guy and decided to drive to where he works and manufacture a reason to meet him, and then follows him around a grocery store. How is this a "seemingly normal" person? But she's able to fake it well enough that not only does Barry think she's normal, but a large portion of the commenters in this thread thinks she's normal too. And maybe she is less weird than he is, but that could be part of the appeal; he's weird enough that he can appreciate her weirdness, while still making her feel relatively normal by comparison. And to those who wish the film gave her a more meaty character, the film is from Barry's point of view. The film sees every character how Barry sees them, and can't show us any more than that. So while I agree that I'd love to see the version of this film from her point of view, that fleshes out her character and shows how she sees herself and how she sees Barry, that's not what this movie is, and I for one don't fault it for not being that movie. I could nitpick this movie too. While Adam Sandler is fine, I don't think he's great. As much as I love the character, I'm left thinking how much better he'd be if played by John C. Reilly or William H. Macy or Ben Stiller, or even Philip Seymour Hoffman, who portrayed a similar, yet markedly different character in Happiness. (By the way, an American Cinematheque double-feature of Boogie Nights and Happiness in March 2014 to honor PSH might be my favorite double-feature I ever attended.) But I think Adam Sandler is a little overmatched by the complexity of this role. I could also nitpick some story points too involving his character. For instance, if he's fastidious enough to call the company to make sure he understands the frequent flyer mile promotion, he would have also noted that there's going to be a processing period of six to eight weeks. I also don't know if I buy that this character falls prey to a phone-sex-extortion scheme. But then again, in Punch-Drunk Love, the story is the part of the movie where you suspend your disbelief. The emotions are what's real. Finally, a lot of posters are struggling about whether this deserves to be in the Canon considering the rest of PTA's filmography. Admittedly, I also feel like if Boogie Nights is not in the Canon, than this shouldn't be either. However, as mentioned in the episode, PTA is like the Coens, in that their films are so largely different that one could easily argue that 80% of their work deserves Canonization. Is Punch-Drunk Love an example of "lesser" PTA? Is there such a thing as "lesser" PTA? Before this rewatch, I would have said this is my 2nd least favorite of his films that I've seen, ahead of Inherent Vice. After this rewatch...I still might say that, although it's now pretty neck and neck with The Master in my estimation. Would I Canonize Boogie Nights and Magnolia before Punch-Drunk Love? Probably. But Punch-Drunk Love is still an outstanding film, and instead of worrying those other films, I'll just vote yes on the excellent film that's on the table.

Not to be the "It's also on FilmStruck" guy again, but it's also on FilmStruck.

I'm shocked to see the vote is this close. This movie is bad. Maybe if I were a decade or so older and seen this in the theaters as an impressionable pubescent boy, I might have loved it too. However, I watched it tonight for the first time as an adult, and it's bad. Easy no.

I knew this episode wasn't going to draw a ton of votes, but I'm still a bit disappointed that so few people were able to check this film out, judging by the vote numbers so far. I agree with sycasey 2.0 that it would have been nice to hear a more fully-fleshed argument for why this particular movie deserves to be in the Canon, as opposed to other films that cover similar material. For example, why should this be in Canon before Welcome to the Dollhouse? That said, I'm still voting yes. I think Fat Girl (I agree with Ruben that "For My Sister" is a much better title) portrays a very realistic seeming relationship between these siblings, and I really enjoyed both of their performances. I thought the ending worked well to establish Breillat's thesis about the complicated nature of the emotional violence that can accompany sex, particularly at that age. I don't know if other films did it better, but there's enough here that I'm okay voting yes.

Excellent point, and I'd also throw in that the mainstream success of Crouching Tiger probably led to Tarantino making Kill Bill (for better or worse; I'm generally not a Tarantino fan but I do really like Kill Bill Vol 1). I hadn't thought about this, but it really was a monumental year for East Asian cinema, with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Battle Royale, In The Mood For Love, and Yi Yi all coming out in 2000 and all Canon-worthy for my money.