Canon to the left of me, canon to the right.

Leaving Las Vegas, cemented in pop culture as one of the premier tragedies of the last decade, has its own particular mythology attached to it: spoken of in the same breath as The Bad Lieutenant, What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and Requiem For A Dream, it's always been described to me as "beautiful, but incredibly depressing."

The critics agreed that year: Nicolas Cage won 'best actor' awards from the Motion Picture Academy, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild; Elisabeth Shue was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and won 'best actress' at the Chicago Film Critics Association Awards, the Dallas-Forth Worth Film Critics Association Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards. High praise indeed.

Still, C. and I had never gotten around to seeing it until tonight, when we happened to alight upon it while channel-surfing. The performances were riveting, but on the whole the movie left me a little cold; I just wasn't compelled to care that much about the characters. For some reason, I felt really detached from the whole story and disinclined to get emotionally involved with the doomed pair. I admired the actors' performances, and nodded approvingly at the meticulously-constructed tragedy, but when it was over I didn't feel like it had made much of an impact on me. Maybe if I'd seen it at the time, when it was fresh, it would have made a stronger impression.

* * *

In her inimitable style, Twisty waxes vituperative on the tendency to affix "women-" to given nouns in order to differentiate the new species from the larger (male) genus:

It is this assumption--that blogging (political blogging, apparently, in particular) is a natural consequence of having a dick-- that fans the icy purgatorial fires of the so-called authoritative male voice.

God, am I ever sick of that fucking authoritative male voice

(...)

Anyone can speak the truth. Anyone can do it in a blog. Anyone who does it is a blogger.