"Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children"

(quote from William Makepeace Thackeray)

Little Children: I'm still plugging away at 2006, hoping to get to 50 movies seen (Two away), and this was my most looked-forward-to, yet still-unseen flick. And it did not disappoint. I don't know if I'm completely onboard with calling this a suburban satire, though portions of it are definitely delightfully satiric. It's the story of two couples, where the wife from one family (Kate Winslet) feels trapped and alone until she meets Brad (Patrick Wilson), the husband from the other family, and they begin an affair. This affair is set against the backdrop of a neighbourhood where a pedophile, Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley) has recently moved back in with his mother. The whole thing is chock full of great performances: there are of course the two Oscar-nominated ones, Winslet, and Haley, but there are also the two overlooked roles: Noah Emmerich as Brad's old friend Larry who reconnects with him, and obsesses over the pedophile as a way of salvaging his life in crisis, and Phyllis Somerville as Ronnie's mother, who is possessed of an uncommon inner strength to defend her son, regardless of what he's done. Terrific film.

The Spirit of the Beehive {El Espiritu de la colmena}: I always check TCM on Sunday nights because they seem to show random foreign movies at that time that you never see at any other time of the week (I missed Tokyo Drifter when I was sick, but caught some of Seven Samurai in recent weeks), and I hadn't heard of this one, looked it up on IMDB, and decided to watch it based on the praise some gave it. Now having watched it, I'm not sure I can really give it much of a description. It's about a family in 1940s Spain that has grown distant from each other. The mother and father hardly talk, no one seems to pay much attention to either daughter. Together, the daughters see a screening of Frankenstein. When one daughter asks the other about why Frankenstein is killed, the other daughter explains it was fake, and that Frankenstein lives near them. They frequen an old abandoned building, looking for Frankenstein, and generally pass the time away. Later, when someone comes to live at the abandoned building, the youngest daughter, Ana, befriends him. It is beautifully shot, and looking it up on IMDB, the cinematographer was beginning to go blind, which I can believe becase The Spirit of the Beehive can be watched almost as a catalogue of beautiful images that he sought to get down on film before his eyesight gave out. It is amazingly slow-paced, but there's enough to look at, that it should never really get you down. I'm really glad I saw