Long, long, ago, before the original Star Wars came out, it was being hyped somewhere (the NYT?), and at that time, being a big Heinlein fan, I kept wanting it to be his Starship Troopers. Even though it was obvious this was something different, I was a little disappointed when the first Star Wars film finally came out. It didn't have whatever I thought of as what science fiction ought to have. I just found movieblog, and like a lot of people, he complains about the prequels. But actually, they're all kind of silly. Anyway, I've long since stopped reading science fiction regularly, and I never bothered to see the film version of Starship Troopers when it finally came out. By that time, my tastes had changed so much, it sounds like I would have found it pretty stupid. American movies have gotten increasingly loud and annoying, while my wife and I have gotten old (and probably annoying in our own way.) We still haven't seen either of the Lords of the Rings; we'll probably end up seeing them on cable or dvd. We never did see Titanic, and frankly, never wanted to. A few days ago I ran across an article in the Times (the real one, in London) about cop/buddy movies, which mentioned Les Ripoux, which I'd heard of but never seen. Although it's pretty well-known and was quite popular in France, it apparently never made it to video. Not arty enough for the foreign film buffs, and too foreign for the cop movie buffs. That's the kind of foreign stuff we like to see--middle-brow foreign movies.