A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

TURN GREEN, MOTHERFUCKER: I've been taking some personal time off from the blog, and things will be very slow from my end until after the New Year (I can't speak for my co-bloggers). You'll cope. I know it.

But first I need to pass along word one of my favorite annual lists is back: the Village Voice's annual critics film poll.

Lost In Translation topped in the voting for best film and best performance, but what's really worth reading, as always, are the comments. Here's a sample:

Translation's ugly swipes at them wacky Japanese (not to mention pea-brained American starlets) can be read as a defensive hitting-out, an extremely adolescent mode of cocooning: shut in my room 'cos nobody speaks my language—nobody gets me—but you. The teen spirit of romanticized alienation soon grates because the film reads most convincingly as autobiographical juvenilia. And yet, even Bryan Ferry himself could not have conjured the plangent rhapsody of Mr. Murray singing karaoke "More Than This." Delayed adolescence is largely ridiculous, as is Lost in Translation, but what about the ridiculous sublime? --JESSICA WINTER

I love the scene in Terminator 3 when Claire Danes first uses an automatic weapon, and it's like Nick Stahl notices her for the first time as a sexually attractive being, and then he twists the knife completely by saying, "You remind me of my mother." --CHRIS CHANG

Had no one who reviewed Masked & Anonymous ever heard a Dylan song? The movie worked in the same way: oblique, threatening, funny, pointed. What was shocking about the trashing wasn't the implicit rejection of its politics (its vision of America as third-world dictatorship) as the critics' lazy-ass "Well, this is weird" reaction. The reviews were the equivalent of what you might get if you sneak-previewed La Chinoise at a multiplex. --CHARLES TAYLOR

Overheard, repeatedly, at the packed opening-night show of The Hulk at Loews 42nd Street, from a restless crowd of young action fans who didn't appreciate Ang Lee's reluctant, angsty Bruce Banner: "Turn green, motherfucker, TURN GREEN!" --ED HALTER

Character transpositions would've helped several movies. Master and Commander wouldn't have been so dull, decent, and manly with Johnny Depp's swashbuckler from Pirates of the Caribbean. Will Ferrell would've helped relieve the elvish tedium in LOTR III. From Lost in Translation, Anna Faris's ditzy starlet would brighten the stultifying Last Samurai—enough with the sword stuff, let's go out for sake and karaoke! --BRIAN MILLER

Enjoy.