Matt the Great

This is the movie where Julianne Moore plays a 1950s housewife. Basic premise: she's a mother of ten, her husband spends his measly paycheck on booze, she wins the bread by winning little housewife contests all the time. I saw it on a rainy Monday and it warmed the cockles of my heart. Iit's all a real memoir.

ICONS IN THE CAST: Julianne Moore. Of course the first movie I want to talk about has Julianne Moore. She could win this year--not that she'll win for Prize Winner, but Prize Winner could easily be the one they use to award her for The End of the Affair, The Hours, Magnolia, etc. It's pretty unanimous to think J-Mo is hot and awesome and good at acting and stuff, so rather than talking about her in this movie, I'll recap our moment. I'm on the First Center Aisle at Doubt during the busy period of the walk-in. A solidly annoying amount of Excuse Mes are asking me stuff. I take a ticket from one in the crowd, look at it, and say that this ticket is on the Second Center Aisle. I hand the ticket back to the patron and notice, OMG, it's Juli-fucking-anne Moore. She's surprisingly not too tall, and not surprisingly stunning with no makeup and plain clothes. I gave her her ticket and she said:

"Thank you."

As I was handing it to her, we made eye contact and unmistakably had a moment. I don't have a link to Julianne Moore's blog, but no doubt she talks about our experience together on there. After I got off, about 40 contacts in my phonebook got this text:

SOMETHING THAT MADE ME AT LEAST A LITTLE VERKLEMPT: Like, the whole freaking thing! The most verklempt-wrenching moments were all those where Julianne Moore seemingly hits rock bottom and then pulls out some skittle-colored maxim about happiness and life. And then MTG puts his hand around his face lest Gayathri sees his tear. A really special one, I think I remember, is in the last 20 minutes when the main daughter (she's the one whose real-life counterpart wrote the book, so I guess the extra screentime makes some sense) by the window. Oh--and then at the end, (spoiler!) all the real-life kids play themselves in the present.

Also, if you dig really precious children, you're going to *love* the flower-picking son. You might want to save your $10.25, Lauren S.

AT SOME POINT, I SAID, "AWW, DAMN ": The weakest link of this movie was Woody Harrelson (who also came to Doubt--we didn't have a moment) as the loser dad. But I will say he did make me really uncomfortable a lot, so I guess he did his job. But there's the is-this-domestic-violence? incident with the milk bottles. If ever I were going to say "aww, damn," this would be that time.

COULD PUT IT ON MY FRIENDSTER FAVES: Umm, yeah, I could. One thing listing this as a favorite says is that, "this guy, though devilishly handsome, really likes his chick flicks." But I think anyone I would want friendstering me would say, "this guy LOVES Julianne Moore. His stellar tastes well complement his stunning looks."

This movie is so much like A League of Their Own. AND! I learned a secret for making better egg salad (spoiler!): pickle juice.