A couple of good films

Hula Girls (2006), won "Best Picture" at the Japan Academy Awards. Hula Girls starts slow and ends in wave after wave of satisfying and spectacular eye candy. Several bits of business (the arrival of the drunken master, the Dad who gives away his ugly daughter, "There's no crying in baseb...err...hula dancing," the mother with the obnoxious kid) do more than allude to A League of Their Own, but I have to admit, the Japanese take is usually loads funnier than the Hollywood schlemiel schtick 'twas tooken from^†. Oh, well... Because the film has a happy ending, and because it is after all Japanese, everyone cries at the end. And cries and cries. Forever. A ten-kleenex ending. It's exactly like an Iowa Girl's State Basketball Tournament, in fact. Weird.

Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Indiana with gray hair. The first three films were about Nazis just prior to American entrance into World War II. This one is about Commies in McCarthy-era 1957 just prior to American entrance into World War III. The atomic bomb scene is worth the entire price of admission, and that's before your first clue about what's going on. The rest gets better by the frame. Keep your eye on the hat.