Dogs of the sky

The dogs of the sky are barking. From well before dawn until you decide you just can’t take it any more and get on up out of bed. Couple that with a seemingly late crop of crickets and a toad looking for love in all the wrong months, and it’s a miracle anybody can get any sleep around here. Well, soon enough the deep, stiff silence of winter.

It’s some kind of miracle when we get to see movies two weekends in a row, and even more of one when there are actually that many movies we’d like to see. I could have seen three last night, but had to whittle it down to one, and having just seen “The Big Lebowski” and being especially susceptible to the charms and machinations of the Coen Brothers generally, I went with “Intolerable Cruelty.” As with the best of screwball comedies, I was utterly torn between needing to burst with laughter and needing to hear every next word, so I spent most of the movie expelling single bursts of glee into the air, then holding my breath so I could hear. “O Brother Where Art Thou” proved they had watched Preston Sturges movies, and they knew what to do with George Clooney. Catherine Zeta-Jones knows what to do all on her own, and she does it very very well. And I think it’s fair to say this film has the absolute Funniest Fatal Gunshot Wound Ever.

What else would I have seen? Well, we missed “Once Upon A Time In Mexico,” and I had just recently been wowed by the previous film in the trilogy, and it looked like things blew up real good, so I had wanted to see that. “Kill Bill” also looks like a hoot, and, well, I mean, Uma Thurman. Kinda all I need to know. And the Bill Murray vehicle, “Lost in Translation,” is supposed to be marvelous. But none of them have a hitman named “Wheezy Joe.”