Brothers Bloom

Well wasn't this a beautiful surprise? It's got just about everything a movie can have: New Jersey, Dylan, Herman Melville, naked-tush, Mark Ruffalo, a hot, smart, melancholy, joyful, adventurous, eccentric, bold, virginal, whorish, sensitive, big-eyed, kooky, funny and charismatic young heiress, all wrapped up in a meta-commentary about why fiction and story telling matters, and how all of life is a con if you approach it with timidity.

Of course, all the above is a con, too, because women like that don't actually exist outside storybook world, which is too bad because, oh boy, Slothrop knows about this diamond and he's got the mustache right now to pull off the caper... as in Le Cercle Rouge... which means "The Red Circle" and refers to the film's epigraph:

"The Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: 'When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.'"

In fact, the Buddha said no such thing; Melville made it up.