Your plans this Friday night

You are seeing Pan's Labyrinth. Seriously. Go now. I saw it last night and was absolutely floored. It's a fable, told in the grand, grotesque tradition of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, about history and war and childhood and imagination. It has the magic of Cinema Paradiso or Whale Rider, and the intensity and urgency of Schindler's List. Definitely not for kids, and not for the squeamish (quote from my roommate, who saw me squirm through the particularly brutal parts: "How are you going to get through medical school?"), but this movie offers so much more than blood and guts (giant frog guts, in this case) that I can't even describe the experience. It reminds you how powerful movies can be; I started crying maybe halfway through and didn't stop til the credits came up. In the good way that that happens.

Bio - Mike Ross

Michael "Betsy" Gregory Ross, master of the GPS and Neil Armstrong lookalike, consumes his body weight in Red Bull every year. In his youth, he rescued swimmers on the Huntington Beach coastline by tossing surplus Boy Scout merit badges at them as flotation devices. In college, he survived three years of being sexiled by the notorious hook-up artist, "Head Hapa" Brian "Yoshi" Laing. In his spare time, he single-handedly created the computer education program for the island nation of Bermuda without ever leaving the beach. He wrestles alligators with his bare hands, and he maintains his own solar panels to power his wirelessly automated house, which can sing the chorus to "Pirates of Penzance" complete with a Cutco knife-throwing finale at the press of a button.

After rigorous Navy training on how to look cool in a flight suit, he reported to "cow town" Hanford, CA to fly "Super (Compensating for Something) Hornet" jets. Recent convert to ChoJoCroLoDoSos*, he currently has only one wife, the lovely and talented Alli(son) James Ross, who strangely does not appear in her family's Christmas card, and whose sister definitely never had a nose ring.

* Stanford-ese for "Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints" aka Mormonism