John Sayles pays up.

If one's affections can be bought and sold, it's good to know the price. For example, George Lucas could totally have had my movie love if he had only included a girl Jedi character in the new Star Wars movies. I would have suffered through the midichlorians and Jar-Jar Binks and the whole nine yards, and I would have watched them again and again--if there had been a girl Jedi who was an actual character with a name and lines of dialog and actions taken, and no, it doesn't count if you think you remember something about someone in the background or maybe in a comic or novelization or other related work. It's like Wil Wheaton and the last Next Gen movie: it does not count as having Wil Wheaton in it if you cut his scenes. Girl Jedis, like Wil Wheaton, like most things really, do not work in homeopathic quantities.

Today I found another way in which my movie love can be easily bought, and it is this: give me David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell shooting 1920-appropriate guns at bad people. Even Strathairn cleaning his gun: such a happy sequence there. So very fine. I theorize that a movie with David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell shooting 1770-appropriate guns or 2005-appropriate guns at bad people might also work. But possibly not as well as 1920.

Here is the thing about John Sayles movies so far: I do not always finish them and say, "Oh, wow, that whole movie was great." But so far he has always given me at least one scene, and usually more than one, that makes me go, "Heh. Awesome." When people talk about loving things for their virtues instead of for their lack of flaws, I am now going to think about John Sayles movies, I think. We will get more and see what an expanded data set will do.