Related Strips: #315: The Season of Giving

If you missed the update late Friday, you'll want to step back to #315 to read that and possibly the Notes from the Manager, as well.

More details about the shooting have emerged since a hearing last Wednesday, when the attempted murder charge was thrown out by the judge (as I expected):

[Woffard] Lomax, 31, told the judge he was at the movie with his girlfriend and her three teenagers, enjoying the film and laughing, when a man in front of him — not Cialella — told him to quiet down.

"We can't laugh?" Lomax recalled asking.

A second man threw popcorn at the family, and a brawl ensued. Lomax said he was fighting with the first man when the second man pulled out a gun and fired, striking him in the left arm.

A defense lawyer argued that Cialella was being choked and punched as he tried to break up the fight and fired in self-defense.

"He's a marksman," lawyer Greg Pagano said. "If he wanted to shoot to kill, he would have."

Some of Lomax's new account of the incident sounds a bit strange to me, considering that he previous told police that "Cialella was walking toward his family when he stood up and was shot," but perhaps the discrepancies between the two versions are attributable to the newspapers' editing, not Lomax himself.

Happy New Year, y'alls.

The movie they're watching is, of course, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I enjoyed it, but it failed to resonate with me as a love story (which was, unfortunately, the heart of it), in order to really make me fall in love with the film — even my massive crush on Cate Blanchett wasn't enough to make me care about Benjamin, despite a solid performance by Brad Pitt, well-aided by fantastic aging (and de-aging) special effects.

David Fincher's visuals were terrific, as I had expected, and there are definitely moments of brilliance in the film, so it was worth seeing. Even at 2 hours and 45 minutes, I didn't feel that it was too long, which says something in and of itself.

The comment about Taraji P. Henson's Southern black voice in the last panel (from a new customer character I call "Broseph"; he's with Chad of Chad & Trixie from the Mission: Impossible III strip) is one I've seen here and there on the internet, although I don't agree with it. The role of Queenie (Benjamin's adoptive mother) could have been a fairly stereotypical "Mammy" role, but Ms. Henson fills it out well, giving Queenie a heart; she's one of the strongest characters in the film.