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Dear Manny,

Thank you for the raincoats, they make us look very dashing. However, they are too small. We wear Medium in dogs’ sizes.

Drogon and Mat

See the illustrations by Finn Campbell-Notman

Tom Waits had something to do with it.

Read it at The Guardian.

Post your answers in Comments. The winner will be announced on 12 December.

Books we’d like to see on the big screen
The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
How To Be Both by Ali Smith

This contest is brought to you by National Bookstore.

We just realized that we never finished this series, which we started over a year ago. (Some of the links no longer work; we’ve updated them.)

Part 1
Part 2

7. The International by Tom Tykwer

Shootout at the Guggenheim New York. The movie stars Clive Owen and Naomi Watts and is about shenanigans in big finance. There’s also a big chase scene on the rooftops of–was it Istanbul, or are we confusing it with one of the Taken flicks? Anyway, good set pieces, timely plot, wish we could remember more.

8. Ghostbusters by Ivan Reitman

Photo from the Ghostbusters wikia.

Paranormal activity should emanate from museums, they’re only full of dead people’s things.

Our friend Chook has an interesting theory. According to the local superstition, you can’t go straight home from a wake because the dead person’s spirit will go with you. (How do the spirits know which person to go with? Or being dead do they now have the power to be in many places at once?) So coming from the wake, you’re supposed to drop by a restaurant to make “pagpag”. People usually go to wakes late at night, what’s still open at that time? Therefore Chook thinks all Starbucks are haunted.

9. Batman (1989) by Tim Burton

Photo from the Batman wikia.

“Gentlemen, let’s broaden our minds.” Hey, Michael Keaton might get an Oscar nomination for playing an actor who used to play a superhero in Birdman. We’re just happy to see Michael Keaton again.

10. The Wings of the Dove by Iain Softley

There’s the museum in London, then all of Venice is a museum. Pruned of his tendentious, exasperating prose, Henry James novels make wonderful movies.

11. A Room With A View by Merchant-Ivory

Photo from Slow Italy

All of Florence is a museum. There’s an excuse for the Italian economy: How to achieve progress when you live in a museum.

12. Dressed to Kill by Brian De Palma

In which the Philadelphia Museum of Art stands in for the Metropolitan Museum of New York. We love Brian De Palma, he’s the lewd Hitchcock. In this retread of Psycho, sexually frustrated mom Angie Dickinson (When we were kids she starred in a cop show called Policewoman and supposedly her legs were insured for a million bucks. Should’ve been more. We wonder how much Kim Kardashian’s ass is insured for.) goes to the museum and tries to pick up this guy, who gives her the runaround.

Dressed To Kill also has a great elevator scene, right up there with the fight scene in Captain America: Winter Soldier.

119. Playing It Cool. We’ll assume Chris Evans (Captain America) had a huge personal debt of gratitude to the filmmakers, which is why he agreed to star in this romcom. It’s not terrible, but there is no particular reason it must exist. The movie’s conceit is that it is an anti-romcom. If it’s anti-romcom you want, then the movie you should see is…

120. They Came Together. Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd mess with the tropes of the romantic comedy with varying levels of success, but the parts that worked left us howling with laughter.

121. Paris vu par. Six episodes that take place in six different parts of the city by six directors of the French New Wave, including Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. In the Godard, a young woman sends two love letters to her two lovers, but unfortunately switches them. In the Chabrol, a boy plots against his parents, and in the Rohmer a prissy store clerk thinks he has killed a thug on the street.

122. Les Visiteurs du Soir. Are the words “Criterion Collection” enough to make you watch a DVD? In our case, it’s a ringing endorsement. In this medieval fantasy by Marcel Carne, shot during the German Occupation, two minstrels appear at a castle and start interfering with everyone’s love life. They turn out to be the Devil’s emissaries, and they discover that their boss has some serious competition.

Police are baffled by a string of disappearances in Paris. The missing are all young women of a certain physical type, in their early 20s. They turn out to be the materials in a surgeon’s experiment to reconstruct the face of his beautiful daughter, disfigured in a car accident.

This horror movie isn’t scary at all, but it is eerie and strangely lyrical. (Presumably it was the inspiration for the Billy Idol song.) Though it has a recognizable 20th century setting, it seems to happen outside of time. And for a movie built around horrible disfigurement, it’s gorgeous.

Yes, it’s another version of the mad doctor story, and the plot is ludicrous but we take it seriously (Unlike that action howler, Face-Off). Eyes Without A Face is like those fairy tales we heard as children that kept us awake at night because we knew those characters couldn’t possibly live happily ever after.

november26, who has convinced us to read the spy thriller I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. Congratulations! Please email saffron.safin@gmail.com to claim your prize.

And congratulations to all our contestants for finding books that you love; we’re adding many of the titles to our own to-read list. Honorable mention goes to ruth, for finishing Swann’s Way. Read all the entries.

This contest was brought to you by National Bookstore. The next contest starts on Monday.