We just watched Food, Inc. again tonight (again for me, first time for Heidi). I saw it in the theater the first time, and the nice thing this time was that I could look up the names and numbers on my laptop while watching.

I found the interviews with Troy Roush interesting for their candor about Monsanto. He is identified as the Vice President, American Corn Growers Association. I became curious because the name sounded like an industry lobbying org, but his comments really were quite critical in some significant ways. Turns out that the National Corn Growers Association is the big corn backed organization, and American Corn Growers is a smaller group dissatisfied with the state of corn policy in the U.S.. Roush is a 1st VP in the Indiana chapter.

Anyway, all of that is background for why I ended up on Monsanto’s page dedicated to criticizing Troy Roush, which states, with no apparent irony, the following to close out the page:

It is interesting to point out, that while Mr. Roush is a harsh and frequent critic of Monsanto and GM crops, he remains a customer of Monsanto having purchased a considerable amount of corn and soybean seed from us during 2008.

Roush’s main topic in Food, Inc. was to point out Monsanto’s hard ball tactics forcing farmers to remain Monsanto customers even if they’ve ever just had GMO corn pollen blow onto their farms. He was accused by Monsanto of violating their patents, and subsequently settled after spending hundreds of thousands to defend himself. So, if he’s still growing corn, of course he’s a Monsanto customer. More background here and here.

Part 1: Tarantino isn’t Tarantino anymore

The foundation for my reaction to this movie comes down to Tarantino himself. His most recent movies were nearly all homages to genres of film. Each film was as much about the art of film as they were about the plot and story. Basically, everything from Kill Bill on is, in one form or another, a film study piece. I liked these movies, appreciating them for what they were. The plots were inane, the twists predictable or underwhelming, but they were what they were: homages to their genres. All of his schticks, from the over-the-top graphic violence to his music choices to his exaggerated characters were fun because they worked toward the greater goal of the film. Sure, he was making movies for film buffs, but they were fun and the non-film buff like me got exposed to something novel and new.

If you look at his recent work as a series, each subsequent film, though, had less plot & worse writing while adding more film buff catnip. Basterds simply continues the descent. It had no greater goal or homage as far as I could tell. It was all the schtick with nothing of substance holding it up. The schtick never did anything for me on its own. In fact, the more I think about it, I never really liked it. In Kill Bill: Vol 1, for example, the Crazy88s fight scene after Gogo dies didn’t add much to the film for me. It was long, disjointed, and pointless. It’s bad film making excused by the genre argument. (I just watched it again… same reaction).

So, with Basterds, I got the schtick, got that it was ‘vintage Tarantino’ but, honestly, I just didn’t like it. We got the long, drawn out dialog, the slow mo shots, the shots with long pauses, the unnecessary close-ups on desserts and incidental elements of the scene, all of it with just a few jokes & Brad Pitt holding it up. I was bored. The vintage has gone sour.

The jokes were funny, though.

Part 2: Historical revisionism, done poorly

What follows contains a major, huge, important spoiler that will ruin the only anticipation created by the film. Do not continue reading if you haven’t seen it and want to. Seriously.

(As an aside, I’m sure this is going to be the more controversial part of my review. I suspect I’m reading more into the film than intended by Tarantino, but this was my honest reaction to the film. Honestly, when the film lost me (right about when Mike Myers showed up), I just got bored and couldn’t just sit back and have fun with the film. I started thinking too much about the ‘why’ of this film. Heidi and the friends we were with both offered different suggestions for Tarantino’s intent with Basterds. No reason offered thus far has swayed me. If you think I’m not getting it, I’m happy to hear suggestions. It could make this section moot.)
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I want to use this space to completely rip this movie which, quite honestly, may be the worst action movie ever made. Instead, I will simply summarize my reaction this way:

When you go see Transformers, bring your iPhone, Blackberry, or laptop. Surf the web, answer emails, do whatever until you hear a gunshot or explosion or ominous music. Start watching until someone starts talking without an explosion happening at the same time, at which point you can return to your other activity.

Or, better yet, just wait until it comes out on Netflix. Seriously. Save your money.

I rarely do this, but I’m basically copying the post from Ritholtz’s blog:

“American Casino is a powerful and shocking look at the subprime lending scandal. If you want to understand how the US financial system failed and how mortgage companies ripped off the poor, see this film.”
–Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist and writer

Here is the tweet I sent while the credits were rolling:

Just saw star trek. Feels like something familiar has been ripped away intentionally but without malice. Unsure how I feel about it.

In the hour since, I figured out a few things about what I liked and didn’t like about the movie. There’s one significant spoiler below, so if you haven’t see Star Trek and want to, you should probably stop reading now.

OK, you’re sure? Here come the spoilers:

(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I had a chance to see The Great Buck Howard this weekend at Real Art Ways. While I wasn’t necessarily wowed by the movie, I wanted to post a review to encourage more folks to see it. When I arrived at RAW, I was literally the only one in the theater. I have no idea why that was, but I’ve never seen RAW that empty. (eventually, two couples showed up).

The movie follows a young man, played by Colin Hanks, who drops out of law school to become the road manager for the Great Buck Howard, played by John Malkovich, an aging mentalist who is playing in front of smaller and smaller audiences.

This is one of those movies blessed with strong performances and interesting characters which just never quite gets to its potential. The writing is good but doesn’t hold up to the performances or the star power in the movie. What’s remarkable, though, is that the movie kept pulling me along until I was interested in how it would end. It’s that sort of sneaky film that is unassuming the whole way through, just letting you get to know the characters in measured paces until suddenly realize that you’re invested, at least a little, in what happens to Buck.

The trailer will give you a good feel for most of the movie (too much of the movie, if I have one big criticism).

Worth the rental or the trip out to Real Art Ways. It’s playing at RAW until Wednesday, when they shut down the theater & gallery to get ready for the Odd Ball this weekend.

PS. I really like Emily Blunt. Between this and The Devil Wears Prada, she’s got a good feel for snarky.

I haven’t posted in awhile, but I figured this was post worthy.

I have seen “The Watchmen.”

[Short Version] It was excellent. If you like the graphic novel, you’ll like the movie.

[Longer Version]

I’m not going to throw in a lot of spoilers, however I’m going to assume that if you are reading this, you are familiar with the story.

The movie is a relatively faithful adaptation of the graphic novel. There were a few changes. Some of the details in the set up for the end were changed. There are no exploding psionic squids, although the basic concept for the end is the same. There is no “Black Frigate” story line. There is no Ozymandias back story. Some of the subtlety of the graphic novel is lost. But on the whole, it was faithful.

The soundtrack is fantastic and sets off the movie very well. Some of the music is very subtle. I almost missed the soft song that was behind Adrien Veidt the first time we see him. There is music from Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Leonard Cohen, among others that are very well matched. The Soundtrack, as available on Amazon, is missing a few songs.

The visuals are also outstanding. Gritty. Surreal. The cinematography was beautiful. All and all, it was what I was hoping for. I loved watching it. Like the music, there were lots of subtle touches (although not as many as in the comic). I want to see it again just to see and ID all the different stuff on Ozymandias’ multiple TV sets. From what I could tell, they all had meaning. Quick hint, look at the screen to the middle right. The World Trade Center is softly noticeable in the skyline and it was slightly disconcerting. The costumes are outstanding. Did I mention the attention to detail? Seriously excellent.

I was a touch disappointed with Dr. Manhattan. He has always had some degree of unreality but it really shows. There are lots of fine details in him, yet he just isn’t quite right when he moves and talks. It goes to show that CGI still isn’t quite there, despite what they did with “Benjamin Button.” And speaking of Doctor Manhattan, he is anatomically correct and that is not hidden…several times.

There was one thing that really irked me though. The “aging” that they did was bad. Really bad. I know that many of the characters have to appear in the present and in the past. They took 20 and 30 year old actresses and cover them in stuffing, latex and make up to make them look old. They look like 20 and 30 years old actresses stuffed in latex. The skin on the neck and cheeks looks especially bad. I had total loss of suspension of disbelief when the older version of Sally Jupiter was on screen.

I was also kind of disappointed by Dr. Manhattan’s watch-like contraption on Mars. It was supposed to look like it was crystalline. I though it looked and moved like it was CGI. It just didn’t look…cool.

Things to note: There is sex and it is graphic. Thrusting, grunting, showing both bodies, no sheets. With a camera angle change it would have been a different type of film. There is also lots of violence. Some of it is very graphic. There are several very brutal killings that, in many movies, would have been displayed by showing the shadows. The killing here is shown with fairly significant gore. Basically, if it was gory in the graphic novel, it was gory in the movie. Again, there is significant attention to detail.

All and all, I liked it. I liked it a lot. I will likely see it again and buy the DVD. I’m not a hardcore comic geek, but I read the graphic novel when I saw the preview for it before Batman. I went with a hardcore Watchmen fan and he also liked it. A couple of people I went with had never read the comic and they liked it. If you liked the Dark Knight, you will probably like this movie. If you want light hearted, puppy loving, everything works out in the end type movie, you won’t like The Watchmen.

Love the bass line, and really love that the gunshots were taken out of the track. Really never liked the gunshots in the album version anyway.

We just got back from seeing Slumdog Millionaire tonight. I suspect I won’t need to say much, since by now you’ve all heard how good this movie is supposed to be. For the few of you that don’t know about the movie, it’s the story of a young man who comes out of the slums of Mumbai to win the Indian incarnation of Who Wants to be a Millionaire (called, by the way, Kaun Banega Crorepati). He goes on the show not for fame or fortune, but to impress the girl he is destined to be with. As he explains how a “slumdog” could know the answers, we see vignettes of his life at three different ages. Through this, we get to see a picture of poverty in India that’s more powerful and expressive than any I’ve seen in a long while.

Since you can get the basic reviews everywhere you look, and I suspect this film will be dissected in some detail as Oscar season gets closer, I’m going to skip the basics and focus on three things I took away from the film. It should go without saying that you should go see it as soon as you can. There are some things tough for young children to understand or even see, so I’m not sure I would take young kids. It is brutally violent in a few places.

As I mentioned, Slumdog shows a side of poverty and religious strife in India that’s not present in many films. I personally found it very, very hard to watch. I spent a long time during the film wondering why I was getting so upset during the flashbacks, bouncing between sort of silently fuming at the injustice of it all and being just saddened by it. Certainly, some of the things we see are worthy of both reactions. There is evil in the world, and few experience it the way the impoverished do.

As I was trying to puzzle it out with Heidi on the ride home, I kept coming back to the same place. Growing up in the U.S., I’m only surrounded by lots of Indian people when I’m around family or our religious circle. Both groups are largely self-selecting. They’re all like me, more or less, from a socioeconomic perspective. As a result, I’ve learned that I can probably identify with someone that simply looks Indian. In India, obviously, there’s no homogeneity of class and social background. The poverty there is nothing like anything I’ve experienced in my life. Yet, simply because they look like me, I have a lot of trouble with the disdain shown by the middle class & wealthier Indians toward the poor.

Heck, it’s one of the reasons I feel extraordinarily uncomfortable about going to India. I feel so completely out of place witnessing the class stratification there and the obvious privilege that comes with money. I know how I’m supposed to act but I simply… can’t. Indians shouldn’t treat other Indians with such disdain. I think the cognitive dissonance is essentially what upsets me. I don’t know how to describe it better. Hopefully that gives you an idea of what I mean.

The second observation is that I still think Dark Knight, which I recently re-watched, is more deserving of Best Picture honors than Slumdog. While I really think SM is a unique film and worthy of winning, it follows an arc that’s pretty typical (love as destiny). DK, on the other hand, took what could’ve been a predictable Batman/super hero arc and turned it into a reasonably complex look at morality under stress. The Joker is anarchy, and the performances are solid across the board. I know it’s hard to consider a super hero action flick for the top spot, but the fact that it’s an action movie makes it even more impressive to me. Either movie would be a worthy winner, but I’m leaning DK.

Finally, the Slumdog soundtrack is very, very good. A.R. Rahman did a good job with the original music, and M.I.A.’s contributions fit very well. O… Saya is particularly intriguing as a standalone track. The M.I.A. tracks stick out a little since they’re culturally more Western-sounding than Rahman’s work, but it’s hard to find too much fault in that. Even if you don’t pick up the rest of the album, I recommend getting O… Saya and the new remix of Paper Planes (it’s the second, longer version on the disc). Both will likely be in January’s mix.

Bottom line: go see it as soon as you can. You’ll enjoy it.

(there’s a minor spoiler, so I’ve put part of the review behind the “read more” link. If you don’t want any info about how this ends, don’t read this… though, it is only a minor spoiler)

Heidi and I also saw Marley and Me over Christmas weekend. The movie is an adaptation of the book Marley and Me by newspaper columnist and reporter John Grogan. The story focuses on Marley, his dog, and how he becomes part of the family even though he’s, well, more than a handful. The movie feels like a tribute to the real Marley.

There’s not much that’s surprising here. It’s a movie about a unruly but lovable dog that’s as much about his family as it is about the dog. We see two lives summarized together, Marley and Grogan, as Grogan and his wife build a family with Marley. We see the highlights of their life together, as babies are born, as they change jobs, as the kids get older. So, as we go and see how crazy Marley is, howling at thunderstorms, eating everything that isn’t out of reach, including furniture, we’re also learning about Grogan’s life while Marley is in it. It works very well and makes for an enjoyable movie.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

Heidi and I saw Valkyrie over the Christmas holidays. As most of you probably know, the movie dramatizes the attempted coup by the German Resistance toward the end of the war. The movie is written primarily from the perspective of Claus von Stauffenberg, the key figure in the attempted assassination of Hitler.

The movie is good and worth seeing, especially if you like historical fiction. I didn’t know anything about this particular attempt on Hitler’s life. In fact, even though I knew of the various attempts on Hitler’s life, I had no idea that the conspirators had detailed plans on retaking control of Germany from Hilter’s SS and Gestapo and the Nazi party itself. That’s where the movie really shines. These weren’t assassination attempts, but full on coup attempts inside a nationalistic, hyper-jingoistic regime. As Heidi put it, the story is compelling. The risks these men and their families ran to take on the Nazi party were enormous.

Unfortunately, the movie is hobbled by a few problems. Bad writing, possibly motivated by a desire to keep the script moving, simplifies dialog to very heavy-handed, simplistic exchanges. There is no nuance or subtlety. These are good guys, saying good things, doing good deeds to save Germany and everyone else. Huzzah… or something.

This probably directly contributed to the second major issue. I’m generally wary of historical fiction in film because too much context gets lost. It’s especially hard to make a movie that spends time talking about the political views of major characters while making a taut thriller. Even with those challenges, Valkyrie goes further by essentially stripping the Resistance characters of any ideology or detail aside from “they opposed Hitler” and “they had opposed the Nazi’s politically in the past.” They’re cardboard characters played by some phenomenal actors. So, watching the film, I became sensitive to anything that seemed to contradict my own (flawed, certainly) understanding of the history here. I was, for example, noting every mention of the Holocaust because I was concerned that the movie might try to make stopping the Holocaust a central motivator. If we were to believe most World War II movies, stopping the Holocaust was the primary reason the U.S. became involved in World War II. (I wish it were so) The movie doesn’t really go that far with these characters, but then again, it glosses over their motivation anyway.

Finally, Tom Cruise is, well, Tom Cruise. He does a decent job, but it doesn’t quite fit the film.
Heidi identified the problem as Cruise playing von Stauffenberg like an action hero. That seems like a valid criticism to me, though he might’ve been restricted by the script issues I mentioned above.

If you can ignore these things, you get rewarded with a good ending that actually maintains tension and interest even though, ultimately, we know how it ends. They focus on the details here of how the plot unfolds and how Hitler and Goebbels are ultimately able to turn back the coup. It was a satisfying ending to an decent film.

I’d recommend seeing it when it hits video. Not really a must see in the theater, but it’s a good introduction to this bit of history.

One other note: the history here is actually interesting. You can start at the Wikipedia page for the 20 July plot of 1944 and go from there. The coup was thwarted by a number of different failures, and I’m curious now to read more about it. On that note, the film succeeds quite well.

Heidi and I rented Baby Mama a while ago. No long review on this one. It’s basically what you’d expect but funnier. Unlike a lot of comedies, the trailer doesn’t give away the best jokes. Tina Fey and the rest of the cast are really good. The script is smart. Decent Friday night date flick all around. Recommended.

Really, one of my favorite flicks. You really should watch it, if you haven’t. The soundtrack is also pretty good. I actually bought it a while ago, and some tracks are on my main playlist.

I’m working at home today because I’m a bit under the weather. As usual, I have the iMac playing a movie. I’m watching For Love of the Game, the schmaltzy, romantic baseball movie by Kevin Costner. Fun, popcorn movie if you like baseball and sappy romance, by the way.

Anyway, I’ve now randomly looked up twice and caught actors that have gone on to TV (semi-) stardom. The first is Domenick Lombardozzi, who played Herc on The Wire. He played the tow truck driver who comes to tow Jane’s car at the beginning. The second is Daniel Dae Kim who plays Jin-Soo Kim on Lost. He plays the ER doc (in flawless, eastern PA English, obviously) when Billy Chapel hurt his hand.

Anyway, that’s it. Thought I’d pass it on.

From Aaron Sorkin: Obama asks Bartlet for advice.

Via Super Intern Nick’s Twitter Feed, we have this amazing short film about the man who owns the world’s largest record collection. It’s a sad film, but still incredibly touching. If I had $3 million to give him, I’d do it.

I first saw Brea Grant on Friday Night Lights, playing the nerdy-and-punk-ish love interest for Landry Clarke for a few episodes. She has an amazing enthusiasm and energy that comes through the screen. It’s no wonder that she was chosen to play the new Heroes villian, Daphne.

Now, if she does a reasonably decent job on the show, which seems likely in my mind, she’s on the cusp of becoming moderately famous. Not paparazzi-follows-her-every-move famous, but still, pretty famous. Heroes was the number 1 show in demo for Mondays, after all. So, the question is will she stay on Twitter or blog quite as often once she becomes more famous?

Update: sigh, poor writing when writing quickly. My point is that folks like Brea Grant are growing up in an age when everyone has a Facebook page, uses things like Twitter or Pownce or whatever, and are generally very visibly connected to a lot of people. We all have a public face now that we present. I was using Brea Grant as an example, in large part because I was surprised at how accessible she is to fans. Thinking about it for a sec, I realized that she has an advantage in that she’s not ultra famous yet. It’s going to be interesting to see the current generation of young stars get famous, especially the ones that aren’t child stars first.

I realize that for someone in my line of work, not having seen Sneakers until tonight is probably a gross violation of my geek creds. Or something. But, since my wife ditched me at the last minute tonight to go see Springsteen tonight, I decided to grab it and give it a watch. Not bad. I don’t have much to add, aside from that. I expected a better technology angle, but this is more about the ethics of hacking vs. the actual practice of it. It’s not Hackers or The Net. It doesn’t try to create “action” or “drama” out of the act of hacking into a computer itself, which makes it different.

I still think WarGames is the clear winner of the genre, but Sneakers has a good story with some of my favorite actors. Actually, the cast is unbelievable. River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Timothy Busfield, Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell are all very good in this movie… as they are in just about every movie they’re in.

And, I have to admit that they ended with the RNC bankrupt and Greenpeace, Amnesty, and the some other charities with all of their money got a snicker out of me. Even though I self-identified as a Republican back then, too.

If I had two things I wish I could be, the first would be a musician, the second a graphic designer. The wannabe designer in me really wanted to see Helvetica when I saw it in the iTunes store. Helvetica is a documentary about typography, specifically the emergence of Helvetica 50 years ago and it’s origins in modernist design to the rebellion against it to it’s reemergence as a core design element today. The movie touches on the power of type and typeface to communicate through conversations with some big name designers, including the people behind some of the fonts and album covers and posters we all might recognize.

To me, type is the hardest thing I grapple with when working on FatMixx. It and color give me the most trouble. These ideas that are stuck in my head need the right typeface and the right spacing to work, and I’ll spend hours playing with fonts and colors before even starting on a new FM layout. (then I’ll usually give up and do something “boring” or random, but hey, I tried)

To that end, listening to these talented designers talk about how they approach type and how they interpret Helvetica was a neat hour plus of entertainment for me. If you’re a font geek, or if you have wondered how that ubiquitous font came to be, this is worth seeing. The history lesson alone is interesting enough.

It’s available on iTunes now:

(and, yes, it’s been a movie extravaganza this weekend)

Heidi and I rented 27 Dresses last night via iTunes and our Apple TV. This is going to be the shortest review ever. It’s basically what you’d expect, a romantic comedy that’s neither memorable nor particularly good or bad. If you have an hour and a half where you want to watch something funny-ish that helps you relax, this is the movie for you.

This is a movie that lives up to the hype, even without the full IMAX Experience treatment. Right now, it’s a 9.6/10 at IMDB, a 94% at Rotten Tomatoes, and a (surprisingly low) 82/100 at Metacritic. Scores like that tend to make me cautious because it raises expectations to an unreasonable level.

To be sure, you shouldn’t go into this movie expecting it to be perfect. It isn’t. It’s still the best action movie this summer, and arguably the best Batman movie ever. Thanks to Heath Ledger’s amazing performance as the Joker, solid performances by the rest of the cast, and a story that’s deeper than most of the Marvel movies, this movie delivers action and characters so well that I want to see the movie again.

It’s hard to describe what makes Heath Ledger’s performance so good. His character is disturbed but brilliant, a smart but crazy villain. While Jack Nicholson’s Joker was a bit whimsical, this Joker is pathological. Simply put, you don’t figure him out even until the very end. He is written as an anarchist, interested in the battle against Batman, not the winning. Chaos is his goal, nothing more, but he introduces it in a systemic, organized way. One of the movie’s most interesting themes is how the Joker introduces chaos by using society’s rules against itself. I can’t go into more without giving away chunks of the plot and I really don’t want to do that. Simply put, Ledger is brilliant and runs with the script and makes it fly.

I really do mean to compare this DC Comic story against the Marvel movies that have come out this summer. Iron Man was a fun movie, and the first Spider Man movie with Tobey Maguire had a solid story, but this movie explores the Batman character better than any movie before it. There’s a central portion of the movie that’s quite dense, mostly dialogue and examination of whether Batman is truly helping Gotham. This question of Batman’s purpose is central to the movie, and it doesn’t distract, because it’s woven so well into the overall story.

This is still an action movie, however, and there’s where most of the minor flaws show up. The Bat Pod is stupid. Seriously. And there’s a big sequence, parts of which have been in the trailers, that doesn’t live up to the standard set by the acting and the story. Decent stuff, not great.

Beyond that, the Illinois-like Gotham plates on some of the cars was annoying, especially since the film was clearly shot in Chicago (is it bad that I can recognize a city from the bridges shown over rivers?). Every time a plate came into view, I kept trying to read whether it said Illinois at the top. Maggie Gyllenhal was a less ideal Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes, but Aaron Eckhart is perfect as Harvey Dent.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got. Go see this movie! It’s awesome. (even Heidi liked it!)

OK, contra my tweet, the movie can be distracting if you’re puzzling over a boring problem that you can’t figure out. So, I ended up googling one of the lines in the movie to see if there was any science behind the statement.

The line is: “It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix! Yes, it’s an excimer, frozen in its excited state”

And, shockingly, there’s some actual science there.

Such a good movie. If you haven’t seen it, go get it or rent it. It’s only $7.49 at Amazon right now (click the image below to get it).

OK, back to work with me.

I loved it, Heidi didn’t. I’ll let her explain why she didn’t like it in her own words, but the gist of it was that the main characters were robots, which she doesn’t like, and that there is little dialog for the first half of the film.

Of course, those two things are why I loved it. The detail and emotion conveyed by all the little details in each characters movements, gestures, and sounds were fascinating and engaging to me. The quality of the animation is also better than I’ve seen in a Pixar movie for a long time. The rust on WALL•E was just one example of the touches that really stood out to me. This is also the first Pixar movie I can think of that includes live action sequences with real actors. They’re worked in well, though the final effect wasn’t as strong as I thought it might be (animated people still look… animated).

The story was simple and fun (it’s a kids movie at some level, after all). While the overall arc was predicable (boy gets girl, er, robot), there were enough details and new aspects to the plot that made it interesting. Elements of the plot reminded me of Idiocracy, without the anti-intellectualism. These citizens are more disengaged than ignorant. And, like many Pixar films, it touches on and relies on universal themes throughout — the power of music to connect and bind, the importance of touch and physical closeness, and the basic need in all of us to love.

Definitely worth seeing. All those 9.0 reviews got this one right.

Update: I apologize for the crappy writing… too tired to fix it…

Can’t wait. I wish these were books first — this Bond character would’ve made an interesting book character.

I have the DVD for BSG: Razor in right now. I’ve seen it before, wasn’t paying much attention, but I flipped on the “Favorite Episode” DVD extra and just learned something I would’ve never guessed. The actor that plays Lee Adama, Jamie Bamber, is English. I heard his voice and looked up from my laptop — who the hell has that English accent. His character’s voice is also very different than his normal speaking voice. Literally stopped my coding in it’s tracks.

That has to be one of the best American accents I’ve heard in a while. Most of the time, English or Australian actors will slip on the edges of words here and there. I haven’t caught anything with him, and I’m usually pretty good with that stuff. I’m impressed.

Be Kind Rewind might be up your alley if you liked Raiders: The Adaptation. I haven’t seen this yet, but I’m dying to since I saw The Adaptation. Looks good.