Government is just people Jon, people like you and me.
Oh God, don't say that!

Richard Clarke is cool. He was last night's guest on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. I've read a lot about him over the last few weeks (how could you not?) But this was the first time I really saw him live. He was smart, comfortable, and clear. I can't know if he's been telling the truth all this time, but I do know this: when I watched him I felt like I was watching someone who was being truthful and not trying to bully me into thinking something. He just sounded like he was telling it the way he saw it, and figures people will come to their own conclusions.

Why can't more public figures act that way?

Anyway, if you missed it Comedy Central will replay it today at 7:00 pm.

Okay, first of all, it turns out the Pope's not really Catholic.

Doonesbury is one of my favorite comic strips (although it doesn't match up to Calvin and Hobbes, which I talked about before.) They've been great throughout the last year from the Portland Schools to the war and W's Caesar hat. Normally I get annoyed when a strip runs repeats, just as I get annoyed with TV repeats. But Doonesbury this week is running one of my favorite sets of strips. I even have this sequene up in my office. Go read it - it's classic.

www.Doonesbury.com

I'm kind of crushing on you right now Trinke.

Jersey Girl was quite different from Kevin Smith's other movies. The key change: Jersey Girl is really just a standard romantic comedy with Kevin Smith spark. A lot of critics have complained that we've seen this story before, but that's OK. Romantic comedies have a formula for a reason, it works. Smith took this formula and added excellent dialog, interesting characters and most importantly some wit.

Of Smith's previous movies only Chasing Amy is remotely close to this one. But Chasing Amy was much more raw and less truthful then this movie. Chasing Amy was a little too far out there to speak to most people. The characters in Jersey Girl are people that I feel like I could know, and the things that happen to them are things that I could imagine happening to me.

Because it's Keven Smith the characters are quirky, and the language and dialog has some raw qualities. But the dialog stays true to the characters and isn't an exercise in cleverness like it has been with him in the past. This is clearly Smith's most accessible film.

And it's a great film too. It was funny and touching - I even had a bit of a tear in my eye at the end.

OK, Jim, I've got some bad news

I normally don't like horror and zombie movies much, but I really liked 28 Days Later. The trick is that 28 Days Later isn't really a horror or zombie movie, it's a post apocalyptic movie. It isn't about the zombies as much as it's about what happens when society utterly collapses. The easy way to tell this distinction is that the characters aren't focused on the zombies, their focused on their future.

Notice all the shots showing the empty countryside, or the freeways with just one car. The initial shots of Jim wandering around an empty London are spectacular, but not nearly as meaningful or thought evoking as the shots later. I'm sure this was fully intentional. Those initial shots instill confusion and show the devastation caused by the virus. But the later shots show the remnants of a collapsed society. It made me think about what would happen if society completely collapsed, never mind surviving against a rampaging herd of zombies, could you even survive without the basics.

Really, what would happen is electricity, water and gas all got turned off and there was no expectation of them ever turning back on? I've spent some time out in the wilderness, but I always brought my own food with me. And now I like right in the middle of the city. There's no way to harvest food here in a renewable way (aka, the stocks in the stores will run out real quick without restocking.) The best bet would probably be to head to the country, then hope for some good fortune and quick learning.

I really liked this movie's take on a post-apocalyptic world. Typically these worlds are created through some kind of massive destructive event (lots of nuclear bombs are the standard) but having it happen through a rapidly spreading virus leaves the possibility that all the structural infrastructure of society is still around, just none of the people.

This movie makes me with they'd done a better job with The Postman. If you like these kinds of stories you should read the book by David Brin, it had real promise and the movie really made some fundamental plot and character errors in its adaptation.

Animated Driver on Animated Course

I just saw a new commercial for the Volvo S40. The neat thing is the whole commercial was just in game footage from Rallisport Challenge 2. My favorite part was the tag line under one of the jumps the car did (quoted above.) The visuals were stunning and Rallisport 1 was an excellent game, I look forward to the sequel.

EBGames lists its release date as early May. So there's not long to wait. Ahhh - too many video games, too little time.

There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive D:.


I'm about to be a big nerd, bear with me.

I remember when CD-Rom's first started being a viable way to distribute computer software. And I remember thinking that was a good thing since I was tired of installations where I had to keep track of about 10-15 floppy disks (now, insert disk #12...) And they've held true to form, most software comes on one or two CD's. There have been some exceptions, Visual Studio has always required a lot of disks, and the first Balders Gate I think required four, which was a big deal at the time. But now more and more games are requiring lots of discs for their installs. I guess soon enough DVD-ROM will take off and we'll be back to one or two discs for a few years.

I'm thinking about this because I bought and installed Far Cry today, a new game. It comes on five discs! I don't really mind that so much. What I do mind is that after swapping five CD's during the install and putting a 3 gigabyte footprint on my hard drive, do you know what happens when I try to play the game? I get that freakin' quote above. I need to put the actual CD in the drive to play the game. I understand why they do it (copy protection - and yes, even though everyone I know has a burner, these CD's typically have special anti-copy measures on them) but I've always been annoyed by it.

I'm especially annoyed when a game takes up 3 GB of my hard drive after a CD swapping installathon and still expects me to insert the CD to play. It's not like there's data on that CD they need to access at run time.

Dude!
I know.
Dude!
I know.

When I walked into a sneak preview of The Girl Next Door I was expecting a teen romp sex comedy. That's what the advertisements led me too. But this movie is clearly something different. It's hard for me to get a handle on exactly what it is though. That's the wierd thing, while I was watching it reminded me of John Hughes, standard teen sex comedies, high school movies where the uncool kid becomes the cool kid, well done romantic comedies, and Risky Business. Seriously, this movie draws inspiration from all of those places. Now that I've thought about it some I'd say the best way to describe it is a cross between John Hughes and Risky Business, with some ridiculous sex comedy thrown in for spice (note that the movie doesn't rely on gross out humor, it tends to be smarter then that.)

The odd thing is I'm still not really sure how good it was. Honestly, I was so impressed that the movie was doing all these different things and not falling flat on its face that my mind was caught up in that, instead of just watching it. Now, a truly excellent movie wouldn't have allowed me to be distracted like that, but I think we can all safely agree that this one isn't in that category anyway. There were times when I really was drawn in, the movie captured me the way excellent high school or romantic comedies can. That's where they ran into trouble with their genre mixing. Just when I was really getting drawn in, they'd change gears to a new genre. This had a jarring effect for me and pulled me out of the movie, so now instead of thinking about the characters and how much fun I'm having watching this, I'm thinking about how clever it is that they managed to mix all the genre's together and make it mostly work.

I kind of want to go back and see it again now that I know all this, see if I can watch it for the movie it is instead of thinking about all this other stuff. It was a sneak preview though, I can't go see it again until it opens wide in a few weeks. So I guess I have to do the best I can from the one showing.

Is it good? Yeah, it's good. I got drawn in, I was suprised, characters that you think won't have depth end up having depth (namely the title character), it was sweet, and I laughed a lot. You have to get over the genre switches and just go with them, and porn plays a pretty heavy role in the story so you have to be accepting about that. But the movie is ambitious, it trys new things, it doesn't delve to the lowest common denominator and it doesn't depend on shock value for it's humor. I have to reward and applaud movies that do that. Even when they're not great, I like that they didn't take the easy or (these days) popular way out. But it was good, and I think we need to reward movies like this, because that might inspire more like it.

- Don't talk to me like that, because I'm not your puppet
- Since when? Now get your spongy pink ass out there and dance for the cameras.

A couple of friends took offense to my slandering of Death to Smoochy a few weeks ago. Of course, I had to admit I'd never actually seen it, I was just calling it crap by reputation. But my friends persevered, and their recommendations caused me to rent a copy.

This is certainly a quircky movie, and has lots of odd little laughs stashed around. The whole childrens show with mafia tie-ins concept is certainly a first. I give them lots of credit for going a long way out on a limb for this one, but unfortunately the limb ends up breaking. If only they'd kept this in the realm of working, it would have been an instant cult classic.

After seeing it I still stand by my earlier statement that this is a wonderful example of a bunch of talented people making a really bad movie. Look at it, you have Robin Williams, Ed Norton (this is perhaps the only bad movie he's ever done), Danny DeVito, and Jon Stewart. Of course they came up with lots of good funny moments, but they just couldn't put together a good movie this time.

I don't think you came here to help people find their way, I think you came here to help people find your way.

Mona Lisa Smile runs into some tricky societal questions. As someone from a very leftist culture I have this basic negative reaction to the culture portrayed in the film, where these super bright girls were typecast in the roles they would play. I kept thinking: it's terrible that these girls are getting relegated to second class roles in their adult lives. But that's the thing, are they really second class roles? I certainly percieved them that way when watching, but I'm not sure how much of that is my prejiduce coming in and how much of that is the way the movie was written. The film did break the mold though with one major character standing up and saying that she wasn't being pushed into this role, she knew she had options and was choosing what she wanted to do based on what would make her happiest.

I guess thats the rub. I don't see stay at home parents as second class at all (I have to be gender neutral here since I think it's perfectly fine for Fathers to be home with the kids, it's what my Dad did.) I just get a bad reaction when people have an expectation to do that pushed on them. All this talk about the definition of marriage we're going through has caused me to think about some interesting things. Not all social progress is good, we leave some things behind. There's no question that currently in this country we've left behind a lot of things that helped families to be stable. I'm not saying I want to trade it all in, I think the changes have been good overall. But it's important for us to look back and see what we've given up, try to get some of that back.

This movie fits into this discussion quite well. It shows some of the limitations of that culture. Bright, talented women were shoehorned into only doing one thing, when maybe that wasn't the best fit for them. People in terrible relationships were forced to stay in them and lead unhappy lives. But what have we given up in trade? The movie doesn't really talk to that, it actually doesn't even so much hint that we have given something up. It's pretty one sided that way. But once again, like Lost In Translation, this is a well made movie that may or may not acccurately represent anything, but caused me to think about a bunch of stuff. That's good enough for me to like it.

Of the Microsoft employees who read weblogs, only 15% read them in a news aggregator.

Scoble quotes that statistic in wondering why more people don't use RSS aggregators to read content. I know the study he's talking about and I spent some time talking to the researcher who did it while I was at Tech Fest. I told her why for a long time I was in that 85%.

I started writing this blog more then a year ago, but only last month started reading blogs in RSS. In general I'm an early adopter, so it wasn't so much that I needed to get over some kind of crazy adoption hump, it was more that I hadn't really delved into the Blog world yet. I read my news online, but was happy with the way I did that, and the only blogs I read were those of three or four personal friends. I viewed blogs as a way to keep up with what my friends were doing and thinking. The time saving of an aggregator is pretty marginal when you're only talking about a few sites.

The key for me was when I started thinking about reading more and wider blogs. I'm not exactly sure what led me into it, but I think I just ended up with a couple of links to random blog posts. When I get linked to a specific blog post on a new site I usually go out and read some of the other posts, kind of like an informal quality sample. Through this I found a couple that were interesting, and figured I'd add them to my list. My breaking point was about 8 blogs that I was checking on a daily basis. That was when I started seriously thinking about an aggregator. This was a simple process for me, I figured the one Scoble was using for his 1300+ blogs would work fine for me (for the record it's Bloglines, and does in fact work great - but I haven't sampled the competition to see if there's better.)

But now because it's so easy to add feeds the number of blogs I read has ballooned immensely. I'm acutely aware that I spend far more time reading blogs now with an aggregator then I did before the old fashioned way. Of course, I'm also digesting significantly more content (and yes, I have a far higher content/time ratio now too.) This is much like my TiVo, I now spend more time watching TV then I used to, but I get more and better content out of it because I can be selective and efficient with the content I watch.

I hear a lot of people talking about using RSS for news feeds. I tried this, subscribing to some of the yahoo and NY Times news feeds. But I really, really didn't like it. There was a ton of noise, and you have to go to the main site to read the article anyway (since they only put a summary or the first paragraph in the feed.) I've found I'm much happier just doing it my old way: twice a day I go to the websites for the NY Times, Seattle Times, and Google News. I browse the headlines and read stories that are interesting to me. Maybe I'll eventually convert over to using RSS for news, but it hasn't been appealing to me yet. Am I missing something important about this?

So really, I think the key to convincing people to use aggregators is not how much time they can save over reading blogs by hand. It's more convincing people there is enough content out on blogs they really want to read to justify learning and using a new tool. I have lots of friends at work who occasionally read my blog and a couple others, but they don't have a need for an aggregator with the content they read today. I think the real challenge of the blogging community is to convince everyone else we're writing high quality and interesting stuff (no picking on the shaky premise, that's low hanging fruit.) There's a stereotype that blogs are just online "what I did today" journals, which are deservedly not interesting to most people. But there are other types of blogs out there, blogs that have good interesting content even if you don't know the author. To get people to use aggregators you have to sell them on those blogs. In my case about 8 of them, but I'm sure that number is a sliding scale.

The trick is to get people really interested in blogs. Once they're over that hump they'll search out an aggregation tool when they need one. People are smart like that. A lot of the posts in this discussion give me the feeling that people have forgotten that lots of blog readers only casually read a couple blogs every now and then. An aggregator doesn't solve a problem for them, which is why they don't use one. Let's get them excited about blogs, show our value, and give them a reason to need an aggregator.

The good news is, the whiskey works.

I finally got around to seeing Lost in Translation this afternoon. I talked last week about how movies need to have a purpose, and this movie's purpose seemed very much to just let you experience different parts of life. To take you away from where you are now, and put you somewhere else.

I have some friends who travel for work a LOT, and I've been thinking about them over the last few weeks. I wonder about how hard it must be to go to new cities and entertain yourself while staying in a hotel by yourself and not knowing anyone. For the first third or so of Lost in Translation I though about this a lot. Not only were the characters having to deal with this issue, but they were in a totally different culture, which makes it even harder.

Of course in the movie they deal with it by connecting with each other. Now the movie took me off onto another path, I started thinking about how we sometimes form these special and intense relationships while traveling. These are a special breed of relationships, they're sort of inextricably tied to being away and being in a foreign place. I've had some of these, and known friends who've done it too - they are almost never maintainable. They're just not part of our regular lives, they don't fit into the routine we come back to. Strangely, depending on the moment, I find this either tragic or expected and OK.

So really, for me, this movie is about showing how traveling and humanity interact. Since I do a fair amount of traveling, but almost never go someplace where I don't know people, it was really interesting and engaging for me. I'll need to ask my traveling friends if they had the same reactions.

But as Roger Ebert says the important thing isn't what a movie is about, it's how it is about it. I was very impressed with the overall quality of Lost in Translation. It's even more impressive that it was done by a first time director, first projects almost never turn out this well. This overall quality (in the acting too) is really what swept me into all the thinking I did about traveling. And that's how I know they did a good job. I don't think about bad movies nearly this much.

You're neck and neck, it's all going to come down to the paddling.

Survivor is one of my TV guilty pleasures. I don't like the game as much as I like the idea of people out on an island somewhere trying to survive. Although the game is brilliantly designed (that's why the show has the longevity it does.)

But I have a continual pet peeve with the show that flared up tonight. In most of the seasons the tribes are stranded in a place where water is a big part of their life. They use boats in challenges, sometimes they even use boats to get around to challenges and tribal councils. Yet they are almost universally terrible paddlers. Paddling isn't that hard, I teach six people how to paddle in about 10 minutes every time I guide a raft trip. If I were on the show as soon as we had some of the basics taken care of (shelter and water) I'd be convening a little paddling lesson.

Seriously, these two teams are in a neck and neck paddling race with huge stakes on the line, and their paddling made me cringe. Admittedly I've been paddling canoes, rafts, and kayaks since I was a wee lad - but someone on the show has to know how to paddle and try to teach their team... If I'd had 30 minutes with one of those teams it wouldn't have even been close, they would have blown the other team away.

When I was a kid I used to wonder how it would be possible to live forever in Heaven, without getting really bored. And then I realized it wouldn't be that hard because you'd be in the company of some of the most interesting people who ever lived... so TED is really the official pre-release version of heaven.

An interesting blog post pointed me to an amazing performance by a young musical prodigy. I was supremely impressed, and I suspect you will be as well. But listening to the music and watching the picture slide show piqued my interest in TED. I'd never heard of it before, but I've read about it a bit today and now I think it's a stellar idea and I really want to go. Of course, I think it's doubtful that I'd qualify for an invite, even if I could afford the $4000 price tag...

Is it hot in here or is it just you.

Speaking of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, they had a ridiculously good looking guy on the show this week. Not only does he look like a model, but he's an frickin Olympic athlete. After some gratuitous changing scenes that had him in just his underwear it was great watching the Fab 5 fall apart over this guy - expecially at the end when they're watching the date. Although I must admit that clearing the ice in central park and having the couple skate was a good move. I guess having the hottie on was a thank you to the show's female and gay male audience.

Side notes: the DiPalo's guy ruled, Thom was super impressive this week, and who wouldn't like to be able to shop at Armani by just haphazardly grabbing things off the rack?

I know how guys talk. And first of all you're not a guy anymore - you're married.

I laughed out loud many times at Bravo's new comedy, Significant Others, a show that follows four married couples and their relationship issues. The format is original and great - they show bits and pieces of the couple's lives and twice during the 30 minute show have a few minutes of rapid fire jumping between the characters on a couples therapy couch. This allows them to advance to certain plot points quickly, then flush them out in the more traditional sitcom parts. It's also very funny. The show moves quick, and is sometimes hard to keep up with. But that's ok since if you miss something it's not a big deal, this is more about quick humor then extended plot - so missing bits and pieces won't set you back.

There were other dialog gems as well, like the following Woody Allen-esque moment:

Her - What bugs me is the total lack of consideration.
Him - That's funny, because what bugs me is that she's pretty much crushed my will to live.

And in the process of a ridiculous moment where a guy is picking up a girl came this line:

If we were dating Tuesday would be "just look at you" day.

With The West Wing reruns, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and now Significant Others, Bravo is rapidly challenging Comedy Central as my favorite cable channel.

Update: It turns out this show is entirely improv, which makes total sense to me now. One of the reasons I liked the first two episodes was there was no coherent style or theme, it bounced around all over the place. I like this theory of edited improv: they let the actors go, film way more then they need, then piece together the good stuff. But it does make the therapy couch scenes pretty dense, since they're skipping around so much.

2.3. Calvinball Field - The Calvinball Field should be any well-sized field, preferably with trees, rocks, grass, creeks, and other natural hindrances to health.

- From The Rules Of CalvinBall.

I love Calvin and Hobbes, it is my favorite comic of all time. One of my daily web sites, UComics.com, has been rerunning Calvin and Hobbes strips for about six months now and I've been thrilled to read them again every day. Then Blues News had that CalvinBall page as a link of the day yesterday. All this reminds me I should probably go buy some more Calvin and Hobbes books, I have a few, but given how much I like the strip I really should have all of them.

There's just something about the wit and the great personalities of the two main characters. Plus, I can't remember anything else that so vividly captures the imagination of a six year old. I think the strip appeals to us so much because of that part in everyone that wants to go back to being six (as long as I don't have to deal with high school and middle school again - I'm happy to skip directly from elementary school to college...)

I still remember when the last Calvin and Hobbes ran. It was New Years Eve, 1995 and I even wrote a bad paper about it for school. I can reminisce with another great Calvin and Hobbes site since that one even has a searchable archive of every strip (see the wonderful last strip of the series here.) I remember not liking that last strip when I first read it, I wanted more wit and humor. But I was 17, that's what the comic was for me then. Now when I look back I see the strip more reflective of life, and that last strip seems perfect.

I like some comics today, specifically Doonesbury, FoxTrot and Dilbert - but nothing compares to Calvin and Hobbes for me. Speaking of, anyone know what Bill Waterson is up to these days? A little research tells me he's relaxing.

Act your age, not your shoe size.

Every movie has a purpose. The producers set out with a goal, a reason for the movie's existence. Sometimes it's humor, sometimes it's a touching story, or a sappy love story so people can vicariously live through the screen, or perhaps entertaining action, or movies that really try to say something about life or humanity.

I think the fundamental failing of Uptown Girls is it didn't really have a clear goal. It wanted to be a comedy, and a fairy tale, and a touching story. But for me (and Jill, who I watched it with) it didn't really nail any of these, instead it just kind of flailed around. It had funny moments, but those took away from it's ability to be touching. And the fairy tale aspect kind of pulled the whole thing out of reality, making it both less funny and less touching.

It was well made. Dakota Fanning did an excellent job, and Brittany Murphy was solid as well. But it's hard to take something without a purpose and make it really entertaining, it just doesn't work that way.

I believe that's from God, the number one mack.

Starsky & Hutch is a silly movie, it's one of those that just strings together a lot of jokes with no real cohesiveness. And in the end the quality of movies like this depends on how many of those jokes hit, and this one got about two thirds of them - which is pretty good. Although I think a lot of my enjoyment came from seeing it in a full theater with almost 20 friends. Movies are always funnier that way.

I have to give special credit to Will Farrell, who was hilarious. We made many a joke later at the bar about dragon poses. And I love that Snoop Dogg is doing more and more acting - even if he plays the same character every time. But the best part of the movie was Ben Stiller's persona in the party scene at the end:

Do it.

This is the sort of intimate, human stuff that makes you drop your jaw and think, good God, the Internet is an incredible thing.

From Boing Boing.

This set of photo's and comments starts off slow, and didn't really grab me until about half way though. Go look at them, and push through the beginning. The amount of stuff (cars, helicopters, barges) that had to be left behind is staggering. But more powerful for me was the idea of a whole city just sitting there quiet. Is there anywhere else in the world like that? I know there's places out in the desert that used to be military bases or research or something, but I can't think of anywhere that's the size of the Chernobyl area with absolutely no one there...

See it here.

Get ready for the movie event of the year.

How many times do you hear a silly line like that in previews? Does it really make anyone more excited about a film? Do people fall for lines like that? Anyway, we're running right up on to the Spring and Summer movie season. Since I'm a fan of, how shall we say, less artsy movies I really enjoy this time of year. I like the arty movies, they're fun, but in my core my favorite genre's have action and adventure or comedy and those mostly happen in the spring and summer. I did one of these about this time last year and it's been on my mind this week. So here we go with my thoughts of upcoming hollywood films I'm interested based solely on what I know about the people making them and their trailers:

Starsky & Hutch (3/5)

Who knows if it'll be good. But the comedy pedigree is impressive. It's it's not funny it will be kind of like Death to Smoochy where you wonder how talented people come together to make crap. Seriously: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Juliette Lewis, director Todd Phillips (director of Old School and Road Trip.) This one is the subject for my first movie night of 2004.

Hidalgo (3/5)

I just want to see if Viggo has legs beyond The Lord of the Rings. We've seen him in some other stuff, but let's see if he can parlay his success. As Jason says, this looks like it will regard itself with just the right amound of seriousness.

The Girl Next Door (3/12)

Guy says there is huge buzz about this one on the Fox lot. Rotten Tomatoes only has a few reviews for it but it's at 89% so far. I'm excited.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (3/19)

I really like when Jim Carey plays a more serious character (Man on the Moon, The Truman Show, yes even The Majestic.) Plus the director used to make a lot of Bjork videos, so he has the right pedigree for a weird-ass, mess with your mind kind of movie.

Jersey Girl (3/26)

All hail the return of Kevin Smith. I named my site after an obscure quote from one of his movies, think I'm a fan? Who cares if Beniffer is in it, I'm watching primarily for the dialog. Kevin, it's been too long...

HellBoy (4/2)

This will be terrible, but it's a comic book movie. And I feel a strange obligation to go to comic book movies, even really bad comic book movies. I'm not sure why I torture myself like this...

Walking Tall (4/9)

The Rock has really been establishing himself as a full blown action movie star. Can he keep it up?

The Whole Ten Yards (4/9)

I really liked The Whole Nine Yards and most of the same people are involved. Silly comedies like this typically aren't anything special, but alternatively it isn't too hard to make them decent. I figure this one will fall inside that spectrum.

The Punisher (4/16)

I'm torn about this one. I really, really want it to be good since the Punisher is a cool character, but deep down I know it's going to suck (much like Hellboy.) The trouble is the whole movie is amateur hour, no one involved has really done much else. Every now and then a green team will come up with something good, but much more often it goes the other way. I fear it will be a bad year for comic book movies.

Kill Bill Volume 2 (4/16)

I'm not really sure how I never managed to see Volume 1, I know I'll absolutely love it and I love Tarantino films. My hope is they'll put it back into theaters (or on DVD) before this one releases. Either way, with volume 1 as good as it was (I have trusted sources) Volume 2 should be a good time.

Van Helsing (5/7)

The march of bad comic book movies continues. The trailer for this reminds me a whole lot of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and we all know how that turned out.

Troy (5/14)

Ah, this is when the summer movie season will officially begin, with the first over-hyped action epic. Lets wait for reviews to see if it's actually any good - it'll be hard to tell from trailers alone.

Shrek 2 (5/21)

I loved the first one and even the ride at Universal Studios is great. They'd have to work hard to screw this one up. One of the movies I'm really looking forward to this year.

The Day After Tomorrow (5/28)

Hey look! We're going to watch the world get destroyed by CG natural disasters caused by humanity's irresponisibility! Wait, haven't we done this a few times in the last few years. I can't remember a good one of these, think they can break the streak?

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (6/4)

Come on, it's Harry Potter. I excited about this one and The Goblet of Fire since this is where the stories start to get dark. Bad things start happening and play time is over. From what I've read and seen in trailers this movie is going to stay true to that, which means they will likely be more serious and compelling for us grown ups...

The Chronicles of Riddick (6/11)

Ug, for some reason I have a special place in my movie library for Pitch Black. And I really like the Riddick character (he made the movie.) It's made by the same people as the first one, but I think they actually got a budget this time, so it won't have that gritty charming B-movie feel. I really want this to be a good sequel, but the look and feel I've seen so far puts bad memories of Alien: Ressurection in my mind.

The Terminal (6/18)

Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Steven Spielberg - that's enough to perk my ears up right there. But they have a fantastic premise too: a guy traveling from a small country has to start living in an airport terminal becuase his country ceased to exist during his flight, so his passport is no good. Imagine how long it would take to sort that beauracracy out...

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (6/25)

The look and feel of this one it terrific. Yes, it's strange, but it's a wonderful throwback to the 30's and the pulp fiction (not the movie, the genre of books.) I'm even more impressed that this is an original property - it's not a film version of a comic book or an old story or a bunch of other random things. I figure this will either be spectacular or fall flat on its face. I'll get to find out which in June.

Spider Man 2 (7/2)

I just saw the theatrical trailer last week and I was very, very impressed. Another movie I'm really looking forward to.

King Arthur (7/7)

Antoine Fuqua (Training Day and Tears of the Sun) will save this from mediocrity. Plus Keira Knightley continues her rise by playing Guinevere. I was skeptical, but the trailer gave me faith.

I, Robot (7/16)

I've read just about every story Issac Asimov has published about robots. His writing isn't great, but his ideas are fabulous. There's a huge source of excellent material to work with so as long as they don't dumb it down this should at least be intruiging. But Alex Proyas is in charge (among other things The Crow and especially Dark City) so I have to assume he'll keep it smart and challenging.

The Bourne Supremacy (7/23)

The Bourne Identity was a reasonably good action thriller in a genre I really like (people who are exceptionally good at what they do and get by by being both smart and a bad ass.) That's enough to get me to buy a ticket to the sequel.

Catwoman (7/30)

I'm scared... I love Batman. Haven't they done enough damage with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin? But still, I try to hold out hope. Then I see a picture like this.

The Villiage (7/30)

Until M Night Shyamalan makes something I really don't like I'll go see anything he does.

Alien vs Predator (8/6)

Alien vs Predator has a long history in the comic world and it's a really cool idea. Two bad ass alien races going head to head (since without some luck and Hollywood formulas they would have wiped the floor with humans.) Will it be any good? It's just hard to get these kinds of movies right. I mean really, how often are alien monster movies good? They're hard to do. Can the director of Resident Evil, Soldier (baaaad Kurt Russel movie), Event Horizon and Mortal Kombat do better then he has in the past? I wouldn't make any bets on it.

Blade: Trinity (8/13)

Wow, you sure can tell we're into August (traditional dumping ground of bad action movies. Blade was decent, Blade 2 was pretty crappy. Think the trend will continue? I do.

Yikes, that's a lot of movies and I even left out a bunch (really anything aimed at teen girls like 13 Going on 30 or Mean Girls.) With the exception of two weekends in late April there's at least one every week from now until mid August. There's some that should be great, some that should be terrible, and lots on the fence. Let's see what happens.

Things never turn out how you plan.

For Love of the Game isn't a sports movie, it's a love story. It just uses major league baseball as a backdrop for the story, showing how the immense social and personal pressures of professional sports effects a relationship. For the most part it's sappy and overly sentimental, but that's really how stories like this always are.

The whole movie exists inside one baseball game with lots and lots of flashbacks. Whenever an entire movie is structured around flashbacks it's always going to be sappy and sentimental - since that's what flashbacks are. But the story can still be touching and accessible. I wouldn't want people who shy away from sports movies to pass on this becuase they think it's a sports movie. Of course, they're welcome to pass on it because it's just a sappy love story. But I'm guessing that the people who pass on those two genre's are different people, which actually makes this a decent crossover movie.

Of course it's not nearly the excellent crossover movie that Jerry Maguire is. I thought about Jerry Maguire a lot during this one. It's also a love story with some sports in it and Kelly Preston is in both. She's a much different chracter in each film though - I just can't get over the first scene where we see her in Maguire (unfortunately I can't reprint that quote, it's no good for family audiences.) Hmmm, maybe I should go watch that one again.

Damn is this movie sappy. But at least it has good music.

- Sweetie, you're sort of dating him.
- Sorry I'm not better looking.

I got scared at the start of 50 First Dates. After a great expository intro it starts out with some bad slapstick involving one of the side characters, and then an unfortunate incident with a walrus. Things get better for a bit, but then they introduce Lucy (Drew Barrymore) and explain her condition. At the point the movie is downright tragic. I felt horrible for her and her family (note that I actually felt in an Adam Sandler comedy, I was surprised.)

But then it turned it all around and become a good, sweet, and funny movie. And since the film brought us into the tragedy of Lucy's life when everything works out in the end (if you think that's a spoiler you have problems) there's an emotional payoff there too. This is the key that Anger Management missed, in order to have a good emotional payoff when everything works out in the end you have to get the audience to care for and feel for the characters when things aren't going so well. As an example I even teared up a bit in this film (I'm a softy though.)

Adam Sandler really hit his stride with this one. This movie has broad appeal, doesn't rely on dumb humor (but has some) and is touching. Plus I have to give a special comedy award for Sean Astin. He plays a geeky body builder with a lisp, which is silly but also quirckily funny.

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