Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Newsflash

After re-reading Harry Potter 5 and 6, I have changed my mind: I think Snape is evil.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

You won't regret going to the movies to see...

Sicko - Michael Moore haters will observe that he is up to his old shenanigans, pulling ridiculous stunts and sometimes not telling the whole story (I walked into the movie knowing next to nothing about the health care systems in Canada and England, but pretty well informed about France - and although he got the country's excellent health care system right, random Americans yammering about their kids going to college for free gives the wrong impression. Students who excel go to college for cheap; kids who lag behind or don't make the grade get cut at a very early age, starting around 11 or 12, and about 80% of all French college students fail their freshman year. This doesn't make it any less true that it's easy and cheap to have doctors make home calls, or that the public access medical care is both cheap and high quality. Nor is it entirely untrue. It's just an inadequate and unnecessary tangent). Somehow I feel like I got this review started on the wrong foot, though, because my point is that the movie is great and you should go see it.

Live Free or Die Hard - A worthy installment in one of the best series of action movies ever made. I alternately laughed (at funny things) and cringed (at scary things) through the whole movie. Love Bruce Willis. Love the Yalie who plays the mac guy in the commercials, and, more or less, plays a slightly geekier version of the mac guy in the movie. Love the fact that the Die Hard movies always zero in on some important issue of the day and have something to say, if you can look past all the metrosexual, Europeanish villains. And thank heavens for metrosexual, Europeanish villains in a time when most movies muck around with politics and feature Middle Eastern/Eurasian villains. In fact, I'm going to say that again, in the form of a useful advisory:

Moviemakers of the world: if you want to avoid making asses of yourselves, stay away from the Middle Eastern/Eurasian can of worms and go for the metrosexual Europeans. They work every time.