Spamityville

White Elephant Reviews: The Amityville Horror (2005)

Really, and in a totally non-homoerotic way, I will watch anything with Ryan Reynolds in it, especially if it’s on OnDemand. I expected little, but this widely despised remake of the simultaneously boring and nerve-wracking original Amityville Horror pleasantly surprised me. It also made sure that I couldn’t get to sleep until 2:00AM. I had to eat a whole container of wintergreen mints and read The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a pretty short book.

The basic plot is: the Lutz family gets a real bargain on a house in Amityville because the previous tenants were all murdered up real good. The Lutzeses move in undaunted, get somewhat daunted by the house's weird noises and unearthly visions, then eventually get very daunted but too hypnotized by the house's evil to leave. The local spirits work especially hard on Ryan Reynolds, turning him from a happy-go-lucky contractor into an embittered shut in child hating weirdo (perhaps this explains why he teamed up with Jessica Biehl to hunt vampires). This takes about a month. Then they move out, leaving all their worldly, 1970s-era goods behind. In between, some black goop oozes out of various parts of the house and a slutty babysitter gets really, really scared.

Anyway, if we judge horror movies by whether they inspire fear (or its more sophisticated and rarer cousin, horror), this one’s a winner. The movie was genuinely horrifying, in that it created a long-burning and hideous dread without having to actually supply too many scares. The director uses surprise cuts sparingly and very clumsily, since none of them are in the least scary. They’re about on par with a well funded haunted hayride and they consist mostly of actors in lots of white makeup drooling Hershey’s syrup out of their mouths. But the moaning sounds of the old house and Ryan Reynolds' against-type performance load on the tension big-style.

So the movie is pretty good. But the story is classic (and its structure is of course literally true, even if the haunting is disputed). Bear with me here: we have a man marrying a woman who already has children, so he’s a stranger and so are they. They buy a house (the scene in the movie in which they tour the house and make their decision is very finely done - the Amityville story is of course a real estate nightmare). The movie is in some ways also about the fact that you really don’t know what you’re getting with either house or marriage.

It kept reminding me of the Roman wedding ceremony. The Roman bride wore red and carried a torch, a strange fire which could kindle the hearth OR burn the house down. She was marked always as a stranger: her children were members of her husband’s family but she never really was. In the movie this is quite sensibly reversed with the husband as stranger, a vile torch ignited by a chthonic spark.

This is especially sinister given that the movie is in many ways so everday. It's just a family unhappy with its new house. They don't really even need an evil spirit to tear themselves to pieces.

"All roads lead to the same place"

Brutus prepares to cast Expelliarmus and defeat Snape once and for all.

As loyal Moonsash readers know I'm a huge fan of Rome on HBO, and this season is pleasing whatever faculty I have that responds favorably to sex and violence drenched historical dramas. The first episode was a little rocky but the second one is an unparalleled delight: the return of Cleopatra, Vorenus' midlife crisis coming to a gothy head, and a prolonged, delightful brawl-for-all between Marc Antony, Atia and Octavian (Octavian decks Antony with some kind of ancient Roman bookend). We see none other than Lucius Vorenus come into possession of the ancient Roman version of the Gem Saloon, which should be utterly unbelievable and delightful in every way. Fixin' towards a bloody outcome indeed.

Extras has been a little different; the first episode was great but the second one felt like a huge and pointless setup for a moderately funny song by David Bowie. I worry that the celebrity guest stars will begin to overwhelm the tender and complicated overarching plot. It also looks a little like Ricky Gervais is repeating The Office's first to second season change: these two episodes have been decidedly heavy on drama and light on comedy. Gervais handled it well in The Office but who knows how it will pan out this time.

ALSO HOLY SHIT ON BATTLESTAR GALACTICA HELO JUST SHOT ATHENA/BOOMER/SHARON/PRETTY KOREAN ACTRESS whose character has gone through so many name changes I can no longer keep track. This blog post is OVER.

An Incoherent Sound of Rage

A Seattle school has put a moratorium on viewings of An Inconvenient Truth because a bible-believing parent named Frosty objects to the presentation of science (It's worth noting that it seems that neither he nor his wife has actually seen the objectionable film). If this were a video blog, you could see me sputtering and bulging out my neck-veins with fury. The school has an official policy on "controversial issues," indicating that teachers must strive to present both sides of anything that invites heated debate. Shall we assume that the Holocaust will get the same rigorously impartial treatment [heavy sarcasm here, O People of the Internet]? Just read the article, which shows how religion and patriotism are bound up in a willful rejection of anything that might show a flaw in America.

A Milestone in Total Quality

That's right, Holiday blog-readers: MOONSASH has upgraded to Google Blogger Blog-Me-Do 9,000 Professional 2K6 Ultimate Edition! You'll find basically the same look and same lackadaisical updating schedule with no significant new features - the MOONSASH way! Here's to the FUTURE!

Merrye Solstyce!!!

If anything represents the Reason for the Season, it's a day-late photograph of Zelda cosplayers used without their permission and with entirely snarky intent.

Wishing all of Moon Sash's Fans a Safe and Delightful Holiday Season

More Notes from my Fiction Career

Utne Reader reviews Beeswax magazine, favorably! They don't specifically mention my story, but I am pretty sure they were just being coy.

UPCOMING:
- Review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day; I should have this read by QIII, 2009.
- A review of Cormac McCarthy's new dramatic novel The Sunset Limited.
- Perhaps, finally, a highlight reel of Warhammer 40K fiction. Of course much of Pynchon's new book takes place at a blimp convention in the year 40,800, so I may be able to kill two birds with one stone here.

Tristes Tropiques

In my groundbreaking review of Final Fantasy XII I mentioned a 1990s semi-interactive screensaver about a man marooned on a desert island. The Internet has generously provided me with a wealth of detail on this subject: the screensaver is Johnny Castaway, a 1993 Sierra On-Line production. In my callow youth I adored screensavers, and I remember weeping many a salty tear because I would never have "flying toasters" because it was only for Apple computers. I did have Johnny Castaway, which even then I felt was kind of a disappointment. It was one of those screensavers that was essentially way too complicated to use for its intended purpose. Basically, it was an extremely slow-paced cartoon which consisted mostly of Johnny shuffling around his island in his tattered rags. Occasionally a little canned event would play. On holidays, Johnny would set up seasonally appropriate decorations. It was probably not worth waiting an entire year to watch Johnny string up from VGA tinsel on his palm tree. The whole thing bore an air of melancholy and although I thought it would be amusing to write about this little-missed piece of software ephemera, it's actually kind of depressing.

Start Digging some Nerd Holes

A Review of Final Fantasy XII

As many of you (actually, just EHastings) may know, the demo of Final Fantasy XII filled me with disgust and I swore I would never buy it. It did not, at first, seem like a game, it was more like one of those semi-interactive screensavers that were briefly popular in the 1990s (Castaway Jim?). Yet here I am, having just spent about ten hours playing it, and it’s really awfully good.

Online review sites have, as usual, been gushing about the top-notch plot and characters. They are, as usual, giving Square-Enix entirely too much credit. Here’s the basic sketch: a disaffected, spiky-haired orphan teams up with a quiet princess to fight a cruel, mechanically-inclined empire. Is this sounding familiar, O People of the Internet? Within the first half-hour of the game, the protagonist’s female best friend plants her hands on her hips and tells him to be careful, something that every female character in every Japanese RPG is required to do as often as possible (don't worry, she gets kidnapped just a little later). The princess, whose name is something like Ashleigh Starla Modeine IV, confines herself mostly to spluttering and saying things like “I’ll never surrender!” Thomas Pynchon, this ain’t. On the plus side, although the things the characters are saying are stupid, the localization is very good, like a pretty good fantasy novel. Lord Vayne, the effeminate, long-haired villain (sound familiar again?) actually makes a very interesting, rhetorically ornamented speech early on.

The characters themselves are shopworn wares from the FF series stock – a determined knight, a determined plucky lad, a determined female sidekick, a determined princess, and a sarcastic but nonetheless determined sky pirate. The highlight character is Fran (yes, her name is Fran), an oddly accented furry who is screwing Sky Pirate Balthier in what must be some extremely awkward and unsatisfying virtual grappling. She has a neat, kind of vaguely Bjorkian accent but is otherwise a standard FF weirdo elf rabbit creature thing.

So as usual the plot and characters should be ignored, but the game mechanics, OH DOCTOR are they good. Two radical changes improve the combat system: no random encounters (all the enemies are already on the map and you fight them without transitioning to a battle screen), and no controlling your characters. The Gambit system, which EHastings accurately described as an autistic programming language, means that you can set general tactics for your characters and then just watch them level grind for hours on end. Somehow, they made this really, really fun. This isn’t as big a revolution as you might initially think: famous old PC games like Baldur’s Gate did basically the same thing, as did the more recent (and vastly better-plotted) Knights of the Old Republic series. FFXII’s gambit system is nonetheless a big improvement on the automatic combat of these other titles: the gambits let you set, in detail, actions for most possible scenarios, and the simple, intuitive system is nonetheless very powerful. You can take just a few seconds to set a behavior like, “If any of your allies are injured, heal them, unless they’re really severely injured, in which case you should give them a potion, and if no enemies are around you should recharge your magic and then heal everyone.” Afterwards, you can experience a brief moment of reverse Schadenfreude when you realize how excited you got over programming the behavior of a virtual rabbit-woman archer.

Anyway, the trademark of Final Fantasy has always been the endless parade of tedious, enervating random battles, and they are gone from this version. What could have been boring (watching your cyberdudes fight) just makes the game feel fast-paced and constantly new. Fighting, say, fifty enemies in a row take about ten minutes, gives measurable rewards, and requires only periodic nudges. Everything else is pretty much standard: you have a standard level board instead of the monstrous “Sphere Grid” from Final Fantasy X, so if you want to customize all your characters in bizarre ways, you can. If only there were a way to turn off the repetitive, vulgar music score this would be perfect. Highly recommended.

Reviews you can Use

NB – No one will ever be able to use these reviews for any reason.

LAMY Safari Fountain Pen.

This is an inexpensive aluminum* fountain pen – no precious resins, pewter wizards or fragments of Abraham Lincoln’s DNA interrupt its smooth, industrial surface. It has a snap-on cap with a sleek but ultimately useless wire staple clip (as you can see in the picture, it’s U-shaped, so it bends whatever you clip it to; it’s also very tight). It’s very light and pretty large and the shape is very slightly squared. You could use it to write a check for €250 to a store in Munich that sells only stainless steel paperweights. The nib is almost without ornament, nearly black in color, and has a Teutonic rigidity. It seemed a little scratchy at first until I got the hang of it; it needs a very light touch despite its brutalist looks.

In a marketing move that could only come out of Germany this pen is advertised as being youthful and fun, as if “youthful” and “fun” weren’t already synonymous with fountain pens!. It comes in a variety of ultra-gay colors. If Lamy were an American company their ads would doubtless use rapping exotic animals or snowboarders. I can’t really conceive of any reason for a person other than me to buy this pen, unless you think you might like to write with a fountain pen and don’t want to invest too much of your inheritance in it.

* Mine is aluminum - they're also available in plastic for around $20.

Dexter

David Fisher moves to Miami, teams up with Richard from Sex and the City and becomes a serial killer. Also, he is no longer gay and is dating Darla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is going to be so pissed when he founds out that she has Received the Dark Kiss of the Immortal Blood Rose of Seduction Vampire Style. In all fairness, this show is incredibly good. Dexter’s sister is appealing, the plot has been tight and, in a reversal of Showtime’s usual policy, the characters have depth and interest. Especialy Dexter. The writers have not made him a white knight who slays the guilty; he’s definitely a serial killer, a man who only feels alive and connected when he’s sawing someone’s head off.

Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction

This $20 Xbox game imagines a situation in which dynastic instability and violent conflict in North Korea result in a huge, disastrous war. Huh. The forthcoming sequel is set in Venezuela and is already drawing fire from that country’s legislature because they fear it is a tool of intimidation. This games takes the Grand Theft Auto formula to an actual warzone, but unfortunately they’ve brought along the GTA staples of uneven difficulty and unwieldy controls. If Venezuelans are afraid of tedious escort missions, getting run over by a van just as they’ve finally completed a 45-minute long operation for the fourth time, or being shot from nine miles away by some jerk-off with a rocket, then they may be right.

Zombie Adventure 3-D

A review of The Road

I have written previously, gentle readers, of the fact that we live in the Age of Zombie Fiction, and as everyone knows zombies are the foul handmaidens of Death himself, come to scour the world of all the living works of man. Of course most zombie fiction actually offers a fun and exciting world, an escape from the boring problems of the everyday to a land filled with limitless enemies and equally limitless opportunities for ingenuity, bravery, and wit. The apocalypse, in these fictions, strips away the silly problems that we have invented to spin out the wheels of our days and provides us instead with survival in its sinewy and physical glory. The tough survivors of, say, Land of the Dead, I Am Legend, or Steven King’s Dark Tower series (the last two not strictly zombie fiction), basically live enviable lives. Beneath their thin and sexy layer of grit and danger, they’re doing what we all would really prefer. What’s more fun, filling out grant applications, or knocking out the staircase so you can shoot zombies in the head at your leisure? My networking associate tMa and I have frequently discussed the escapist allure of this fiction, the jolly physical fun of testing your zeal for living against the unlimited hordes of the dead, of building a secure new fortress life without having to do anything boring or inessential ever again.

Cormac McCarthy’s searing* latest novel, The Road, shows us a dirty, scoured world where the only things men can build are stockades of severed heads and meat lockers for their slaves. McCarthy has drawn a more vivid and infinitely more hellish apocalypse than any other writer I can think of. Life for the unnamed father and son protagonists of The Road is not stripped down to its fun, video-game essentials. Each day they contend with unglamorous and agonizing death. They spend the entire novel pushing a shopping cart through the horrifying wastes of an unnamed part of America, scrounging wherever they are able for canned food, old smoked meat, anything remotely edible. They sleep most nights curled together, the boy shivering for a long while, too afraid of other men to make a fire.

The landscape which they wander is scoured of all life and likewise scours the reader: it terrifies in a way that no other description of scenery has ever done for me. The world has burned, and a thick layer of ash dances forever between the opaque sky and the dead ground. The sun is gone and with it all the natural colors. Everything has turned black and grey. McCarthy’s usual landscapes are still there, under their pall of ash, but there is not life to them.

The father and son have to struggle so constantly against the cruelty of this new world that they never accumulate any of the neat equipment that so many other post-apocalyptic narratives feature. They have a gun with only two bullets; they’re afraid even to fire it lest it bring the attention of the other survivors, vile, tough men long accustomed to eating human flesh.

McCarthy’s novel is, in some ways, rather conventional for a post-apocalyptic story: it maintains the great post-apocalyptic narrative traditions of clever scavenging, ruined cities, and insane and bloodthirsty new clans. McCarthy, with his signature skill and economy, has boiled these clichés down to their bright white bones, unveiling a truer vision than many of his predecessors. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic warrior bands have none of the panache of the usual imaginings of the end of the world: they’re not the leather-clad, sexually ambiguous monsters of Mad Max, nor the pale ghouls of Omega Man. They are mostly simply men, wrapped in layers of ugly rags against the permanent cold, bearded, armed with long steel pipes. They are indescribably more sinister and real than the more lurid imaginings of other post-apocalyptic worlds.

Out of these elements, the man and his son, the dead landscape of America, and the rapacious remnants of the rest of mankind, McCarthy weaves a graceful, moving story. The relationship between the man and his son is finely drawn and imagined in heartbreaking detail. Their constant, bitter grasping for survival repeats and repeats, but McCarthy’s unsurpassed prose skill keeps the wound fresh. Each minor victory (a few precious days spent underground in a never-used bomb shelter) and each horrifying setback (their cart stolen, a run-in with a warrior band) stings afresh. The ending, in its terse and rare beauty, is maybe even better than the finish to No Country for Old Men, itself a short masterpiece. The novel, with its bitter winds and cruel vistas, sticks in my mind, like a little snowglobe that I can shake and look into, hearing the uncaring wind and the little boy’s plaintive “Papa…Papa…” A sad, rewarding book.

PS – This Review is notable for having the most inane possible kicker in the history of the world: “Cormac McCarthy sends a father and son on the scariest road trip he can imagine. Seat belts fastened?” To me, this is equivalent to reviewing the New Testament under “God sends his only begotten son on a wild ride with an ending that will leave you on the edge of your seat!”

* The National Reviewer’s Association requires every review of this book to call it “searing” at least once.

A Tradition of Heritage

Milestones in Total Quality

Moonsash turned one year old a few weeks ago – I celebrated by drinking Hoffbrau out of an empty, clean shampoo bottle, and also by forgetting about the anniversary entirely.

Movie Review Roundup

The Black Doodah
Fine actors, slavishly allusive cinematography, and exhaustive period detail can’t save this shallow, dull movie from itself. Apparently Brian de Palma is an auteur non pareil, and his movies are viewed as the crème de la crème, but I’m afraid that watching this one was more of an auto-da-fé than an experience of joie de vivre. De Palma is continually fascinated (so the New York Times says) by voyeurism and especially femmes fatales; why then are his femme fatale characters so thin and amateurish, and his scenes of voyeurism so clichéd?

The Illusionist
Fine actors, slavishly allusive cinematography, blah blah blah. Eerily similar to The Necromancer (considered to be the first gothic novel), this dull vampire LARP of a movie convinced me that Paul Giamatti is actually a fine actor, and that Rufus Sewell should be in more movies, but nothing else. Pretty boring, shot on a very few (nice) sets, uninteresting performances by Jessica Biel and Ed Norton.

Important Fountain Pen News

Many (none) of you may have followed my recent attempts to get Cambridge top-folding staple bound notebooks, in legal yellow, with a reinforced cover (available at the Princeton U-Store in years past, now apparently retired from Mead’s offerings). These notebooks, with their creamy deluxe paper and built-in cover, are perfect for taking field notes in fountain pen. They’re sturdy and they don’t immediately reveal your confidential notes (“nice lobby”, “another impressive lobby”, “good lobby restroom”) to everyone. But you can’t buy them anymore, and regular office stores astoundingly don’t offer anything comparable.

So I eventually settled on the Moleskine, an ultradeluxe notebook for people in Ivy club who want to burlesque note-taking during their vacation to Brazil (also Kean had one before they were cool at Princeton at least). I was extremely loath to take this step since Moleskine has a sizeable following, and I did not particularly want to make a statement of membership in an obsessive, twee group with my notebook (putting this much thought into notebook purchases, and then blogging about it, is of course neither obsessive nor twee). Also, Moleskines cost on average $15 a piece, so I might as well be writing on finely cured and pressed cocaine.

It also turns out that people from the internet have an ongoing argument of about the intensity level of the Council of Nicea about whether Moleskines work with fountain pens. I am here to tell you that in certain cases they do; I use one with a Visconti Van Gogh steel nib F fountain pen, with black Visconti ink, and the experience is perfect. The pen glides over the page like a finger dipped in butter and dragged along a sheet of glass, although the experience is (arguably) less psychosexually dynamic than engaging in a form of frottage with baking equipment. The ink doesn’t bleed or feather, and it doesn’t mark through the page. My particular Visconti has always written rather dry, so even the same pen and nib may not work for everyone. I have also tried writing in the Moleskine with an F, steel nib Faber-Castell fountain pen that I bought in Switzerland (Of course I jaunt off to Switzerland to buy office supplies! Hah hah! Tirrah!). This did not become a lovely memory. I was using a cartridge, and the ink flowed like the Tiber in March, feathering and beading everywhere and humiliating me in front of the luxury boat operators on Lake Geneva. It was, without a doubt, the most tragic thing that has ever happened to anyone I know.

Links for the obsessive and the bored
- the particular notebook I favor, for sale.
- Moleskine's unbelievably pretentious and poorly translated site.
- Possibly misguided list of pens that work with Moleskine (a lot of these Moleskine+Fountain Pen coma wedding sites suggest using Parker Quink, which I consider a grave perversion; I will probably never buy "Noodler's" fountain pen ink because it makes me picture a fat, balding man with a huge grey moustache, wearing a green Sears sweater, annoying a diner waitress by insisting on using his own pen to sign a credit card recipt for $6.48. For Christ's sake, why not call it Fayetteville Fine Inks or something? Jesus Christ.).
- The blog post that started this whole sick show.

He's Old, and his Skin is Cold

I like George Bush, because he's willing to tell everyone else what he's thinking, no matter how innapropriate or crazy it is (link).

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

See, I like Katherine Harris because she's willing to say what everyone else is thinking, no matter how insane everyone else is:

Link

and I dislike Katherine Harris because she helped engineer the fradulent, illegal non-election in 2000.

A Spend-o-Crat Problem in Central Russia

A Quick Note on my Fiction Career

California fifth or sixth estate representatives Beeswax Magazine have sent to print the second issue of their literary journal, one which contains my only notable non-fan fiction writing, “The Narwhal.”  The issue is now available for $6 plus shipping and presumably contains the works of artists and writers other than me.

A Quick Note on my Dance Career: A Review of Step Up

In this toes a-tappin’ dancetacular dense-faced Coach Carter alum Channing Tatum stars as Trance Banderwagon, a white boy from the ‘hood of Baltimore (AKA BODYMORE MURDALAND!).  A wholesome lad, he wiles away his time dancing at high-concept houseparties, shooting hoops with his pals Mac and Skinny, and also stealing a huge number of cars.  After a particularly ribald evening of spastic dancing at the local salon our hero and his friends indulge their sweet tooth for vandalism with the most delicious morsel of all: an ugly and amateurish stage set at the local performing arts school.  Their black crime disclosed, our heroes come to grips with the ministrations of justice found body in a security guard; our hero takes the fall for his two friends and is assigned 200 hours of community service at the scene of the crime (I plan to commit a crime at the Bikini Inspectors training academy as soon as I finish this blog).  This sets the stage for the true star of the movie: dancer/actress Jenna Dewan’s shrugs and bolero wraps.  Dewan sports a new wrap or scarf or dance pinafore in almost every scene, to the extent that it begins to feel like they cut a subplot about her having terrible OCD or aphasia or something.  The rest of the movie is charming and ultimately a few minutes too long.  Watch for Six Feet Under’s Rachel Griffiths as the oddly wooden and bizarrely accented head of the dance academy, and The Wire’s usually fun Deirdre Lovejoy as Dewan’s mother.  Griffiths seems heavily medicated and Lovejoy just sits around her Baltimore townhouse all day, oiling and re-oiling the furniture.

Christmas Ape's Calypso Adventure

Give a hoot! Read a book as belonging to an essential category!

University of Minnesota English professor David Treuer, an Ojibwe Native American, is publishing two books which attack traditional ways of reading literature by or about Native Americans (New York Times article). Prof. Treuer is annoyed that academics read both kinds of writing as ethnography rather than literature. Native American writing and writing about Native Americans should take its place, he argues, alongside all other literature and should be read as such, rather than as a sociological document or piece of fieldwork data. This argument has a somewhat musty odor since it relies on the idea that we should read documents in particular, regimented ways; I’m not interested in getting into a theoretical citation contest here, but my experience in anthropology (the home discipline of ethnography) has been that everyone reads novels as ethnographies and ethnographies as novels or any other permutation of the two, whatever is most interesting. Insisting that literature be read as literature assigns essential and enduring qualities to literature as an object and is thus rigid and unreflexive. Dr. Treuer’s ideas are interesting and welcome and certainly persuasive (I am no expert on the scholarship of Native literature, so I have reason not to believe that it generally gets read as ethnography), but I find it more interesting as a description than as a manifesto. Certainly, he should draw attention to how the writings get read, but trying to re-assign them to a more correct category ignores their existence as a object in full contact with academic and popular readings. It’s also puzzling that he spends time criticizing Louise Erdrich for screwing up important details of Ojibwe language and regional dialect; if we are supposed to read her writing as novel rather than ethnography, imagination rather than empirical document, why should we hold her to such exacting standards?

REVIEW ROUNDUP

Pulse
As boring and un-frightening as a horror film could possibly be. Even the angular charms of Veronica Mars’s Kristen Bell can’t save this badly-paced, dull tale of evil ghosts who fax themselves to their unwitting victims. Led by a pasty white naked Sir Ben Kingsley, these ghosts travel through cellphones and IM to sap the life from their victims, leaving them deadened and without a will to live (much like the movie does to its viewers). As The Onion pointed out, the riot-proof apartments of downtown Romania don’t stand in for Ohio very well, especially since everything is covered with a thick layer of blue Final Cut filters. When I went to the bathroom after this movie a man with huge sideburns and his little son told me, unsolicited, “Whatever you do, don’t see Pulse.” Too late!

The Descent
It occurs to me that the monsters in this movie actually look almost exactly like the ghosts from Pulse, but have the advantage of being so scary that I had to have major heart surgery during the credits. The Descent is basically The Cave sans Piper Perabo and plus about a zillion times more directorial talent and nerve-wracking cinematography. Six no-name British or possibly Norweigan actresses enter a cave complex bearing climbing rope and emotional baggage and OH SHIT CAVE MONSTERS BITING EVERYONE’S FACE OFF OH SHIT A PIT OF CONGEALED BLOOD EVERYONE’S DEAD OH MY GOD! Highly recommended.

Miami Vice
I thought this was the big-screen version of Dr. Katz, but it turns out it’s Miami VICE, not ADVICE. That’s a little psychiatry/media humor just for you, no charge this time! This movie was very good but was so plotty that the actors didn’t have much room to move – Gong Li was the exception, delivering a long slow reveal of an interesting character and somehow seamlessly going from sharp-faced shrew to beautiful movie star without any obvious changes. You know the setup for the movie so I won’t summarize, but it’s definitely fun and worth seeing.

Talladega Nights
This was a pleasant surprise: Sacha Baron Cohen’s evil French NASCAR driver steals the entire movie, but even the scenes he’s not in bore a relatively light touch and were actually funny, unlike Anchorman and Elf. Watch for John C Reilly’s nuanced performance as imbecilic sidekick Cal Naughton (seriously).