I'm pretty wrapped up in the second book, and the first one alone doesn't stand alone as a story, anyway, so instead of reviewing both books separately, I'm going to cop out and review them together when I'm done with The Wizard. I know you are all terribly disappointed.

Started: 2005-10-07 | Finished: 2005-10-18

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As I am typing this, there is a tin of Danish butter cookies in my office's kitchen. This is not the first time there have been Danish butter cookies in the kitchen. Every so often, our company secretary restocks the snacks, and for the past few months this has included a tin of cookies. They never last very long—a week, tops—which is unsurprising because they are tasty and conveniently bite-sized. Everyone loves them. I have an especially hard time avoiding them because in addition to loving their crumbly, buttery goodness, they also remind me of Christmases during my childhood.

Every year when I was a kid, my dad's family would take a trip to Lake Tahoe for the week between Christmas and New Year's. My grandparents, my dad, an aunt and uncle, my brothers, and my cousins would all crowd into a cabin we'd rent and have a week of playing in the snow. It doesn't often snow where I'm from, so it was a big treat for me and the rest of the kids. My older brother usually brought friends and went skiing a lot; the rest of the kids only skied the last day. The rest of the time we'd go sledding or just play in the back yard, making snow forts, digging snow tunnels, and generally running around like crazy people in the snow. If we felt like staying inside, sometimes we'd play card games (my grandma knew about six million different games) or hide and seek, or play video games on the living room TV, which was next to a wood-burning stove that was kept going for more or less the entire week.

What does all of that have to do with cookies? Well, every time we went to that cabin, we brought the same snacks with us. One of those big tins with three kinds of popcorn in it (plain, caramel, and cheddar) and a tin of Danish butter cookies. That was pretty much the only time of the year I ever saw either of those, so now whenever I taste one of those cookies, I picture a scene from one of our Tahoe trips. Like my cousins and I playing with the little toy voice recorder one of us had gotten for Christmas, which let you speed up or slow down whatever you recorded. Or the time I found a rock that looked like ice under the deck. (I still have it.) Or knocking icicles off the roof with rocks and watching them crash on the ground below—and, of course, having my dad or aunt yell at us to knock it off before we broke a window.

Of course, back then I was still energetic and growing, so cookies and popcorn were no big deal. Nowadays, on the other hand, with my sedentary lifestyle and general laziness, I do everything I can to distract myself from the knowledge that rich, sugary nostalgia is just down the hall. My only hope is hoping that the other engineers will have eaten them all before I crack, giving me a few weeks of reprieve. Unfortunately, having written this piece has brought the cookies to my attention, and the new tin just showed up on Friday.

Ah, screw it. Isn't this why I bought an elliptical trainer, anyway?

Nearly every aspect of this movie was terrible. To begin with—and this is by far the most minor offense—neither Orlando Bloom nor Kirsten Dunst could do the accents they were trying to do. Yeah, it's just one thing, but even if the rest of the performance is great, a bad accent pulls you out of the moment and reminds you that you're seeing actors. And in this case the two leads were far from great actors. Far from good. Bad, in fact. But even if they had been great, the script was this rambling, nearly incoherent monstrosity that never focused itself enough to say anything, despite the fact that it was obvious that writer/director Cameron Crowe was trying so hard to convey meaning. The dialogue was trite, when it even made sense. I mean, seriously, this movie was so bad that I have no idea how it even got picked up. The worst part is that it's quite obvious that the film was written straight from the heart, that it meant a lot to Crowe. The one redeeming thing was the road trip that takes up the last 15 or 20 minutes, but by that point I had already been bored for two hours. If only Crowe had just taken that part and made that the movie, maybe this review would have read differently. Unfortunately, he didn't.

Viewed: 2005-10-15 | Released: 2005-10-13 | Score: F

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It took me a pretty long time to finish this book considering that it wasn't terribly long. (My edition is 312 pages.) I never really got into it, I think. Even so, I got the sense that there was a whole subtle world of meaning that I was unable to connect with. There's a very Eastern European feeling of gravitas about all of the vignettes Kundera presents, and I did find his obsession with borders intriguing; it reflected the same sort of transitional moment that I find fascinating in Westerns. Still, I finished the book feeling like I didn't get it. Perhaps I'm just too entrenched in the modern sensibility that he seems to criticize to be able to fully appreciate what he's trying to say. Or maybe I just disagree with him. Or maybe he's not even really criticizing. I don't really know. I think in order to really understand Kundera's message I would have to put a lot more work in, but I don't think I'm willing to invest that much effort. Not right now, anyway.

Started: 2005-08-30 | Finished: 2005-10-06

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For those of you browncoats out there who think it's ridiculous that I didn't award this one a fourth star, let me just say that I liked it. I really did. Firefly is, in my opinion, one of the best science fiction shows ever made, and Serenity had pretty much everything that made the show so great. But the switch from a series of one-hour episodes to a single two-hour film inevitably brought about some changes. The biggest change, one that I'm not sure is good or bad, is that where the show was truly an ensemble piece, the film really revolves around Mal, River, and the nameless bad guy. I don't really think this could be helped—there just wasn't time to really showcase all of the characters—and the performances were still great, but it was definitely different. There were also a few small instances of retcon, but it wasn't too bad. My main problem was that while I think that the writing was good at both the high and low levels—the overall story arc, structure and pacing were well done and the dialogue was, as always, excellent—there were some writing choices at the middle levels that bothered me. I can't really get into it without some significant spoilers, but suffice it to say that I think Whedon got it wrong in at least one place. Despite that, I still think it was a great movie and I highly recommend it to anyone who's seen the show. And if you haven't seen the show, why are you still reading this? Didn't you read where I said it's one of the best shows ever? Go see it!

Viewed: 2005-09-29 | Released: 2005-09-29 | Score: B

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I hadn't heard much good about this one beforehand, so my expectations going in were pretty low. While I can't really say that it was a good movie, it was actually pretty cute. The writing was mediocre at best—in a few places the dialogue made me roll my eyes—but the two leads, Mark Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon, managed to bring the film up several notches. I've been a fan of Ruffalo since You Can Count On Me; he brought emotional depth to his character where a lesser actor would have choked on the sappy script. And while I can't say that Witherspoon was particularly inspiring in this one, she played off of Ruffalo very well; they had very good chemistry. What else? John Heder was funny enough, although he more or less re-hashed his shtick from Napoleon Dynamite. He and Donal Logue were pretty much the only ones that managed to get a chuckle out of me. The movie's not long on comedy and isn't what you'd call brilliant, but for a dinner-and-a-movie kind of date it fits the bill pretty nicely.

Viewed: 2005-09-16 | Released: 2005-09-15 | Score: C

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I was actually quite amazed by this movie. Despite the fact that it got an excellent review from Entertainment Weekly—who are usually quite snobby—I found it to be pretty boring. Rachel McAdams continues to underwhelm me—she plays everything so straight. Not that she does anything particularly bad, she's just uninteresting. The same goes for the rest of this movie. The plot was so straightforward, so linear. I kept expecting that there would be more, that just around the corner we'd have some mind-boggling plot twist, but it never came. It never even felt particularly suspenseful to me. (Juliette got a little nervous during the climactic scene, but even she found the rest of the movie pretty flat.) I don't know, I just expected more from the director that brought us the Scream trilogy.

Viewed: 2005-09-08 | Released: 2005-08-03 | Score: D

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I've been running this site in one form or another for over seven years now, and the Useless Opinions section has existed for more than three. In all of that time, I've only written 15 of these pieces. It works out to about one article every three months. What gives? Why can't I get it together to write something once a week, or even once a month? Lately I've been mulling over this very question, and here's what I've come up with:

1.) I'm not passionate enough. I have convictions on political and social issues—some of them even quite strong—but I just don't care enough to really do much about them. I vote, and I sometimes talk about what I believe. It's not even that writing would be too much work; it doesn't even occur to me most of the time that I should write about an issue. And besides, even if I did write about something like that, what would be the point? Not very many people even read this, and those who do are likely to be either friends or family, and in cases where I strongly disagree with people, I generally don't want to run the risk of alienating those close to me.

2.) I'm not smart enough. Well, either that or I'm too much of a generalist. Whatever the reason, I'm not really an expert on very many things. Certainly not very many interesting things. Consequently, I'm not qualified to write technical articles. Even with the things I do know a lot about in comparison to the average joe—electrical engineering, for example—I'm not experienced enough or knowledgeable enough to teach them.

3.) I'm not interesting enough. My life is pretty normal. I go to work in the morning, I do my job, I come home. In the evenings, I eat, I talk to my wife, I watch TV. Occasionally, I hang out with friends. I go to the movies a lot. That's about it. I'm just not dramatic enough to think that the boring details of my life would be interesting reading.

4.) I'm not funny enough. If I were funnier, I could probably make my life fun to read about. I'm not those things, though. I have a hard time making fun of the events or people in my life. I think in order to be good at that sort of thing you have to be convinced that you're in some way better than others, and I don't. Or, at least, if I do, I dislike that about myself enough that I don't want to point it out.

5.) I'm too embarrassed. There are very few things that make me squirm more than reading back over old journal entries (which also tend to be quite few and far between). As I get older and gain more perspective, I realize how silly so many of my previous fears and peeves are. When I see how self-righteous I have been in the past, it makes me wish I'd never picked up a pen in the first place.

6.) I'm too lazy. Writing is work, so when it comes to writing I do what comes naturally: I procrastinate. Speaking of which, I should probably quit stalling on that Overlook turn. Or, you know, get back to that whole "job" thing.

The fact that I'm over a week late with this review is probably an indicator of the impression it left on me. Not to say that it was particularly terrible, it just wasn't particularly good. There were plenty of funny moments, although in my opinion the funniest parts were in the outtakes at the end. The performances were, for the most part, mediocre. I admit I have something of a soft spot for Seann William Scott, but Johnny Knoxville mostly just gets on my nerves, and Jessica Simpson was just embarrassing. Still, not everyone was bad—Kevin Hefferman as Sheev (who I don't remember being in the show) made me laugh, and I always like David Koechner, who played Cooter. Willie Nelson was also pretty good as Uncle Jesse. Anyway, I didn't particularly care for it, but all three of the other people I went with did, as did the rest of the audience, so I guess this is just further evidence of my increasing snobbishness. I can live with that.

Viewed: 2005-08-11 | Released: 2005-07-26 | Score: D

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Steve Carell is what Will Ferrell ought to be but isn't. First, he's funny, and I mean full-on, belly laughs kind of funny. Even when he goes completely and ridiculously over the top, he's still funny. But he's also capable of portraying actual emotion. The 40 Year-Old Virgin was surprisingly cute. Don't get me wrong, it's also the vulgar sex comedy that you expect—in fact, the three little old ladies that sat next to us left about 30 minutes into the film—but watching Carell's Andy develop a relationship with Catherine Keener's Trish was unexpectedly heartwarming. I don't usually care much for Keener, but she did just fine in this movie. The rest of the cast was also pretty good. Juliette particularly liked Paul Rudd. An interesting final tidbit: in the scene from the preview where Andy is getting his chest waxed, Carell is actually getting waxed. Knowing that makes the scene that much funnier.

Viewed: 2005-08-19 | Released: 2005-08-10 | Score: B

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