Well, that's an hour and 38 minutes that we'll never see again... however, I must say that it was not as bad as Meet the Spartans.

Send-up of 300 falls on its sword. Short form: at matinee prices, you still feel like you were ripped off for the full price of the film—thankfully it's barely an hour and a half long.

If you're seriously considering watching this 2:38 monstrosity, then, please rethink. Carol and I would have walked out an hour in, except that we were trapped in the middle of the theater (with at least one immediately-adjacent theater goer asleep) and were trading looks of disbelief because we couldn't figure out why this was so critically acclaimed.

Listening to NPR tonight, and in particular to Marketplace when I hear Ben Stein issuing a rant about oil companies and prices. That wasn't that surprising, given his history. However, when they went to break afterward, the commentator said "Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?" without further comment...

Mr. Gore has a point. Carol and I have been putting off going to see An Inconvenient Truth for the last few weeks out of concern over boredom, propaganda, and general bad moviemaking. The reviews of this movie by others (which many of you may know I don't usually read) have been all over the map. Although I may find fault with some of the presentation of the data, many of Mr. Gore's suggestions of what should be done are hard to complain about.

It's been a while since I could say this about a film, but run—do not walk—to Wordplay, the new documentary about the annual crossword puzzle tournament.

I haven't seen it yet (we're working on that), but there is an interesting article that I've been meaning to post about since early this month in the Christian Science Monitor about Al's movie, An Inconvenient Truth and other films that provide a documentary format, but a single point of view. Note: this isn't the review, they also had one of those by their movie reviewer, and it's much more agreeable.

As I'm sure you can already guess by now, Carol & I went to see The Da Vinci Code yesterday , a new film starring Tom Hanks, directed by Ron Howard, based on the book of the same name from Dan Brown. On balance, we enjoyed the film as a fast-paced thriller and I think that people who've enjoyed the book will like how things were envisioned and put together.

My folks were in town visiting this week, so we all went down to Bethesda to catch a movie at the Bethesda Row Cinema (since my folks don't tend to see many movies at all, much less ones that are in limited release). We decided to see Kinky Boots, a British comedy about a small-town shoe manufacturer that is going out of business and the attempt of its owner to revive the company by going after a niche market. Their chosen market? "Boots for women—who are men." The premise is certainly open to abuse, but the film charts a course that is not particularly slapstick, but low-key British humor, and tries to navigate the complexities of everything from retailers who are interested more in repeat sales than satisfied customers to various small-town social stigmas, responsibility to ones employees and history, and a host of other things. The result is a funny, but heartfelt, subdued film.

Last night Carol and I went to see United 93, the new film about the United flight that was taken down by passengers on 9/11 outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There's been a lot of talk about this movie, discussing it's relative accuracy, the timing of its release, and whether it was a good idea to do a film on this subject at all.