Steel White Table

I just hung up on a telemarketer, and it felt good.
That’s all I wanted to say.

The Squid and the Whale - I enjoyed this movie so much, I rented it twice over a two-day period and enjoyed it even more the second time. It’s the story of two adolescent brothers and how they react to their parents’ splitting up, and how their parents react. Their individual reactions are honest and [...]

The Departed - I already wrote a brief review of The Departed, but I’ll say this: It was the most fun I had watching a movie in a movie theatre this year.
I wrote: “It’s been well over a decade since Martin Scorsese made a worthwhile film. Now, with The Departed, he’s hit a grand-slam home-run [...]

Stranger Than Fiction - A funny and compelling story of an IRS agent who hears a voice in his head narrating everything he does as he does it, and with a better vocabulary than himself.
It’s the kind of script Charlie Kaufman might write, but not so out of control. I didn’t know much more than [...]

3-Iron - A guy spends his time breaking into and living in houses where he knows the owners are on vacation. He always cleans and tidies up the house, then leaves a token of appreciation behind. Inevitably he breaks into a house where someone is home, and I don’t want to say what happens next, [...]

Little Miss Sunshine - A thoroughly enjoyable movie about a dysfunctional family that travels across the country in a VW bus. Such well-realized characters that it’s a pleasure to watch them act off one another.
There’s an uncle recovering from a suicide attempt who’s just moved in with the family. There’s a belligerent but lovable grandfather [...]

Bubble - Steven Soderbergh’s experimental whodunit film that he describes more accurately as a whydunit.
It’s experimental in that he uses real people, non-actors, playing themselves; the characters’ lives are so mundane that even when something out of the ordinary happens, it’s still completely mundane — and one of the most interesting films I’ve ever seen. [...]

Match Point - A slowly unfolding thriller that’s likely to have you rooting for the most dislikeable character in the movie.
You’d never know it was a Woody Allen film (don’t let his name turn you off). It takes place in London, England, and there are no neurotic New Yorkers.
I don’t know what the big deal [...]

This Doomsday Clock doesn’t look so scary to me. You think they’d put flames around it, or have it dripping with blood or something.

Red River - I agree with everything Roger Ebert says, that Red River is a film that captures “the exhilaration of being on a horse under the big sky with a job to do and a paycheck at the other end. [It is] one of the greatest of all Westerns…”
It’s a bit chauvinist in its [...]

United 93 - You might not need to see this movie about the plane that was hijacked and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001. But after watching it, I felt closer to the events of that day than I did when they actually happened.
I don’t know if I’ll ever watch it [...]

An Inconvenient Truth - I know, this isn’t really a movie. It’s a message about global warming and the end of the world in the form of a presentation given by Al Gore. But it’s solid science and it’s still worth watching — even if you think you already know everything about global warming.
My only [...]

Hot showers. I recently read this passage in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which reminded of its luxury that does wonders:
When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this [a shower] will be one of the first luxuries to go. The [...]

I’m not sure how many movies I saw this year. Probably somewhere between 60 and 70. I saw about 30 of them at my local multiplex. (That number would be lower if it wasn’t for the many free tickets I received; I have no love for the multiplex movie theatre.) These aren’t the best movies [...]

Here’s a 17-minute audio magazine from CBC Radio that may be of interest to some Pod-people.
The much-anticipated Apple iPhone is a beautiful thing. And it will revolutionize the world of mobile phones. It will also become obsolete in a few years, and to some, that’s the dirty little secret Apple doesn’t want you to know.