I thought about going to see this one when it came out, but somehow missed it. I regret that now; I imagine this movie must be creepy as hell in the theater.

There are two stars in 1408. One is John Cusack, in a role that seems pretty comfortable for him, and the other is a room (suite, actually) on the 14th floor of a New York hotel.

As the movie opens we see Cusack going through the motions of being a successful writer. His heart doesn't seem to be in it though, and writing about haunted tourist attractions seems to be unfulfilling for him. (As I suppose it would be.)

That all changes when he receives a mysterious postcard mentioning a hotel room. He calls to inquire about it and is rebuffed. Some legal wrangling gets him into the hotel and in the office of the manager (Samuel Jackson), who does his best to talk Cusack out of staying in the room.

This is also effective at creating the tension and creepy atmosphere that pervades the rest of the film. Since this is a horror movie, John Cusack ignores all the warnings (complete with photographs and a truly improbable amount of documentation) about the room, and checks in.

The rest of the movie details what happens in the room.

"1408" is based on a short story by Stephen King. I have not read the story, but there are echoes of The Shining here. To be sure it isn't quite on the level of that movie, but it is still effectively creepy, without being completely over the top like some of his screen adaptations can be.

Gore is minimal; most of the torment inflicted on him is psychological, but profound. Halfway through the movie I thought that if I was in his shoes I could tough it out; towards the end I was not so sure.

This is a good movie for horror buffs, Stephen King fans, and people who have always thought hotels were vaguely creepy. It isn't necessarily a good movie for fans of John Cusack; he isn't given much opportunity to be handsome or charming here, though he is very convincingly freaked out by his stay in the hotel.

Not for kids, unless you want them sleeping with you until they turn 18.

Sunshine is a disaster in three acts.

It starts off as the most promising sci-fi film I have seen in a long time, something to rival 2001 and Solaris (the original Soviet film, not the Clooneyized one of a few years ago). It degenerates in its second act into a psychological thriller set in space, and then somehow, inexplicably, becomes a slasher film in its third.

This should not stop you from seeing it.

The premise of the movie is that the sun is dying. It's not explained why, but we meet a bunch of scientists who are flying to the sun to drop a giant bomb into it, which will re-ignite the sun. They are not the first crew to attempt this; an earlier voyage resulted in, well, nothing. No one knows what happened to them.

Along the way there is some squabbling, and a fair amount of physicality between people who would have (one assumes) been carefully chosen for this sort of thing. But some terrible things happen (somewhat plausibly), and the mission is suddenly in jeopardy. Difficult decisions are made, and it looks like everything will turn out ok after all, for some value of "ok".

But then, something ridiculous happens. I won't reveal what. I really think the film would have worked a lot better if the last third of it was excised and the rest expanded, but the movie is what it is.

In the end, everything gets resolved, and the impression we're left with is a deeply flawed but beautiful movie, tense and at times almost psychedelic. This is a good movie that could have been great. It's still worth renting.

Children should not see this. No sex, but plenty of violence.

I love Robert Downey Jr. In a totally non-gay way. But I was a little nervous about going to see this, because I'd heard that there's kind of a political undertone to the movie. Those of us who don't believe that Dick Cheney eats babies tend to find Hollywood's expression of political sentiments to range from jarring to downright offensive, so I had some misgivings about that.

But while the opening of the movie does take place in Afghanistan, and is pretty violent, I did not take that away from it at all. Downey plays Tony Stark, an obscenely rich playboy who owns a weapons company. He is travelling to a war zone to do a weapons demonstration (these are generally done stateside, but ok) and his convoy is ambushed and he is taken prisoner.

He's held in a cave, and is ordered to build a weapon. What he builds instead, as anyone who has seen the trailer knows, is a flying suit. What you're wondering is: how cool is the suit on a scale of one to ten?

The suit goes to 11.

It completely kicks ass. The prototype he builds is kind of like a suit of armor that shoots rockets and flames, which would be cool enough, but the finished model he works on when he gets home can do things that fighter planes can't. (And likely never will).

As for the supposed political undercurrent of the movie, there is a conflict between him and the co-owner of the company (Jeff Bridges, in a very un-Dude role), and it turns out that the weapons company has been engaged in unethical conduct. So Stark (as Iron Man) does some flying around attempting to right the wrongs that have been done without his knowledge. If the movie criticizes anything, it's corporate sleazedom. I have no problem with that.

There's a subplot involving tension between him and his assistant, Pepper Potts (played by Gwyneth Paltrow). Ms. Paltrow, in spite of her recent habit of making idiotic comments to the foreign press, is very likeable here, and I enjoyed her portrayal of the character. I thought she might be irritating. I was wrong.

Overall the movie is nearly flawless for what it is -- a completely kick-ass action movie -- and only drags a bit towards the and as Stark battles his nemesis in a collection of scenes that recalled, more than anything else, that horrible Transformers movie that came out last year.

There's a sex scene early on but I can't remember if there was any nudity (probably not), and it's more comical than erotic. There's plenty of violence but little actual gore. I'd say you could get away with bringing teenagers to this (they've seen worse), but leave small children at home. It will scare the bejeezus out of them.

I wasn't going to watch this one because the trailer looked kind of dumb. But I stumbled across a review of it that made it sound pretty decent, and I thought I'd check it out. It might have also had the words "naked" and "Angelina Jolie" in it. I can't remember.

The movie is so full of twists and turns that I'm not sure that I could even describe what happened in it if I wanted to. But, in a nutshell:

Someone is murdered in Montreal. Since Canada has no competent policemen, Angelia Jolie (who works for the FBI) is flown up from Washington to investigate the crime. Why she does this is never adequately explained; maybe she has some great reputation, but the ending of the movie would seem to discount that explanation. But anyway:

For awhile things more or less follow the usual pattern. Dead person turns up, detectives seek clues, people stare at pictures of mangled people and mutter to themselves, people have trouble sleeping, another dead person turns up, etc.

Things get either interesting or ridiculous (depending on your point of view) once the movie starts identifying suspects. It then becomes a sort of shell game while these people are shuffled around; is it this guy? Is it that guy? Did the guy who was just killed and we think did it really do it? Maybe not? Are there really FBI agents this hot?

Which brings me to the most important topic in this review: Angelina Jolie is naked. Not only is she naked, she apparently enjoys being dry-humped on top of broken glass. I have never tested out this technique, but I'm thinking it might not be quite as effective as it is in the movie. Still, Angelina is looking good, and we get to see quite a bit of her.

The rest of the cast was competent, if not particularly outstanding. I believe two of them were native French speakers (though probably not Canadian), and the rest (wisely) did not attempt to affect a rrrrrrrridiculous French accent.

Worth a rental, but not suitable for kids to watch.

Most of the movies that make it over here from the UK are wacky comedies. Nearly all, in fact. So I wanted to check this one out. It is also a nice addition to the canon of skinhead films -- American History X and Romper Stomper being the other two that come to mind.

This movie isn't quite as dark as the other two, although it has its tense, uncomfortable, and even violent moments. This could be because unlike the others, which were basically cautionary morality tales about bigotry, this is semi-autobiographical.

The story traces a period in the childhood of the main character, whose father was killed in the Falklands War during the early 80s. Living alone with his mother, he is befriended by a gang of local skins, a relatively harmless if rowdy bunch of guys. He is initiated into their gang by having his head shaved and buying clothes to fit in -- and I have to say the clothes at least are an improvement.

There are two major dramatic arcs, one involving his character and his development from a (relatively) innocent and naive child into, well, something short of a man but less naive certainly. The other involves the degeneration of the gang into violence -- this thread mirroring the other two films I mentioned.

Having not grown up in England, I couldn't say for sure that the details in the film are accurate, but they smack of authenticity to me, and there is a considerable eye to detail. The clothes, the makeup, the hair (oh my god the hair) ... this movie will take you back even if you weren't there.

Unlike the other two movies, it ends on an upbeat note, and manages not to seem too contrived while it does it -- the bad people in the movie do get a bit of a pass on their indiscretions, I have to say -- and was a very interesting (and presumably fairly accurate) look at the skinhead movement during the 1980s.

Recommended for film buffs, Anglophiles, and Gen X'ers.

I'm not much for musicals, really. I'd also never seen Sweeney Todd performed; all I knew of the story I'd gleaned from watching the previews for this movie. I did learn reading an early review that the story itself had been around since the mid-1800s -- so there is some history here as well. Johnny Depp is indisputably one of our generation's best actors, so I had to go see it.

First observation is that there is a lot of singing. This isn't a movie with songs in it, it's a bunch of songs that tell a story. I assume the structure of the film is very close to that of the musical.

There are bits of dark humor scattered throughout, enough to provoke chuckles from more literate members of the audience. Mostly though, there are songs about madness and revenge and thwarted love... and razors. Johnny Depp in the present (though not in flashbacks) seems incapable of any kind of warmth towards anyone, but does gaze lovingly upon (and sing about) his collection of silver straight razors. It was touching, it was.

But soon enough he is using the razors and singing a bit less, cracking jokes about very close shaves -- and I'm not sure how he was paying his rent because he never did seem to collect very much money. He reaches a business arrangement with his downstairs neighbor, played by Helena Bonham Carter, to make use of his, er, former clients.

HBC is in typical form here, with very pale makeup and breasts bursting from some sort of corset, but whether it's because of the sets or the makeup or the general shadiness of her character, she isn't all that appealing. Mr. Todd does not seem very interested in her either, though she certainly is in him. He is interested only in revenge.

And right now you're wondering if I'll give the end of the movie away. No. But there were some twists toward the end I wasn't expecting, and the resolution is probably a nod to Shakespeare.

Overall a very, very dark movie which I don't think will do particularly well commercially. It's completely unsuitable for children (don't even think about it), a horrible date movie (almost certainly), not something teenagers will be interested in, and even something (thanks to the gratuitous throat-slashery) that will put off a lot of Johnny Depp fans. I'm a little unclear on how this got made, or secured the kind of budget that it clearly commanded.

But maybe they were just after Oscar nominations -- and I think it stands a good chance of landing a few of those.

I think if you read this review and think to yourself "wow I wonder if I should go see that", you probably should. Normal people (I am not one of them, sadly) can probably just rent this.

I generally find Will Smith mildly irritating. He has this kind of over the top, loud, obnoxious screen persona in many of his movies that just rubs me the wrong way. So I was a little concerned when I heard that he had been cast in a movie as the last man alive. The whole movie would necessarily revolve around his character. Could he possibly pull that off?

The answer, surprisingly, is yes. There were some flashback scenes that I didn't think worked quite as well as they could have -- though they did work -- but the meat of the movie, Will Smith wandering around a completely deserted Manhattan, is so brilliantly done that that alone is the worth the price of a movie ticket.

We discover, through the flashbacks, how Will Smith came to find himself in this situation. He wanders the streets of Manhattan by day hunting deer (somewhat ineffectively I must say) and looting apartments. Which doesn't seem like stealing, since everyone is gone.

While this goes on we watch him have conversations with animals and mannequins and other inanimate objects, and watch the slow unravelling of his mind. And if the scenes of Manhattan devoid of people and full of wildlife are worth the cost of the ticket, Will Smith's performance of his psychological deterioration is what makes this a movie people will come back to when those effects are no longer impressive.

Much has been said in other reviews about how the first two thirds of this film are great and how the ending was horrible. I waited awhile to write this review to see how it sat with me after a few days, and I have to say I disagree about it being horrible. I don't even feel like it was tacked on. It was a bit inconsistent in tone, but I think that was actually necessary if there was going to be any sort of dramatic resolution. I have not read the book the movie was based on, so maybe I'd feel differently if I had. But what I CAN tell you is this: this is one of the best movies of 2007, and worth paying to see in the theater. It will not be the same on your television set.

Go check it out.

(Rated R for disturbing zombie-related violence. Leave your kids at home.)

I've been complaining lately that the only good horror movies coming out are Asian imports. Nearly all the Hollywood product we've been getting is either torture porn or remakes of movies that kind of sucked the first time around.

So I was intrigued when I heard that someone was making a movie out of "The Mist", a fairly obscure (but creepy) Stephen King short story.

The movie, like the story, takes place almost entirely in a store. While a man is there with his son a mysterious mist rolls in. The movie is partly about this mist, what it contains, and where it came from. It is also even more about how people act under stress, and the nature of man. (King's view on this is fairly cynical, but he does make a compelling case here given the cast at hand.)

The effects were good, fairly CGI-heavy for a King adaptation, but not really distracting with a couple exceptions. There is some gore that seemed a bit gratuitous to me, only because the horror involved here is chiefly psychological. There are very few "boo!" moments, and not very many deliberate gross-out shots. What the movie does have in spades is the development of a sense of creeping dread, of the inescapable.

I'd been warned that the ending of the movie was not quite what we've come to expect out of Hollywood films. Judging by the grumbling I heard around me in the theater, people expected this movie about the complete destruction of a large swath of (probably) Maine to end with birds chirping and people holding hands. It does not.

And reflecting on the last scene, I considered what a "horror" movie really is. This one completely nailed it.

This is the followup to the abysmal "House of 1,000 Corpses" directed by Rob Zombie. Many of the characters appeared in the first film and reappear here to be given a more sympathetic treatment, although it takes a sociopathic streak to sympathize with these people too much. And that right there is the movie's biggest flaw.

More than anything I can think of since "Natural Born Killers", this movie glorifies murder. None of these people's backstories are filled out to the point where we feel that we can understand their motivations; they just enjoy killing people. It's like a sport to them.

Opposing them this time around is the brother of a sheriff (a minor character) who was killed in the first film. The new cop is a crazier, meaner version of the old one, and may be just as nuts as the people he's hunting. He makes many religion-laced speeches about killing people. It's possible that Rob Zombie is trying to make a moral equivalence argument here about Satanism and murder being no worse than the ideals of God and Law, or maybe he's just thumbing his nose at everybody. Hard to say. He's not the most coherent writer, of songs or of movies.

Like his music though, this is a testosterone-fueled, ass-kicking, sick, twisted ride. There are disturbing images (not just gore but stuff involving a horny clown with unnecessarily nasty teeth), gratuitous sex and nudity, scenes of torture, and a whole lot of pointless violence. Rob Zombie's wife Sheri Moon Zombie is in this again, showing off her ass even more blatantly than the first movie. (Which is saying something.)

The soundtrack is excellent, except the use of that freaking awful "Rock On" song from the 80s that makes me want to hurt somebody. Not with an axe or anything. OK, maybe a little axe.

I would recommend this movie to hardcore horror fans (who may recognize a few movie references) or to Rob Zombie fanatics, and to nobody else. Not even as a rental. And do not, for the love of God, let any children watch it.

[SPOILER ALERT]

OK, so the movie is actually called "30 Days of Night". The premise is that during its annual month of darkness, a group of vampires invades the town of Barrow, Alaska, terrorizing it for the entire month. An intriguing idea for a movie, really.

And before I start in on it, let me say that it's done pretty well. The vampires are creepy and there is some real tension. There are also some excellent moments of gratuitous vampire-slaughtering. But overall, I don't think it's enough to entirely distract from the problems with the movie.

These include, but are by no means limited to:

- The vampires can smell people's blood, but cannot find six people holed up in a house. In a town with like four dozen houses in it. And the people can't bathe. Or flush the toilet.

- They spend two weeks in an attic. What do they eat?

- The opening credit says that the town is hundreds of miles from anything, and there is no road into Barrow. (All this is apparently true). So how do the vampires get there? Do they walk?

- The vampires can move at amazing speeds, even catching up to cars, but when people run from them, they shuffle around like zombies.

- People who cannot grow facial hair, shouldn't.

- On a related note, Josh Hartnett is too young to be a sheriff.

- Why did the vampires kill everybody in the first ten minutes they attacked the town, then spend weeks looking for the dozen or so they missed? The idea is to eat, yes?

- The chief effect of being immortal in this movie seems to be to make people stupid and suffer from poor hygiene.

- And screech a lot. That screeching has to stop.

- There was absolutely no nudity in this movie.

I was intrigued by this because it had Viggo Mortensen in it, which I haven't seen in anything except LoTR. Well, there was some movie with a horse, but it was so ridiculous I shut it off.

Viggo plays Tom Stall, a guy who owns a diner in a small town. He foils a holdup in a suspiciously efficient fashion and this attracts the attention of some scary people from Philadelphia. The biggest surprise in this for me was Ed Harris playing a gangster. I wouldn't have thought he could pull it off, but he was very creepy.

The movie progresses and plays with us a bit, making us wonder if Tom really is who he says he is; the gangsters certainly seem to think he's somebody else. Eventually we found out, of course.

Before that happens though, we get to see Maria Bello in a cheerleader outfit. And all I really have to say about that is this would have been a three star movie otherwise.

I thought some of the acting was rough in spots, particularly the teenage son, and it got off to a slow start, but overall it was a well constructed movie and the family dynamics were interesting.

A couple unnecessarily graphic scenes involving gunshot wounds and some fairly explicit sex make this unsuitable for kids to watch.

I've heard people rave about this movie for a long time, but just got around to watching it. I'm giving it three stars because while it wasn't outstanding, and certainly wasn't consistent, it was memorable. There were some great characters here.

I am however tempted to knock a star off of it because after the credits rolled I was left with several questions, such as:

1) How did these two guys decide to start killing people? Was it a recent thing? If not, why did no one notice before?

2) Why does Il Duce shoot at them?

3) Did the FBI guy have to be so gay?

4) No, really. I don't think Elton John, if he was in the FBI, would be half that gay.

5) Were the courtroom speech AND the news clips both required, do you think?

Overall it was a good flick, very much in the mold of Tarantino, and a fairly enjoyable rental. I still don't get what all the raving is about though.

Believe it or not, I just watched this movie for the first time tonight. It's a movie everyone is expected to have seen already, and there are a few disturbing things in it that everyone seems to somehow know about.

One thing that surprised me was Burt Reynold's performance in the early part of the movie, which was sort of surreal. He seemed to be channeling Brando doing an imitation of Captain Kirk. As if the movie wasn't freaky enough.

The rough plot of the movie is as follows: four guys from the city decide to go canoeing, led by a semi-crazy survivalist type (Reynolds/Brando/Kirk). Things go as horribly wrong as they possibly could.

The locals are played convincingly by actual hill people from the Appalachians. After watching this movie you will have a serious aversion to canoes, and an urge to go make that appointment with your dentist to get your teeth cleaned. I'm calling them tomorrow.

I thought the movie was very well done, actually, and the infamous "squeal like a pig" scene was as tasteful as it could have been. (Still, this is NOT something that kids should watch. Ever.) I'd give it four stars except some of the paddling on the river seemed awfully drawn out, and it could have used a bit more dialogue.

Nice hotel and the Internet finally works. Went out for a drive to Silver Falls State Park, phenomenal scenery, spent some time walking around in there. (And only saw about 1% of what there was to see.)

Came back to Salem and picked a Mexican place at random -- best Mexican food I have ever eaten.

So far, I like it.

It'd get 5 stars but it's kind of annoying that half the town's on one side of I-5 and the other's on the other side. That's kind of retarded. Otherwise though, real nice.

Oh and gas for $2.79 a gallon, AND someone else pumps it for you. Niiiiice, as Borat would say.

Well I broke down and went to see the Transformers movie.

First the good news: it isn't terrible.

The bad news: it's too long. It's disjointed. The plot is incoherent, the character development is inconsistent, and the action sequences are choppy.

It is, however, very funny in spots. The trouble is those spots are spread too far apart, and it sometimes seems to be taking itself seriously, which is a bad move. But then the movie seems to realize how ridiculous it is and gets on with it.

I'd give it three stars if it wasn't so damn long. Two and a half hours? Come on. The effects are impressive, but the novelty of watching mechanical objects morph into homicidal robots wears off after the first 45 minutes or so. The rest of the movie is spent hoping that Megan Fox will take off her shirt (she doesn't) and wishing that they'd destroy that damn cube so everyone can go home.

However, if you can manage to shut your brain off long enough to sit through the movie, there are lots of explosions, and cool robots, and a really attractive brunette. For hardcore fans, this is a must-see. Everyone else can netflix it.

As some of you already know, I like waffles. I like all kinds of breakfast food, provided it can be slathered in butter and/or maple syrup.

I'm also a lazy bastard, so when I saw this box of Eggo cereal in the store, I had to buy it. Imagine: pouring yourself a bowl of minature waffles. No fuss with the cooking, no freezer burned waffles that you just bought last week (what's up with that anyway?), no driving to IHOP.

So tonight I took the box out and got down to business. Immediately upon opening the bag I was assaulted by a violent smell that was vaguely maple-ish but not anything that might occur in nature. I waved the box around, saying "arg!" and hoped that the smell would settle down a bit. It did, but it was still pretty powerful.

I poured myself a bowl and walked back into my office and sat down. The smell was still present and had mutated into something very strange, something odd and entirely un-food-like. Well, they aren't scoring any points with this smell, I thought.

I scooped up a spoonful of them and chewed and, holy crap, they really do taste like little waffles. They're even buttery. How do they DO that? The second and third spoonfuls were pretty good also. After that, the novelty started to wear off.

As I was getting to the bottom of the bowl, it started to seem kind of disturbing that they were buttery, and I checked the surface of the milk for an oily sheen. I didn't see one, but the mouth feel of these things is downright bizarre. They are crunchy, but leave behind this vaguely greasy (and buttery, I suppose) feeling in your mouth.

Nevermind that; I am a professional and I must finish my analysis. I slurped the milk down and I was done.

Urp. Maple burps. Oh, I hope this isn't going to be an ongoing thing.

Overall they were a little disappointing. As a convincing simulation of miniature waffles with a shelf life of a year, I suppose they were sort of impressive. As a meal that I might like to have every day, not so much. I think it's going to be back to Honeycomb for me. I'm not sure I'll even finish the box.

Urp.

It would be tough for me to describe this movie too much without giving away major elements of the plot, but Chow Yun-Fat is the Chinese emperor, Li Gong is his wife, and they have a strained relationship. He has three sons, one by a different woman.

The movie has martial arts elements but at its core is not a martial arts film. Watching it reminded me of Shakespeare more than anything else.

Its use of color was similar to "Hero" (same director, Yimou Zhang). This makes for fascinating visuals, but I find it somewhat contrived in some scenes and a bit of a distraction -- though it does make it easier to figure out what the hell is going on in some of the larger battle scenes.

This is a very ambitious movie on a grand scale, both in terms of plot and sets. Apparently a thousand actual soldiers were used during the fight scenes, and the sets were not computer generated, they were actually built. Amazing scenery.

Speaking of which, it also has the jiggliest Chinese women I have ever seen in my life. I'm not sure why cleavage has been so neglected in Asian cinema up until now, but he really makes a run at correcting for this historic injustice. No topless scenes, but there is plenty of eye candy here.

Ultimately that's why this gets three stars instead of four. Some people say this is a masterpiece, and it probably could have been, but it comes off as kind of gimmicky to me. Some of the visual elements draw the viewer's attention away from the story.

Still, it's worth a rental. Check it out.

I've always been fascinated with Vikings. I can read runes and once tried to learn Old Norse. So when I found out there was a new movie coming out with Vikings in it, I knew I'd have to watch it.

The good news: there's Vikings. The bad news: they have horns. They arrive in a gigantic boat, with horses. And a fancy sled (several, maybe). The attention to weapons was fairly good though. It's true that Vikings would have travelled more heavily armed than Indians. What isn't realistic is that the Vikings always seemed to always outnumber the Indians -- why? And I was not previously aware that the Vikings landed in British Columbia. The resulting trekking around in the mountains is very dramatic, but can't help drawing unflattering comparisons to Lord of the Rings.

Unfortunately that was just one of many plotholes here. Karl Urban stars in the movie, and if you are a person of the female persuasion who gets all hot and bothered at the thought of Karl Urban walking around with his shirt off, then this might be your thing.

OK. The story: he is along as a child on a Viking raid when some unspecified calamity befalls the ship (a fire? an attack? a storm?); he is discovered by an Indian woman who adopts him, and he is raised as one of their own. He's never quite accepted by the other Indians, who won't let him join in their Indian games.

But then one foggy night the Vikings come back and it's up to him (the movie is a bit unclear on why) to fight them all singlehanded.

If you have to ask whether he is successful, you haven't seen very many movies. There is of course also a cute Indian chick. Unfortunately, the only nudity in the movie is what I've already described -- although there was one unintentional laugh when one of the male characters walks by the camera wearing a lioncloth and shows us a little bit more than the director was probably going for.

Overall, a decent action flick. Some reviews I've read talked about all the gore; it was violent in a jerky, blurry sort of way though. I got the feeling they saved on effects by not showing any of them for more than a split second. Sure, heads got chopped off and flew or rolled away, but you can probably see more gore in a video game. It's very violent, but in almost a cartoonish sort of way.

If you've seen The Thirteenth Warrior (starring Antonio Banderas as an Arab with an inexplicable Spanish accent), then you have already seen this done better. Don't bother seeing it in the theater. The best I can say about it is that it's pretty short and it wasn't terrible.

I'm one of about a dozen people, apparently, who didn't particularly care for Sin City. 300 is another adaptation of a graphic novel by the same author, done in a very similar style.

The problems that plagued the first movie centered around dialogue; what works in a comic book sounds ridiculous on screen. It's possible, I guess, to ignore this and to just enjoy the movie as a comic book come to life. I couldn't quite make that jump during Sin City, but with 300 it's easier to do.

The character development is selective (aside from a handful of people, there is no effort at all at it, which works fine), but more effective than in the last movie. The movie itself centers around the famous battle at Thermopylae in 480 BC. The outcome of the battle is never in doubt for the viewer. There is much testosterone-soaked chest thumping about honor, and some speeches about freedom which seem oddly out of place in a society where boys are taken from their families at seven years old and subjected to some pretty brutal military training.

There's also an interesting subplot involving whether the king has authority to fight a war without the authorization of the council, with various nefarious plottings to undermine his efforts. Different people will find that this resonates with their opinions on a different war, well, differently, but as the movie follows the graphic novel very closely and the graphic novel predates the war we find ourselves embroiled in, it's hard to say whether that's intentional or not. Of course, if I was making a pro-war movie in Hollywood these days, I'd deny it too.

Overall, worth a watch, and even the price of admission at the theater. Not terribly accurate on weapons and tactics or anything else, but if you walk in expecting to watch a movie based on a comic book based on a movie based on historical events, then you will get exactly what you want.

Oh, and there's nudity. Hooray for nudity.

If you only take one thing away from this review it should be this: do not take children to see this movie. It has a little girl in it, yes. Yours should not have to see the things she sees. Trust me on this.

I watch a lot of movies. Every once in awhile one comes along that defies categorization. This is a foreign film: shot and set in Spain, with subtitles. It has strong elements of horror. It is, maybe more than anything, a fantasy movie. Or is it?

The main character is a girl of 11. Her mother is pregnant, and we are introduced to the father, who very quickly establishes himself as an unpleasant sort of person. We meet the servants taking care of the house, and see the difficulties the mother is facing with her second pregnancy.

There is much conflict within the family, and with rebels holed up in the surrounding hills. The father is a captain in the Spanish army, I believe -- they seemed a bit vague on these details -- and thoroughly fascist. When he talks about wiping out the rebels, he means exactly that.

While all this is going on (and it would make a compelling movie by itself), the daughter finds herself introduced to a number of increasingly bizarre creatures. Are these in her imagination or are they real? Can she do what they are asking her to do? Should she trust them?

I can't tell you much more without giving parts of the movie away, but this was a nearly flawless film. The casting was brilliant, the acting was top-notch, the writing was unusually good. The effects were outstanding -- but this was one flaw. There were some scenes that I thought were unnecessarily graphic. This is not a movie for children (and wouldn't be regardless), but some of these images will bother adults as well.

The other problem, and I doubt many people will have this same perception, was that the nasty fascist guy, observed from just the right angle, looks just like Steve Carell (the guy from The 40 Year Old Virgin). I found that a bit jarring. This is a VERY un-Carell role.

In a movie like this there is a certain worry that after it's all been set up, they will find some way to completely screw up the ending. They didn't. It is absolutely perfect. When the credits roll you won't know whether you should be smiling or crying, and that is exactly the effect the director was going for.

This just went into wide distribution in the US, and will not be in theaters long. It is worth seeing in the theater.