year of 300

I always say people don't read enough books, and I claim to be a movie aficionado, so I've decided to put my money where my mouth is. I plan to watch at least 250 movies and finish at least 50 books during 2007. This adds up to 300 works that I intend to complete and list on this blog in the order I finish them (perhaps with short comments or reviews). One of the movies I watch will undoubtedly be Frank Miller's 300, which is scheduled for release during 2007.

So, as of 12/31/07, I have completed 51 books and 173 movies for a total of 224 items. I didn't quite make it :( I think I'm going to have to register the url 15-months-of-300.com.

On 6/29/08, I completed my 222nd movie and 300th item, overall. The goal was to read 50 books and 250 movies, though, so I haven't finished the movie part, yet (28 left, as of today).

On 9/6/08, I completed my 250th movie. I have now officially finished the original project.

Current count: 177 books + 431 movies = 608 complete

Completed: 1/1/07	Stephen Hawking - The Theory of Everything	Excellent book. Slightly dated, as the lectures were originally given in 1996. Discusses string theories, including heterotic string theory, but doesn't cover M-theory.
1/1/07	Harvard Business Review on Innovation	Collection of HBR articles on innovation. Some articles were better than others.
1/3/07	Thomas Elliott Berry - The Most Common Mistakes in English Usage	Though a bit dated, this book contains the best and most comprehensive set of English grammar and usage lessons I have ever read.
1/5/07	Barack Obama - The Audacity of Hope	I pray that we will have a McCain vs. Obama election. They seem to be the two best candidates out there at this point.
1/6/07	Children of Men	Lots of biblical symbolism. I feel almost inspired to read the book.
1/6/07	Reservoir Dogs	I had never seen this before.
1/12/07	Freedom Writers	This has a line better than, "I wanna chicken -- a whole one." Yes, better.
1/13/07	Friedrich Nietzsche - The Antichrist	At one point he describes Christians as "crafty, stealthy, invisible, anaemic vampires." He also blames Martin Luther for ending the Renaissance. Although Nietzsche was crazy, he was also sometimes brilliant.
1/13/07	The Pursuit of Happyness	Good old San Francisco of 1981. Will Smith's real kid is a pretty good actor.
1/13/07	Curse of the Golden Flower	Much bloodier than I expected. It was even more colorful than Hero, if that's possible.
1/15/07	Blood Diamond	Lots of people were talking during the movie. I was listening to what they were saying. I'm somewhat embarrassed to have the same hobby these people have. The movie was OK.
1/15/07	Love Story	Cheesy 70s clothes, but still an excellent movie.
1/15/07	Colley - What is Corporate Governance?	This was a good overview, but it was very, very slow and boring reading. It's hard to get interested in best practices in corporate governance, which is essentially what this book covers.
1/17/07	Ferri - All About Asset Allocation	This is the best of many books I have read about investing. Asset allocation accounts for 90% of portfolio performance, and this book explains it well.
1/17/07	Powell - Stuff You Should Have Learned at School	A bit simplistic. The parts about art and music were useful to me.
1/21/07	Pan's Labyrinth	Very good movie. Kind of a Spanish Chronicles of Narnia.
1/21/07	The Queen	The parts about what Tony Blair learned from Princess Diana's death were more interesting than the parts actually about Diana or the queen.
1/21/07	Borgenicht - The Worst Case Scenario Almanac: History	The best part was the beginning, where the book teaches you how to fight a sabertooth tiger.
1/21/07	Hume - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion	Hume's writings offer the clearest explanation of, and argument for, intelligent design. They also offer some of the better developed counterarguments. It is easy to detect an early deist strain in this book, as well as much of the foundation for Darwin's work on evolution. It is altogether a seminal piece.
1/22/07	Harvard Business Review on Strategies for Growth	This collection had several good articles but the last one on "marketspace" vs. "marketplace" was very dated.
1/22/07	The Quiet American	The book was better than the movie. Michael Caine was awesome. The girl who played Phuong can't act at all.
1/24/07	Sneakers	I think every famous actor is in this movie. Even James Earl Jones. James Earl Jones!
1/27/07	Volver	Pedro Almodóvar is one of the greatest living directors. I am now officially in love with Penelope Cruz.
1/27/07	Smokin' Aces	Should have had either more or less realism. It had just the wrong amount. I saw it as a bad cross between Three Kings and Face Off. Yeah, the FBI and CIA have caused all the world's problems, and if they'd just leave the poor criminals alone, everything would be fine.
1/27/07	Truman	An excellent biography -- one of the best I've ever read. I think Truman was the most important president of the 20th century.
1/30/07	The Last King of Scotland	Excellent acting by Forest Whitaker; the best I've seen in a while.
2/3/07	Notes on a Scandal	Judi Dench is great. This movie did a good job of making a pretty absurd plot seem believable, but British schoolchildren just don't seem as bad as American ones, even when they're fighting or bringing crack to school.
2/3/07	Babel	All I can say about this movie is, "that was a lot of naked Japanese girl." I propose an alternate title for Babel -- Crash: International Edition.
2/4/07	David Vise, Mark Malseed - The Google Story	Thanks, Amy, for loaning me the majority of the audiobook. I finished it regular-style. Remind me to give you the CDs back.
2/4/07	Letters From Iwo Jima	Ken Watanabe is a great actor. This movie is heavy on symbolism and has the most interesting (realistic?) bombing scenes I can remember. There was one shot of CG amphibious assault vehicles that looked annoyingly fake.
2/4/07	The Messengers	Although there isn't a single original thing about the plot or premise of this movie, it is well made and pretty scary.
2/6/07	The Machinist	This was a disturbing movie, but quite good. The comparisons to Memento were apt.
2/7/07	Oldboy	Brilliant violence. This reminds of the Beat Takeshi movies, but it's more gritty and faster paced. The characters are equally silent and the violence is equally raw.
2/8/07	The Cincinnati Kid	Much better than watching poker on ESPN2.
2/10/07	District B13	Extreme street walking combined with anti-nuclear weapon rhetoric while exploring the social causes of the riots in Paris a couple years ago. Could have been better. While I was watching it I just kept thinking, "Was Luc Besson really trying to make a serious movie about hoodlum acrobats?"
2/10/07	Hannibal Rising	Basically this movie tries to convince us that Hannibal Lecter is jacked up in the head because he saw Memoirs of a Geisha.
2/10/07	Babette's Feast	My small, cold, Scandinavian wedding (feast). Allegedly spawned the foodie-film genre.
2/10/07	The Passion of Joan of Arc	I wish they still made silent movies.
2/10/07	Intermezzo	The 1939 US remake. Sadly, it was not "the greatest love story of all time." Every actor seemed to have a bizarre, subtle accent.
2/11/07	Shop Girl	Jason Schwartzman's white Helmut Lang suit is the best part of this movie.
2/11/07	Michaelson - Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers; 50 Strategic Rules	This guy Michaelson may be an expert on translating Sun Tzu, but his is a master of neithor warfare nor the art of metaphor. He has butchered and trivialized a great work.
2/11/07	Blondes Have More Guns	Despite its impressive powers of camp and record-setting number of puns, this movie still isn't enjoyable.
2/13/07	Welcome to Sarajevo	A depressing movie. It had a lot of that movie-inside-a-movie kind of camera work and it was very appropriate, given the theme.
2/13/07	Hubben - Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Kafka	This was a very good book. Explains the logical connection in thought between these four influential people. I had never really considered Dostoevsky a great intellect beyond his skill as a novelist, but he most certainly was.
2/16/07	Employee of the Month	Had 4 or 5 funny lines.
2/18/07	Bridge to Terabithia	Very good movie. The religious symbolism was complex, and somewhat hard to understand, but very interesting. It was also My Girl for a younger generation.
2/19/07	The Painted Veil	Unlike so many creations of or inspired by W. Somerset Maugham, this movie had not 0 but 3 sympathetic, or even admirable, female characters.
2/19/07	Keegan - The Mask of Command	This book is a perfect example of why Keegan is my favorite military historian. The book is well-researched, well-written, deeply intellectual and thoroughly relevant.
2/20/07	The Man Who Wasn't There	Well made movie. Very sparse, both cinematically and emotionally.
2/21/07	Ballard - Teach Yourself Ajax in 10 Minutes	Uhhh... took longer than 10 minutes.
2/22/07	The Lives of Others	Very German movie. It was about as subtle as a panzer.
2/24/07	A Scanner Darkly	Did a pretty good job of capturing the weirdness of the book.
2/24/07	16 Blocks	I don't think there's ever been a movie where Bruce Willis limped as much as he does in this one.
2/24/07	The Number 23	Captures the essence of the descent into paranoia surprisingly well.
3/3/07	Breach	A decent movie. Chris Cooper carried most of it. Everyone else's acting seemed a little flat.
3/3/07	3 Extremes	Three strange, horrific movies. They were all quite good, especially "Box."
3/3/07	12 Angry Men	This movie should be required viewing before going to work at OnWafer.
3/11/07	300	This movie was epic. I want a spear.
3/17/07	Premonition	This movie was fairly predictable. I think I had a premonition of this whole movie, except it was called Donnie Darko / Deja Vu, and it was better.
3/18/07	The Last Mimzy	Not just for kids. This movie somehow explains the grey sectoid-type alien, Tibbetan mythology, time travel, and Through The Looking Glass.
3/21/07	Zodiac	Takes place all over California. Pretty good movie. References other good movies.
3/24/07	The Hills Have Eyes 2	The first one was better.
3/24/07	Shooter	Dumb pseudo-political commentary mixed with unoriginal movie.
3/24/07	Dead Silence	Totally unoriginal. The climax was basically just a chucky doll and an old lady, neither of which were scary.
3/25/07	Lost and Delirious	Piper Perabo in a lesbian teen schoolgirl movie. It was coyote boring. Then she started screaming out MacBeth and talking to an owl. Then she started fencing. The soundtrack was horrible. 500 stars.
3/25/07	Powell - Mind Games	A lot of very cool tips and techniques. Surprisingly useful.
3/25/07	Hostage	It's hard to buy scenes where Bruce Willis looks "scared." I'm desensitized. I don't believe that can happen, anymore.
3/25/07	Marie Antoinette	Confusing soundtrack, confusing movie. Jason Schwartzman, again, was awesome. This movie feels like Sofia Coppola acting out all her unfulfilled childhood fantasies of playing dressup on a massive scale and having a ginormous tea party.
4/1/07	Blades of Glory	Pretty funny, but not as good as Talladega Nights.
4/7/07	The Reaping	Not bad... had a certain degree of Exorcist awesomeness about it. I wish it had been a little more complex.
4/15/07	Pathfinder	The ending dialogue was a little too cheesy and the movie didn't really have anything original about it.
4/21/07	Hot Fuzz	By the power of grayskull.
4/21/07	On The Beach	Not quite as good as the book, but pretty good.
4/23/07	Reincarnation	I wouldn't say it was "a film to die for," but it was OK.
4/24/07	Levine - Linkers & Loaders	Books like this should be mandatory for anyone learning about programming. Why, oh why, do they ignore the fundamentals of how computers work in favor of obscure language semantics?
4/29/07	The Namesake	My medium-sized, fat, Indian wedding... and divorce.
4/29/07	Dream of a Warrior	Korean people are weird.
4/29/07	Soy Cuba / Ya Kuba	This movie is probably the only piece of high quality communist propaganda I've ever seen.
4/29/07	In the Land of Women	A little bit simplistic, but had a good soundtrack.
5/5/07	H	A decent serial-killer-thriller, but I figured it out early on.
5/5/07	The Flying Scotsman	Chariots of Fire on bikes.
5/5/07	Brazil	This is definitely a movie that should be re-made. It needs to be made exactly like the original but with a higher production value and modern effects.
5/5/07	The Science of Sleep	There are lots of good things about this movie, and its depiction of the French idea of romance is superb, but the plot is weak and the movie suffers because of it.
5/5/07	A Talking Picture	More of a history lesson than a movie, A Talking Picture essentially consists of one poignant and jarring metephor preceded by a supremely boring, yet surprisingly educational, glossy travel log.
5/6/07	Late Spring	An all-around good movie. The acting was good and the direction was better.
5/6/07	Civic Duty	Poorly acted and anti-intellectual, Civic Duty is basically just a grand glorification of political correctness. The movie implies, through poorly drawn metaphor, that the death of political correctness is somehow causing the United States to be unable to differentiate between terrorists and non-terrorists.
5/6/07	Why We Fight	This movie is trite, manipulative, and like the last one I saw, anti-intellectual. The only theme of this movie that was remotely resonant was the one about the dangers of the military industrial complex. This theme was only well described by Eisenhower's speech itself. The next 96 minutes of the movie were an utter waste that I feel might have made me dumber. The rest of the movie was a meandering romp through absurd conspiracy theories, irrelevant statistics, and attempts by various discredited figures to exact their revenge upon their shadowy enemies, namely, truth, intelligence, fact, and informed analysis. This was a movie by the ignorant, arrogant, and manipulative for the ignorant and manipulated.
5/6/07	Bergmann - The Riddle of Gravitation	Although the info in this book is a bit dated (first published in 1968), it was perfect for me as my knowledge of physics is at least 40 years short of being current.
5/13/07	Dragonslayer	A cross between Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, this was something I would have loved when I was about 9 years old.
5/13/07	For Your Consideration	Probably my least favorite of the Christopher Guest movies, but it was a good satire.
5/14/07	The Stone Raft	Too weirdly euro-metaphorical, even for me.
5/15/07	Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance	Not as good as Oldboy, but still compellingly violent.
5/15/07	The Iraq Study Group - The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach	This didn't have as much depth of analysis as I expected, and most of it is pretty bland stuff that you could hear anywhere (and that isn't noticably different from what's already being tried), but there were two ideas that I found interesting: 1) Move various parts of the Iraqi police force inside the Department of Defense and 2) Significantly increase imbedding of US forces in both the Iraqi army and various Iraqi police organizations. Sadly, though, like its title, this book had a lot of words that didn't really say much.
5/26/07	Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End	Not a good movie. I wasn't a huge fan of the first 2, but they were MUCH better than this one.
5/27/07	Tae Guk Gi	Very good movie. I do wonder about the quality of the subtitling, though, as there could have been some subtle meaning nuance lost in the translation which made too many of the scenes of dialogue seem to say exactly the same thing.
5/27/07	Love Hina: Spring Movie	Lots of flying turtles and various kinds of rocket-powered ships.
5/28/07	Love Hina: X'Mas Special	Apparently it's normal to profess your undying love for someone on Christmas in Japan.
5/28/07	28 Weeks Later	Very similar to the first one, and subsequently somewhat unoriginal.
5/28/07	Jesus Camp	This documentary makes some good points about the indoctrination of children, but it makes them poorly and completely fails to compare the evangelicals to two key foils in modern society: 1) learned, traditional Christians, like the Jesuits, and 2) intellectual non-believers.
5/29/07	Waitress	Pretty funny. Kind of a low-calorie version of The Good Girl.
6/1/07	Shrek The Third	The first half was funnier than the second.
6/2/07	Fracture	The "twist" was too obvious, and that would have been OK, because the movie maintained the dramatic tension pretty well, but then the ending was lame.
6/3/07	Knocked Up	Profane and sometimes hilarious.
6/4/07	McInerny - Being Logical	Anyone who has never learned logic formally should read this book. It provides a great introduction in layman's terms.
6/17/07	Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer	Although a bit trifling, it had a couple of funny lines. Shackling Michael Chiklis so much in that big rock suit really detracts from the movie, because he's the best actor in it.
6/17/07	Sex, Lies & Videotape	Fascinating movie. The movie has a sparseness that almost makes James Spader seem comfortable in suburbia.
6/24/07	Evan Almighty	This movie was sort of funny, but the Evan Baxter character was at least as good in Bruce Almighty as he was in this one.
6/29/07	Music and Lyrics	Aside from a few witty lines, this was a pretty vapid movie.
6/30/07	Live Free or Die Hard	The ultimate in ass-kicking.
7/1/07	1408	Very interesting movie. I wish I had re-read Dante before seeing it.
7/3/07	Transformers	More than meets the eye.
7/5/07	Rosemary's Baby	One of the best horror movies I've ever seen. Brilliantly composed and acted.
7/14/07	Ocean's Thirteen	They need to stop making these movies.
7/21/07	Ratatouille	Celebrating French culture while simultaneously belittling it. Brilliant!
7/26/07	Infernal Affairs	Interesting movie. There are a couple of Michael Mann like scenes in this movie from 2004, which has a different ending than The Departed.
7/29/07	Spanglish	Better than I thought it would be. Although Tea Leoni wasn't bad, her character was a little too flat, and the movie suffered because of it. Paz Vega is beautiful.
7/29/07	Sunshine	This movie couldn't decide whether it was a thriller, a science movie, or a psychological drama. It should have opted for the psychological angle. It would have been better. Cillian Murphy is too creepy to be taken seriously.
7/29/07	Florey - Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences	A very enjoyable and clever book.
7/29/07	Rescue Dawn	Amazing story. A much more subtle film than most made nowadays. Christian Bale is awesome in yet another role where he becomes extremely skinny.
7/30/07	The Motel	Sung Kang is pretty good in this movie, which is like a male Welcome to the Dollhouse. It also has a couple of scenes reminiscent of Happyness.
7/30/07	Keegan - Intelligence in War: The value--and limitations--of what the military can learn about the enemy	All of John Keegan's books are excellent, and this is no exception. There are many implications for how the war on terror should be conducted that can be drawn from it.
7/31/07	Sutter - Exceptional C++: 47 Engineering Puzzles, Programming Problems, and Solutions	This was a very interesting book. It has a lot of great stuff on exception handling, encapsulation principles, templates in C++, and the pimpl idiom, among other things.
7/31/07	Home Movie	Some people live in weird houses, with lots of cats. Some people live in tree-houses and talk to spirits. Some people build robots and ski ramps. But only one man raises alligators.
8/2/07	Browning - Hunger for Light	Mediocre, simplistic poems. They are decently composed but mundane and uninspiring.
8/4/07	The Bourne Ultimatum	Lots of shaky camera work but pretty good.
8/7/07	Hemingway - In Our Time	Hemingway is a master of the English language.
8/11/07	Strathern - Spinoza in 90 Minutes	A good introduction to Spinoza. I plan to begin reading two more books about him at once.
8/12/07	Stardust	Loved it.
8/20/07	Collins - The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems	Billy Collins' poetry is always lively and easy to read. In my opinion he's the most accessible of the modern, American poets.
8/20/07	Superbad	Profane and hilarious, in the same vein as Knocked Up, but with a splash of Clueless thrown in.
8/26/07	Rush Hour 3	Similar to the first two.
8/31/07	Shelley - Frankenstein	This was a fantastic book. I had no idea it was so good. It's nothing like the muddled pop-cultural image of the Frankenstein story I had in my mind.
9/1/07	Ali: Fear Eats the Soul	A very good movie. European racism feels very foreign to me.
9/1/07	Disturbia	Why did they spoil the ending? If this had had the Rear Window ending it would have been 2007 times better than it was.
9/2/07	War	Mediocre movie with decent fight scenes.
9/2/07	Ladron Que Roba a Ladron	Timely and topical, this movie was a bit too simplistic, but fairly well acted.
9/3/07	The Invasion	All the reviews of this movie I've read focus on how the movie fails to exploit the exposition of the psychological aspects of the characters and story, but I don't think that was the point. The interesting thing about this movie is the commentary on human nature. This isn't a sci-fi movie, per se, but rather a dystopian fantasy aimed squarely at the American Left. It attempts to explain why you can't simply sue for peace without sacrificing the essences of what it is to be human. Unfortunately, the movie achieves this message incompletely, and where it succeeds, it does so by relying too heavily on topical things and without sufficient nuance or complexity to make the message a lasting one.
9/8/07	The Girl from Monday	A low budget SciFi flick, The Girl from Monday is like a medioce cross between Splash, The Fifth Element, and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
9/8/07	Inland Empire	A classic David Lynch movie in the style of Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, but perhaps a bit easier to decode this time.
9/8/07	3:10 to Yuma	This remake is an update not only to the original movie, but to the genre of the Western itself. Starting out brilliantly, the movie falls apart a bit at the end.
9/8/07	Shoot 'Em Up	Although it was supposed to take place in the US, it felt very European. All in all, a very enjoyable movie.
9/9/07	The Postman	Almost a good movie, but not quite. It was so corny how Kevin Costner kept saying to Abby, "You're so weird!"
9/9/07	Page - Done Deal	Very concise reference. I think this book was a good place to get started in learning about the art of M&A integration.
9/9/07	Death Sentence	John Goodman had the best part in a well-acted and almost, but-not-quite, good movie.
9/9/07	Down in the Valley	This movie was a bit strange, so it was good that Rory Culkin was in it, because he's a bit strange, too.
9/10/07	Chesterton - Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox	This was a very good book. To say that Chesterton is concise is an understatement. It is a testament to his conciseness and skill as a writer that he can use about 140 of the roughly 180 pages of this book just to give background information on Aquinas, which serves as the marinade for the meat of the story, and nonetheless elucidate Aquinas's theology and philosophy brilliantly and thoroughly.
9/16/07	The Simpsons	Like an above average, long episode of the show.
9/18/07	Conrad - Heart of Darkness	This was a fascinating read. Conrad was a master of the art of leaving things unwritten.
9/18/07	Iweala - Beasts of No Nation	A trite and trifling book. This was not as good as Things Fall Apart, which is itself an overrated book. This was the kind of book that an ignorant person reads to assuage the guilt of being both ignorant and priviledged.
9/18/07	Day - Mastering Financial Modelling: A Practitioner's Guide to Applied Corporate Finance	The Hube said it best when he remarked, "There are way too many screenshots." This book was light on theory and long on pictures of other peoples' Excel. I will not be recommending it to my book club.
9/18/07	The Post-Impressionists: Van Gogh	Very informative and concise. Sadly, no picture available.
9/22/07	Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country	A silly book; it cheapened Vonnegut. He was once far too intelligent and insightful to write a book like this.
9/27/07	Balls of Fury	I love Maggie Q.
9/28/07	Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time	Not bad for what it was, which was a sort of exploitation-novel-mystery about an autistic boy.
9/30/07	Across the Universe	This movie was too muddled to be good.
10/7/07	The Kingdom	This was a thoroughly modern movie in its approach to the post-9/11 world. Chris Cooper was excellent. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman were not excellent.
10/17/07	Beyer - Beyer on Speed	Speed numbers are important, but more can still be done with handicapping as well as with wagering strategy.
10/17/07	License to Wed	Not so great.
10/22/07	Nancy Drew	This is all they serve on American Airlines; there weren't even any peanuts.
10/29/07	Mr. Brooks	This was at least an interesting movie, if not exactly a great one.
10/30/07	Run Silent, Run Deep	It's weird to see Burt Lancaster looking... not old... but not young either.
10/30/07	Roth - Everyman	Not Philip Roth's greatest work.
10/31/07	Wilderness	The acting wasn't bad, but the movie had a very low production value and simply wasn't complex enough.
10/31/07	Harvard Business Review on Mergers and Acquisitions	Maybe the reason so many mergers are seen as "failures" is because mergers tend to occur when one company's stock price is inflated. Perhaps this explains the "failure..." Hmmm...
11/2/07	Iron & Silk	This was not a good movie. It was low budget, as well as low quality.
11/2/07	Scoop	Not Woody Allen's best .
11/3/07	Eliana, Eliana	Low budget and moderately boring, this movie also suffered from being poorly directed and having terrible sound quality.
11/4/07	Elizabeth: The Golden Age	Not bad, but perhaps not as good as the first one.
11/4/07	Bad Guy	This was like a cross between Sonatine and Taxi Driver. Brilliant movie.
11/7/07	Everything is Illuminated	So-so.
11/7/07	Battleship Potemkin	Perhaps the greatest propaganda film ever made?
11/7/07	The Darjeeling Limited	This was my favorite Wes Anderson movie since the incomparable Rushmore.
10/7/07	Jung - Synchronicity	Jung was, at times, brialliant, and I lament the loss of the interdisciplinary scholar.
10/7/07	Kotler - A Framework for Marketing Management	This book started out strong but sucked at the end. It felt like the last several chapters were bolted on later, like the one that was about both international marketing and how to structure your marketing department for "internal marketing."
11/8/07	Once Upon a Time in America	Both James Woods and Robert DeNiro were awesome in this movie.
11/10/07	Rasen	Japanese horror movies just seem so unoriginal to me now.
11/10/07	Rampo Noir	Like a film student final project with a bigger budget.
11/10/07	Michael Clayton	Movies with good acting always have at least a fighting chance of being good. This one was pretty decent.
11/10/07	Lions for Lambs	One of the more sophisticated and fair treatments of the war on terror that has come out so far, especially for the big blockbusters. Three small quibbles with an otherwise enjoyable movie: 1) they overemphasized the pax romana/pax americana comparison, 2) while Meryl Streep's charater was critiqued for her lack of committment to truth and honest reporting, she wasn't adequately tagged for her arrogance in thinking she understood everything so much better than everyone else did, 3) while the movie was reasonably balanced, it was too dismissive of Bush, Rice, and current war strategies; the criticisms were a little too broad and vague.
11/10/07	The Booth	I started out thinking, "I can't believe I'm watching another Japanese horror movie." And this wasn't the best one I've ever seen. It was about not forgetting the sins of one's childhood, which is a good thing to think about.
11/12/07	El Final de la Noche	This was like a thriller with no thrills, or a mystery with no mystery. Pretty good acting went largely wasted on a movie with no charisma.
11/14/07	Rottman - World War II Combat Reconnaissance Tactics	Short but very interesting and complete.
11/14/07	Tweek City	Very low budget. Had some good things about it, despite being very unpolished.
11/17/07	Time	Korean chicks are crazy. That's what this movie was about. Sometimes they're so crazy it can get you killed.
11/17/07	Sleeping Dogs Lie	A pretty mediocre movie, but with some well-placed swearing.
11/18/07	Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium	Dustin Hoffman's lisp is weird, and the ending is weird, but the movie had some funny parts.
11/19/07	The Devil Came on Horseback	The genocide in Sudan is atrocious. The UN refuses to do anything serious to stop it, because they don't care, they are afraid, and they are weak. The US should stop the janjaweed and the government in Khartoum, even if it means removing them forcefully
11/22/07	Dan in Real Life	Much better than I expected and very appropriate for Thanksgiving.
11/23/07	The Convent	What a waste of John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve.
11/26/07	Bull - World War II Infantry Tactics (2): Company and Batallion	I really like this series of books. They are concise and have good illustrations.
11/26/07	American Gangster	A solid movie. The acting was good but not inspiring.
12/4/07	Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter	There is a reason why this book is a classic. The Scarlet Letter is perhaps the greatest of American novels.
12/4/07	Zaloga - US Field Artillery of World War II	This book wasn't quite as interesting as the others in the series because it was so heavily focused on the weapons themselves instead of the tactics.
12/4/07	Initial D (Taumanchi D)	Bad, bad movie. Even good acting by Anthony Wong and decent acting by Jay Chou could not save this terrible movie.
12/5/07	Gone Baby Gone	This was a very interesting movie and had some good acting. It was a complex look at the ethics of a variety of people, some complex themselves and some quite simple.
12/5/07	Street Fight	A documentary about the first, failed run by now Mayor of Newark Cory Booker. I like Booker, even though he went to Stanford.
12/5/07	Hitman	Not very good. The chick was super hot, though.
12/6/07	Stevenson - Treasure Island	I didn't realize how heavily other sci-fi/fantasy/adventure books have clearly borrowed from Treasure Island
12/7/07	Feynman - Six Not-So-Easy Pieces	Feynman's "hot plate" explanation of the curvature of space-time is excellent.
12/9/07	A Dekalog 5 (A Short Film About Killing)	Very raw, and not bad, but I feel like the acting could have been better, especially the girl's.
12/9/07	Cannibal Holocaust	A disgusting exploitation movie, and allegedly one of the inspirations for The Blair Witch Project
12/10/07	Blade Runner (Final Cut)	Although I've seen Blade Runner before, I've never seen this version, so I decided to count it.
12/10/07	Off the Black	Nick Nolte's acting was pretty good, and while almost good itself, the movie was still a little flat.
12/10/07	The Descent	This movie had a lot of good things about it, but they could have done better. The monsters' responses to sound were inconsistent at best.
12/11/07	Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock	The art establishment sucks.
12/16/07	Conversations With Other Women	This movie was strange, and I don't know if it was good or bad, but it reminded me of every waking moment of my life since I was 19.
12/16/07	Osama	It's frustrating how bad the girl is at staying alive.
12/17/07	Collins - Good to Great	First, this book was mind-numbingly and insultingly repetitive. Second, what real insights it did have (and there were a few) were nearly obscured by Collins' attempt to pass off a lot of conventional wisdoms as new insights, his TERRIBLE reading of the book (he is not a professional voice actor and should not have read the book himself), and a variety of minor mistakes in writing. The minor mistakes in writing and grammar might not have been too noticeable if Collins didn't draw attention to them by his flagant misuse of words like "paradox" and "coherence."
12/17/07	I am Legend	Could have been a lot better. The two most interesting thematic elements, why he didn't search further afield for survivors and whether the infected had a social structure, were simply dropped midway through the movie.
12/18/07	No Country for Old Men	This movie was really good. Tommy Lee Jones was superb.
12/19/07	Before the Devil Knows You're Dead	Another good movie with excellent acting.
12/19/07	Children of Heaven	A double dose of child acting, and probably the best Iranian movie I've ever seen. It's pretty easy to be the best out of three, though.
12/20/07	Rottman - World War II Airborne Warfare Tactics	The worst book I've read in this series. Unlike the others, this talked little about tactics and almost completely about organization and equipment.
12/20/07	The Golden Compass	It was like a bad version of the Hobbit. Nicole Kidman almost made a go of it, but her goodness was overwhelmed by the insolvent plot and Lord of the Rings plagiarism induced confusion.
12/23/07	National Treasure: Book of Secrets	This movie was pretty absurd.
12/26/07	Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story	Lots of funnyness. Paul Rudd's John Lennon was awesome.
12/27/07	Children of the Corn	What awesome special effects.
12/28/07	The Prodigy	I like it when low budget movies at least try to be serious, and this one does. It still isn't very good, though.
12/28/07	Delisle - Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea	This was a fascinating little book. One of the reviewers on the back of the book desribed it best: Delisle is filled with a "passionate cynicism."
12/28/07	Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem	Uhh... helicopters have radar signatures.
12/29/07	Juno	I wish all the girls I knew were as cool as Juno.
12/29/07	Paris Je T'aime	Nick Nolte was so awesome that I almost failed to notice Ludivine Sagnier in the movie.
12/31/07	Once	A somber movie, but very pretty.
1/1/08	The Game Plan	This was not a good movie. Hung bou gao shing.
1/1/08	The December Boys	Less bad than The Game Plan, but still kinda bad.
1/1/08	Resurrecting the Champ	This movie wasn't bad. It was pretty serious and not too cliche.
1/9/08	Mr. Woodcock	Not funny. A total waste of Susan Sarandon, BB Thornton, and even of Stiffler.
1/9/08	Field - Forts of the American Frontier 1820-91: Central and Northern Plains	This is the first of the "Fortress" Osprey books I've read. It was fairly interesting, but not the time and place I'm most into. The Indian wars seem so small. All of the fighting feels more like trickery than strategy.
1/10/08	Year of the Dog	From the writer of The Good Girl, but not as good as The Good Girl. Produced by Brad Pitt?
1/18/08	Rottman - Soviet Field Fortifications 1941-1945	I liked this one better than the one about the Forts of the American Frontier.
1/19/08	Cloverfield	Much better than I had expected, but still lacked depth. I'm not sure why the Yahoo! users gave it a B-. Everyone with me in the theater seemed to really like it.
1/20/08	There Will Be Blood	A deep and rich movie, There Will Be Blood is equally about the soul of a man and the soul of a nation. Daniel Day-Lewis was awesome. There were many Kubrick references.
1/21/08	Next	This movie had the least well thought-out notions of time travel or future-seeing I can remember.
2/1/08	No Substitute for Victory	Luckily for us, many of our military commanders have learned the lessons of the Vietnam war, even if many of our politicians and countrymen have not.
2/1/08	Horrors of War	For a super low-budget horror/zombie/werewolf/war movie, this wasn't that bad.
2/10/08	Charlie Wilson's War	A good history lesson.
2/11/08	Persepolis	Another good history lesson.
2/17/08	Jumper	Had some good elements that never developed, such as "jumping" as a metaphor for running away from problems as a teenager.
2/17/08	Before Sunset	The first one was better.
2/18/08	The Maltese Falcon (1941)	I love movies that take place in SF/Burlingame.
2/18/08	The Diving Bell and the Butterfly	Although the special effects in the movie were clever, I think they could have been better. I didn't realize what the "crying" effect was until I saw him crying from the outside.
2/24/08	Rope	An awesome movie, but the ending speech by James Stewart misses its chance to make the movie truly complex and realistic.
3/8/08	Vantage Point	William Hurt's part was trite and undeserving of him. Forest Whitaker was awesome.
3/9/08	10,000 BC	This really was not a bad movie. However, it really was not a good movie, either.
3/10/08	Fitzgerald - Learning Ruby	A good book about an awesome programming language.
3/11/08	In Bruges	I liked the humor in this movie.
3/14/08	Rottman - World War II Infantry Anti-Tank Tactics	Focused a little too much on weapons and not enough on tactics.
3/17/08	Doomsday	This movie wasn't great, but it wasn't as bad as its reviews. It was like a hybrid of 28 Days and the flesh-fair scene from AI. The ending of Doomsday was a good idea, but didn't quite feel realistic.
3/17/08	Scruton - Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction	This was a very good introduction. I really like this series of books.
3/28/08	My Blueberry Nights	I liked this movie, and it netted me a new friend.
3/29/08	Bazerman - Negotiating Rationally	I constantly find myself disappointed that negotiation is not more like game theory, but it just isn't. That being said, this book does a pretty good job of discussing the game-theory-like elements of negotiation.
3/30/08	Run Fat Boy Run	Not bad. Not good. Hank Azaria is a lot buffer than I thought.
4/5/08	Drucker - Managing for Results	Like all Drucker books, this was full of useful insights.
4/7/08	Koestler - Darkness at Noon	A fascinating book -- very Kafkaesque. While the dystopian fantasies do a good job of explaining how totalitarianism stifles humanity, this book is focused on how the mind grasps and ultimately discards communism as a concept.
4/8/08	Mendelson - Introduction to Topology	This book had just about all of the math. I ended up kind of glossing over on some of the proofs. One must concentrate quite hard to extract all the useful information from this book, which is very concise..
4/10/08	Under the Same Moon	This movie was a bit too contrived and simple, but not entirely bad.
4/12/08	21	It's hard to believe Kevin Spacey's character wouldn't have been a little smarter in the end.
4/14/08	Schrodinger - Space-Time Structure	This is not a book about unified theory or the Schrodinger equation. It is a careful explanation of how to use what was, at the time, Einstein's new gravity paradigm.
4/14/08	Smart People	This movie wasn't bad, although it was perhaps a bit depressing. Just so that no one can say I think everything is unintellectual, I did not find this movie unintellectual.
4/19/08	The Forbidden Kingdom	A bad cross between Drunken Master and The Karate Kid.
4/22/08	Benninga - Financial Modeling	A strong book that discusses a variety of topics. Effectively blends the financial theory with application in Excel.
4/27/08	Live From Baghdad	A pretty decent movie. Kind of a cheap, lame version of The Quiet American.
5/5/08	First Blood	Wow, I had no idea what an awesome movie this was. The song at the end was kinda terrible, though.
5/7/08	Blow Up	I still don't understand the extent to which this guy wanted to live in London.
5/11/08	Iron Man	One of the better comic book blockbusters.
5/20/08	The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian	I wish they had chosen an actual actor for Prince Caspian.
5/21/08	Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust	This was an excellent book. Reading this was the first time I had ever contemplated many of the issues of international law and justice that she brings up.
5/21/08	Thomson - On Aristotle	The number of typos and other mistakes in this book was astounding. I think there were at least 0.5 mistakes per page. I noticed all of them.
5/21/08	The Maltese Falcon (1931)	I didn't realize what I was missing by watching the 1941 version. The original is much more interesting.
5/22/08	Satan Met a Lady	Certainly not the best version of the Maltese Falcon, although Murgatroyd was pretty awesome.
5/23/08	Time Out	This movie was haunting and disturbingly believeable.
5/23/08	Binmore - Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction	Binmore is very strong on the evolutionary stuff and the statistical stuff, but his criticisms of Kant are simplistic.
5/24/08	Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull	Not bad. Felt similar to the old Indiana Jones movies.
5/26/08	Son of Rambow	Much as First Blood is a more sophisticated movie that it appears to be on the surface, so is this.
5/26/08	The Visitor	A visitor in his own country.
5/31/08	No Man's Land	This movie showed the impotence of the UN, but its metaphors about the conflict itself were rather superficial. It was really about war in general, not so much war between Bosnians and Serbs.
6/1/08	The Counterfeiters	An all-around good movie.
6/1/08	Purple Butterfly	I would say that fully 40% of this movie was closeups of Zhang Ziyi's face.
6/8/08	You Don't Mess With the Zohan	Hummus FTW
6/9/08	Marcus Aurelius - Meditations	The older I get, the more I agree with the idea that all truth and wisdom is contained in the past.
6/9/08	Timmons - How to Raise Capital: Techniques and Strategies for Financing and Valuing your Small Business	A very good introduction, focused more on how to create value than how to actually ask for capital.
6/9/08	Ireland - Leyte Gulf 1944	It was the greatest naval battle of all time, full of mistakes, ultimately indecisive, and yet the last time the Japanese fleet would ever threaten the American.
6/10/08	Nuland - Leonardo Da Vinci	First of all, this book should have been titled, "Leonardo the gay anatomist," because that's all Nuland cared about. Second, it was really annoying how Nuland was constantly blaming Leonardo's failure to understand even more on the incorrect ideas of his time and the shortcomings of Aristotle and Galen. He never once recognizes that Leonardo may have actually learned something useful from his study of the classics.
6/10/08	Short - German Defences in Italy in World War II	I could have done without the last section on tourism tips like, how to dress when visiting the reconstructed abbey.
6/11/08	Everitt - Augustus	Augustus was perhaps the most influential man who ever lived (or maybe second to Jesus), deeply flawed, and movingly heroic.
6/11/08	Schultze Gets the Blues	More than meets the eye.
6/13/08	Fields - The Roman Army of the Punic Wars 264-146 BC	This one had pretty good diagrams, maps, and descriptions of the armies, themselves, as well as of the generals, but lacked any sort of cohesive narrative.
6/14/08	The Happening	This would definitely have been better if it had left more abiguity as to whether the plants didn't like the way the humans were or just that they existed.
6/14/08	Bull - World War II Jungle Warfare Tactics	This book was short but good, and focused almost as much on Japanese tactics as allied.
6/14/08	Mackey - Lebanon: A House Divided	I shall return.
6/15/08	Tate - Ruby on Rails: Up and Running	A good intro. It's not easy to jump into Rails without knowing the Ruby language fairly well, first.
6/15/08	Young@Heart	Fred Nittle's "Fix You" was amazing.
6/16/08	DeMarco - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams	Although I had read many parts of this, I had never read it through beginning to end. I think this may be the single best book about management in existence.
6/18/08	Set to Kill	This movie is about the consequences of being a selfish, greedy woman, and it's pretty good.
6/19/08	Hawking - The Nature of Space and Time	Traditionally, I list only the first author, and I have followed that convention here, but half of this book was written by Roger Penrose, who was, I believe, Hawking's thesis advisor, and who here plays the role of Einstein to Hawking's Bohr in the series of lectures-as-debate which makes up this book.
6/19/08	Molinari - Desert Raiders: Axis and Allied Special Forces 1940-43	I had no idea there was any WWII-fighting going on in Africa beyond the Rommel-vs-the-Allies campaign on the northern coast.
6/20/08	The Incredible Hulk	Edward Norton was certainly a better Bruce Banner than was Eric Bana.
6/20/08	Get Smart	Steve Carell is always funny, but the movie could have been a lot better.
6/22/08	Hoffer - The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements	This book was full of good insights.
6/27/08	Rabbit-Proof Fence	The real kicker is that she had to do it twice.
6/28/08	Wanted	The influence of Equilibrium was undeniable.
6/29/08	Ken Burns' America: The Shakers	The original modern Utopian socialist experiment.
6/29/08	The Night of the Hunter	"What religion you profess?" "A religion the almighty and me worked out betwixt us."
6/29/08	Yojimbo	Basically, all Kurasawa movies are masterpieces.
6/30/08	Lahiri - Interpreter of Maladies	The writing was decent, but the book was still primarily exploitative. I would have preferred something deeper.
7/2/08	Antill - Stalingrad 1942	Hitler and Stalin were less than stellar commanders-in-chief.
7/2/08	Water Drops on Burning Rocks	Could have gone deeper into the Freudian-homosexuality thing.
7/4/08	Wall-E	Macs are evil. All movies with 2001: A Space Odyssey references are better than all movies without.
7/4/08	Stanley and Iris	It's my library. DeNiro plays a Ben Franklin who gets a late start on the American Dream.
7/5/08	Born Into Brothels	I want to beat up all the abusive parents in this movie.
7/6/08	Tuchman - The Guns of August	A beautifully written book about the courage, ineptitude, arrogance, triumph, and folly of the great powers in Europe.
7/6/08	Hancock	Better than I thought it would be, but their relationship remains confusing and perhaps nonsensical.
7/6/08	The Basketball Diaries	Practically a Sopranos prequel.
7/7/08	Murakami - After Dark	I like Murakami because he's consistently bold.
7/8/08	Network	Best line in the movie, "If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed."
7/10/08	Woodward - The Battle for Leyte Gulf: The Incredible Story of World War II's Largest Naval battle	This account, despite having been written with much less of the benefit of hindsight, seems one of the best on this subject.
7/12/08	Hellboy II: The Golden Army	Mostly a waste of Guillermo Del Toro.
7/12/08	Nosferatu	The modern-sounding music sometimes didn't seem to fit.
7/13/08	Fields - Troy c. 1700-1250 BC	The modern-sounding music sometimes didn't seem to fit.
7/13/08	Mongol	A decent movie. It was like 10,000 BC without all the historical impossibility.
7/16/08	Close Encounters of the Third Kind	What awesome special effects.
7/19/08	They Live	"...and I'm all out of bubblegum."
7/20/08	The Dark Knight	Best Batman ever.
7/22/08	The Gods Must Be Crazy	Ah, the fantastic bushmen of the Kalahari
7/23/08	Videodrome	I think maybe The Ring was influenced by this.
7/26/08	Fields - Soldier of the Pharaoh: Middle Kingdom Egypt 2055-1650 BC	This one was very short, and had a weirdly missplaced section at the end about charms the soldiers would wear into battle, but it was good..
7/26/08	Tacitus - The Histories	Tacitus's speculations about the origins of the Jews were fascinating.
8/1/08	McCain - Hard Call	This book was pretty interesting, although obviously designed to help position McCain for the presidency.
8/2/08	Howard - Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction	An understanding of the differences between limited and total war is both topical and important.
8/2/08	Hemingway - Men Without Women	The bullfighter story was the best, as usual.
8/5/08	Fa - The Fortifications of Gibraltar 1068-1945	Over 30 miles of tunnels and anti-submarine nets!
8/12/08	No Reservations	A fairly trite movie, it avoided a few obvious cliches but managed to catch all the rest.
8/16/08	Seife - Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes	This is a great book. If I spent years researching this topic I would be proud to produce this text.
8/16/08	Star Wars: The Clone Wars	Poorly acted and poorly made, this movie further tarnishes the Star Wars legacy.
8/17/08	Step Brothers	This movie really wasn't very funny, except for one or two parts, partly because it was too terribly real in certain ways.
8/23/08	Pineapple Express	Kind of funny.
8/24/08	Pausch - The Last Lecture	This guy reminds me a little of myself.
8/25/08	Gaudard - The Gospel of Judas	The various gnostic gospels are most interesting for what they illustrate about the theological arguments of the first couple of centuries AD.
8/27/08	Auster - City of Glass	A very good, post-modern sort of book.
8/30/08	Babylon A.D.	I thought this was pretty good. The motivations of the Noelites should have been more complex.
8/30/08	Mamma Mia!	Don't worry, girls. There's still plenty of time to live out your unfulfilled dreams and magically transform your regrets into youthful exuberance.
8/31/08	Tropic Thunder	Not unfunny.
9/1/08	Traitor	Although the movie was Hollywoodesque, it also had a certain realistic quality to it.
9/1/08	Westworld	Yul Brynner was an awesome Terminator in this movie.
9/2/08	The Lady from Shanghai	This movie is somewhat hard to follow, but it's good.
9/3/08	Webb - Born Fighting	While this is an excellent narrative about the Scots-Irish-Americans, I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions Webb draws, but I did learn a lot by following the path he laid out.
9/6/08	Transsiberian	This was not a bad movie. It was very timely given the Georgia situation.
9/6/08	El Bola	I think this movie was a little overrated, although it was not bad. It did have a gritty, tragicness to it.
9/7/08	Clash of the Titans	This movie was not exactly good, but it did contain several interesting mythological interpretations.
9/13/08	Primer	Low budget, but well thought out Sci-Fi.
9/13/08	Burn After Reading	Echoes of Fargo, but not as good.
9/13/08	Blind Fury	This was really a pretty bad movie.
9/20/08	Righteous Kill	Was better than the critics said it was, and had a Heat-clone ending, but was no Heat.
9/20/08	Donnie Brasco	Awesome movie. I can't believe I hadn't seen this before.
10/14/08	Vicky Christina Barcelona	A return to classic Woody Allen form.
10/15/08	Roberts - Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe	Waterloo is one of very few battles in history where two truly great generals actually faced one another on the battlefield.
10/15/08	The Land that Time Forgot	This is one of those cult classics that I think must have a very small cult.
10/16/08	Japanese Castles in Korea 1592-1598	This is one of those cult classics that I think must have a very small cult.
10/17/08	Single White Female	At first I thought this was going to be a Rosemary's Baby remake, but it wasn't. It was still creepy, though.
10/25/08	City of Ember	Was pretty decent except for the ridiculous and inappropriate log flume scenes.
10/26/08	Epicurus - Letters and Sayings of Epicurus	Epicurus was one of the closest to figuring out astronomy and atomic theory of all of the ancients. It is no surprise that Newton was reading Epicurus shortly before making several of his breakthroughs.
10/26/08	Skinner - Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction	Machiavelli is far more sophisticated than people commonly give him credit far. In no topic is this more evident than that of the invisible hand, a concept invented my Machiavelli and referring originally to politics, not economics.
10/26/08	Turnbull - Pirate of the Far East: 811-1639	It is quite interesting to see not only how much interaction there was between China, Korea, and Japan, but also how the Japanese pirates were portrayed by Ming chroniclers.
10/26/08	Body Heat	William Hurt is such a good actor. Ted Danson does a nice job, too.
11/6/08	McCullough - John Adams	John Adams was a great man in an era of great men.
11/7/08	Junior Bonner	A strange sort of a neo-Western, I think this movie is vastly underrated.
11/7/08	Hemingway - A Moveable Feast	This is a beautiful book.
11/9/08	Maborosi	A very sad movie - the saddest I've seen in a long time.
11/18/08	Invasion of the Body Snatchers	Donald Sutherland is good in this movie. It's weird seeing Leonard Nimoy be anyone but Spock.
11/21/08	Epictetus - Enchiridion	Epictetus is as good and interesting as Seneca or Epicurus, which is saying a lot.
11/22/08	The Boy in the Striped Pajamas	The movie revolves around the two boys, both of whom act well.
11/22/08	Kao - Innovation Nation	John Kao's book is not bad, and I was very surprised to see Eric Best quoted in it, but it's not great, either. My main quibble with this book was that it never adequately addressed the issue of how you can do so much to promote innovation in the economy without "interfering" in the economy. I asked Mr. Kao this same question once, when I met him for a round-table discussion. Like Mr. Kao in the discussion, the book doesn't really directly tackle this issue.
11/22/08	Karas: The Prophecy	I'm not quite sure I understood, but apparently there were several people who take turns being Karas, who's a cross between Brandon Lee from The Crow, Batman, a mech, and a Predator, in order to defend Japan from water goblins.
11/24/08	Fields - Thermopylae 480 BC: Last Stand of the 300	A good, simple survey of the historical record.
11/28/08	Belle Epoque	A very Spanish movie, which is a sort of a weird precursor to Vicky Christina Barcelona.
11/28/08	Harvey	I now understand things about Donnie Darko which I never did before.
11/29/08	Scruton - Kant: A Very Short Introduction	This is an excellent entry in an excellent series of books-- an amazingly concise Kant reference, from which I learned much.
12/04/08	Karas: The Revelation	A crazy amalgamation of The Crow, Batman, Superman, Dark City, The Lord of the Rings, Akira, Transformers, and about 9000 other things.
12/7/08	Gudmundsson - The British Army on the Western Front 1916	This is one of the books in this series that's supposed to focus on orders of battle, and it did that well.
12/14/08	Tank Girl	This was a bizarre, medium-budget, post-apocalyptic, punk-rock-girl-power movie with a strange performance from Ice-T.
12/15/08	Luttrell - Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10	While this is basically just a survivor story, it also gives some interesting insights about the relationship between the Taliban and the Pashtun tribesmen, as well as their feelings about Americans.
12/18/08	Caesar - The Civil War	Caesar's account is written in the third person, as if he were Reggie Miller.
12/22/08	Happy Accidents	A bizarre movie. It was sometimes boring, and what was good in it was barely held together by Vincent D'onofrio.
12/24/08	American Pimp	This is the most incredibly awesome documentary ever.
12/25/08	An American Haunting	Not good, but not as bad as its reviews.
12/26/08	The Andromeda Strain	Much of the appeal of this movie was the technology-dazzle, and it's not so dazzling now.
12/27/08	Frost/Nixon	Virtuoso acting and the subtlety and balance of this movie make it a near masterpiece.
12/28/08	Strangers on a Train	This wasn't my favorite Hitchcock movie, but none of them are bad.
12/28/08	Gran Torino	Every review of this movie which says something like, "Why did Eastwood ruin this movie by making the character a venom-spewing racist," was written by an idiot.
12/28/08	Gilliver - Caesar's Gallic Wars 58-50 BC	This book was OK, but spent far too much time assessing Caesar's own writings' veracity instead of actually reporting history.
12/29/08	Valkyrie	The July 20th plot was too little, too late. Even then, too many wavered. This movie wasn't bad, and the most interesting part of it was its damning condemnation of the bulk of the German army.
12/30/08	Logan's Run	Does anyone else think it's weird that Box considers the people to be food? He used to tend fish on behalf of people, right? And he knew English. So, why didn't he understand that people are not food?
12/30/08	Roth - Indignation	This novel wasn't bad, but sometimes I wonder if Roth now simply writes books, knowing he is talented, with the hope that he will accidentally stumble, once again, upon greatness.
12/30/08	The Spirit	A bizarre movie with references to Sesame Street, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Sin City, and about 900 other things.
12/31/08	The Curious Case of Benjamin Button	This movie was worth seeing, although it didn't sufficiently distinguish itself from Forrest Gump.
1/1/09	The Omega Man	This was clearly the basis for a lot of the scenes in I am Legend.
1/11/09	Revolutionary Road	While very theatrical, this movie had an amount of realism in it that appeared to unnerve the audience.
1/11/09	Graham - The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction	A very good introduction and a worthy member of this (very good) series.
1/19/09	The Wrestler	A very good movie.
1/22/09	Loveday - Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads	Although there's nothing revolutionary in this book, it isn't a bad summary of best practices in web design circa 2005.
1/24/09	Heckel - The Wars of Alexander the Great	A good overview with a few a samples of the rich history of the successors of Alexander.
1/25/09	Watts - The Widsom of Insecurity	I know Watts is the Zen Master-type, but he gives Eastern religion far too much credit for his ideas, which are often quite original.
1/27/09	Collins - Ballistics: Poems	It's unusual for me to like someone as popular as Collins so much, but I do.
1/29/09	Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time	A small and rather unambitious book, but not a bad one, about the history of chronometers and sextants.
2/22/09	Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews (1977)	Gets right to the heart of the interesting stuff.
3/1/09	Coraline	Not a bad movie, but too simple and too flat. Teri Hatcher's voice acting was a little weird..
3/15/09	Man on Wire	This is a strangely inspiring story, especially in the way it addresses (only indirectly), September 11th.
3/15/09	The Watchmen	A very bizarre piece of historical fiction, this movie is better than the B- it got on Yahoo!
3/22/09	He's Just Not That Into You	A relatively simple and boring movie, good only in its cliche modernity.
3/22/09	Duplicity	This movie was really pretty bad, and had almost nothing redeeming about it.
3/29/09	Gigerenzer - Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious	While for some this book might be a revelation, it is written by someone whose understanding of psychology and logic is quite limited. Gigerenzer suffers from the same lack of statistical knowledge as Malcolm Gladwell.
4/4/09	Adventureland	This was a pretty good movie in some ways. If it had aimed for more than medium-depth, it would have been better.
4/4/09	Pope - Essay on Man and Other Poems	Pope is my new literary idol.
4/5/09	Dorf - Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise	This book has a lot of good content, but some parts were clearly just filler.
4/5/09	Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom	Friedman is a genius. This book felt like good preparation for the seven more years I will have to spend defending the free market.
4/12/09	Barbero - The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire	I definitely learned some things about the Gothic wars from this book, but the book itself was not concise enough, not well enough written, and felt like it would have been better as a chapter in a larger book. The link to the fall of the empire was weak, as was the explanation of the relevane (or lack of relevance) of religion to the relationship between post-Constantine emperors and the Goths, Huns, and Alans.
4/26/09	Fighting	This movie wasn't great, but it had good qualities in the same way that The Fast and the Furious had good qualities.
5/2/09	Bonaparte - Napoleon's Art of War	Napoleon was a genius.
5/3/09	Drucker - The Effective Executive	Drucker is clearly the greatest of the management writers. He was also clearly one of the first to internalize and apply Herzberg's Two factor theory.
5/9/09	Star Trek (2009)	A successful re-casting of the original cast.
5/16/09	Management	This movie initially reminded me of a cross between Little Miss Sunshine and The Good Girl, but had insufficient depth.
5/24/09	Sunshine Cleaning	I agree with filmcritic.com's Hassenberger that Adams and Blunt make uncommonly convincing sisters, and Arkin starts out strong, but this movie throws away so much of its character development in the final two minutes.
5/24/09	Seife - Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea	Another excellent book from Seife. This book is powerful and clearly articulates some of the most important metaphysical topics of today, such as: what is zero-point energy, will the universe die a "heat death" (what I call entropy death), how "real" are the rational vs. the irrational numbers, and what do all the dimensions of M-theory really represent?
5/25/09	Kelley - The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm	This book is OK, but I didn't find anything special in it. It's sort of like a light management consulting for dummies book, with lots of pictures of a shopping cart.
5/25/09	Terminator Salvation	This had a hollywood ending, although it left the viewer somewhat unsatisfied, which could be good, but means the movie will only make $80M or whatever.
5/25/09	Cashback	This movie had a non-sensical title, and it wasn't a great movie, but it was very appropriate for this week, in which I have thought about nothing but the way time works.
5/25/09	The Unbearable Lightness of Being	The part with the dog is indeed the saddest.
5/31/09	The Girlfriend Experience	She was so bitchy and realistic.
6/05/09	President Ronald Reagan's Initial Actions Project	This is a fascinating look at the kind of thinking that went on in the Reagan white house. It's extremely timely, as Reagan was dealing with how to quickly repair the economy while dealing with various foreign crises in his first 100 days.
6/6/09	The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3	There is definitely some Reservoir Dogs precursor material here.
6/14/09	Up	Another good Disney/Pixar movie.
6/17/09	Kaplan - Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos	This book was somewhat provocative.
6/26/09	Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen	Was weirdly critical of the President.
6/27/09	Fromm - The Art of Loving	This is the most insightful, best, and most important book about love ever written. Fromm had a penetrating mind and was a master of many disciplines.
6/30/09	Moon	A very good movie. Extremely aware of its relationship to 2001.
7/1/09	Brafman - Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior	Yet another book that confuses correlation and causation. It's an epidemic.
7/1/09	Away We Go	Witty and relevant.
7/3/09	Blue Sky	Sort of a touching story, in a way, about the madness of mutually assured destruction.
7/3/09	Day for Night	This was a very, very French movie.
7/4/09	We Own the Night	This was a pretty ambitious movie, and it succeeded in some ways.
7/5/09	30 Days of Night	This movie was 4 or 5 good character development scenes away from having a psychological allegory.
7/5/09	Redbelt	I don't understand how, at the end, the Professor knew what had happened.
7/5/09	Food, Inc.	This was a very silly, Michael Moore-esque movie. It wasn't a documentary, because it didn't attempt to chronicle anything; it was just a commercial. And it was a confused commercial at best. I thought it said I should buy my food at Walmart, but then at the end it told me not to. Furthermore, it was full of slanderous and libelous stuff, mixed in with too many factual inaccuracies to be accidents. It's another example of the anti-intellectualism that I find so prevalent in the media and popular culture.
7/8/09	Barabasi - Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means	At first, it seemed pretty run of the mill, but this book steadily picked up steam as it went along. I agree with the idea that network theory is a precursor to a new theory of complexity, which we badly need.
7/11/09	Ayres - Supercrunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to be Smart	Although there are parts where Ayres still confuses correlation and causation, for the most part his book is correct: people need to learn how to think in terms of statistics.
7/11/09	Public Enemies	This movie is virtually a documentary, with very little invented except the particulars of various situations.
7/13/09	Greenfingers	This movie was really pretty bad. It was like a German movie in its unsubtlety, minus any of the good things about German movies.
7/13/09	Crist - Exotic Betting: How to Make the Multihorse, Multirace Bets that Win Racing's Biggest Payoffs	This book was very good, but Crist doesn't take the discipline far enough. He seems poised to truly excel without even realizing it.
7/18/09	The Hurt Locker	A many-layered look at the war and the soldiers fighting it.
7/19/09	1984	The first half of this movie was a complete waste and added nothing to the story. The torture parts were interesting and worth the price of admission (or, in this case, download).
7/20/09	Excalibur	Le Morte d'Arthur isn't my favorite version of the King Arthur story, but this movie was decent nonetheless.
7/25/09	Midway	The story is a little flat, and the symbolism of Tom's relationship to Haruko is simplistic, but the importance of chance relative to strategem at Midway was portrayed well.
7/25/09	Bury - The Ancient Greek Historians	This is a good, if somewhat dry, book, by one of those who knows the most about the ancient Greek historians.
7/25/09	Hanson - Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think	This book is essentially about a "chaos theory" of war. I didn't know Socrates fought at Delium.
7/25/09	Enemy Mine	Dennis Quaid is one of the few people who can both look like Buck Rogers and look like Tom Hanks on a deserted island.
7/26/09	Moby Dick	Good acting in this version.
8/2/09	Cat Ballou	I wish we could stay in 2009 but go back to having the 1965 Jane Fonda.
8/16/09	District 9	This movie was like a big cross between Independence Day, Black Like Me, and Enemy Mine. The main plot and character were good, but the supporting cast was weak.
8/23/09	Julie & Julia	Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci were good.
8/30/09	Faraday - The Chemical History of a Candle	I wish we could return to the days where science, as a profession, was accessible to people who didn't go to grad school in a niche field.
9/7/09	The Objective	This was a low budget horror/thriller movie that had more depth than I expected.
9/7/09	Outlander	This movie really wasn't very good and had a problem with its plot that was so large that it made the movie non-sensical.
9/7/09	Mutant Chronicles	This movie completely failed to deliver the metaphors it may or may not have been aiming to deliver.
9/7/09	Max Payne	This was a weak movie that wasted a perfectly good "invisible-alien-pulling-someone-through-a-skyscraper-window" scene.
9/8/09	Elizabeth	While moderately interesting, the connection between the love story and the political plot line was... well... not connected.
9/12/09	Julius Caesar	A decent portrayal of the Julius Caesar story, not based on the Shakespeare version.
9/25/09	Maister - The Trusted Advisor	A solid how-to book about building trust in advisory relationships.
9/26/09	Andreasen - The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius	This book was very simple and basic. It was written by someone who did a fairly good job of only one thing: disguising the fact that writing the book was, for her, a huge ego-trip.
10/1/09	Surrogates	This movie wasn't bad, but it lacked depth.
10/10/09	Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up	In this book, Paulos has a battle of wits against an unarmed foe. The problem is that his foe is unarmed because he presents the side of "religion" in such a silly and trifling way as to win the argument before having it. The book also deteriorates into a grand justification of Paulos's own existence and political beliefs, which are simplistic and ignorant at best. If I could give Paulos one piece of advice, I would tell him that the mark of someone truly wise is being able to understand both sides of the story, not to convince less educated people of one side or the other.
10/11/09	Lady Vengeance	Another awesome movie from Park Chan-wook.
10/27/09	Couples Retreat	Vince Vaughn had a few funny lines.
11/1/09	The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection	The one good thing about communist manifestos is that usually they at least make good, insightful criticisms, even if they don't know what to do about the problems. This book, however, didn't even make insightful criticisms of society.
11/21/09	Paranormal Activity	This movie would have been really excellent if a) the metaphors had been slightly more sophisticated, and b) the guy's acting was better. It wasn't quite believeable enough that he wasn't a demon.
11/27/09	The Time Machine	This was a droll and drab version of the story, lacking in both mpact and depth.
11/28/09	Operation Valkyrie: The Stauffenberg Plot to Kill Hitler	A solid documentary about Claus von Stauffenberg and Operation Valkyrie.
11/28/09	A Serious Man	This was really just an exploitation film, and while it had some depth, it was no American Beauty.
11/28/09	Catacombs	The only bad thing about being in love with Shannyn Sossamon is that I have to watch all her movies.
11/29/09	Saboteur	This movie was surprisingly preachy at times.
11/29/09	Saints and Soldiers	This is an original story, but is historical fiction and feels almost like a dramatic documentary.
12/6/09	The Twilight Saga: New Moon	The acting in this movie wasn't the problem; the problem was the completely lame story/script. The movie was so unoriginal that it was hurting me while I was watching it.
12/6/09	Sartre - Existentialism and Human Emotions	Existentialism is like libertarianism -- it's a great thing to strive for, as long as you never reach it.
1/3/10	Invictus	Meg: I'm sure the money clip will be safe in my room. Stewie: I'm sure it will be lost throughout the pictures of Justin Timberlake or Tom Cruise or ... blast, who the devil do teenagers like ... or Morgan Freeman.
1/6/10	Russell - The Conquest of Happiness	As usual, Bertrand Russell is extremely insightful. I wish everyone I know would read this book.
1/22/10	A Single Man	A very good movie. Julianne Moore was fantastic. Shades of American Beauty and One Hour Photo.
1/22/10	The Book of Eli	This movie had little hints of brilliance in it, but it was too simplistic. It was basically just a better Waterworld. Wrong ending.
1/23/10	Legion	Too simple, wrong ending.
1/30/10	The Arbinger Institute - Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box	A profound lesson in leadership and general mental health.
2/6/10	Man, Woman, and the Wall	This is an ambitious movie that attempts to comment on modern Japanese society's isolation and loneliness. It doesn't fail, but the goal isn't fully realized, either.
2/15/10	Facing Ali	A very sentimental movie, but still a good one.
2/21/10	Shutter Island	This movie was well made, but fell a little flat. The war allegory started out well but didn't come through in the end.
2/27/10	Zombieland	I think I prefer Birtish Zombie-comedies.
2/27/10	Ninja	A pretty mediocre B-movie. The whole secret society angle was completely unnecessary.
2/27/10	The Friends of Eddie Coyle	This movie has a fascinatingly subtle form of subtlety.
2/27/10	Whiteout	Wasn't really much of a "twist."
2/27/10	Whip It	If I were capable of describing a movie as "cute," then that is how I would describe this one.
3/6/10	A Prophet	This was a good movie, with many layers. It's Frenchness wasn't too annoying.
3/7/10	G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra	It doesn't really bother me that this movie had plot holes; it bothers me that it goes out of its way to expose then. Why have someone say, "they've evacuating the tower" only to show the tower later completely unevacuated?
3/7/10	The Invention of Lying	This was a very simple movie, but had some funny moments.
3/13/10	Snow Angels	This was basically a novella in movie form, with echoes of The Good Girl.
3/21/10	Reichheld - The Ultimate Question	This was clearly a book for which the author didn't quite have enough content. Enterprise doesn't even use NPS. The linkage of NPS to profits is weak at best. NPS may, in fact, be a more efficient way (especially for a firm with limited skill/resources) to do customer satisfaction surveys, but that's really all it is.
4/1/10	Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays	My love-hate relationship with French existentialism continues. I'm fairly certain that Camus wasn't as smart as people thought he was.
4/11/10	Kirchubel - Operation Barbarossa 1941 (1) Army Group South	Barbarossa is unique in human history for its scale, the scale of the battlefield, the scale of the battle, the scale of the genius displayed by its players, and their scale of catastrophe.
4/17/10	Thirst	This movie just goes to show that no matter how much you think you've sinned, a Korean woman can always make you sin a little more.
4/24/10	Raincoast Books - Vancouver Stories: West Coast Fiction from Canada's Best Writers	In honor of short story writers writing over-wrought sentences everywhere: "Finishing a book in the morning is not like finishing a book in the evening, that time when things settle down for the night, even the worries settling in to rest, worries clutching at the mind so they won't be left behind during the night or lost in the forest during a dream about the road less travelled, because finishing in the morning has no finality, except maybe the finality of graduating from high school, or of finishing a successful first date, while the finality of evening is total and complete, the day already over, the finished book but an epilogue to yesterday."
4/26/10	Veronico - Redwood City (Then and Now)	A pretty good set of pictures and some interesting factoids and history.
5/5/10	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	This movie was very Germanic, in that it had no subtlety whatsoever and left absolutely no questions unanswered at the end.
5/8/10	Virtuality	Really not a movie, but rather a TV pilot, Virtuality never quite makes enough sense to be compelling, and then it ends.
5/9/10	Wonderful World	Matthew Broderick plays a character not unlike the one from The Cable Guy. I may be the only one, but for some reason I have a hard time ever seeing him as completely downtrodden; I always feel like he's faking it a little.
5/11/10	DeThomas - Writing a Convincing Business Plan	I think that this is the best reference I have found on writing a business plan.
5/14/10	Where the Wild Things Are	A surprisingly cerebral movie with pretty good child acting.
5/16/10	Needle Through Brick	A solid documentary about traditional Chinese Kung Fu. I noticed how much of the gun kata in Equilibrium seems to be based on Praying Mantis Kung Fu.
5/21/10	Letters to Juliet	This movie was too formulaic and predictable, but it was far more interesting in light of the connections to Vanessa Redgrave and Julio Franco's real lives.
5/23/10	Gisevius - Valkyrie	While certainly self-serving, this book is also one of the most accurate first-hand accounts of many of the events leading up to Operation Valkyrie.
5/28/10	Gleick - Isaac Newton	Newton was a phenomenal intellect, but also an odd soul, occupying as much volume in history for what his struggles and failures eiptomized as for his contributions to mathematics and physics.
5/29/10	Nishigaki - How to Good-bye Depression: If you constrict anus 100 times everyday. Malarkey? or Effective way?	This was one of the strangest books I have ever read. It was poorly written and should never have been published. Nevertheless, there was a sort of sense to it, that betrayed why Buddhist cultures' slowness to adopt phsychology is unforgiveable in a world where the same cultures adopt Western problems of mind.
5/29/10	Steinbeck - The Pearl	Steinbeck is a master of the essence of parabolic human experience.
6/8/10	Gracian - The Art of Worldly Wisdom	An interesting book, but too much focused on being an apology for Isabella.
6/12/10	Get Him to the Greek	All-around pretty funny movie. I particularly liked Puffy/Sergio.
6/13/10	Iron Man 2	Most of the campyness that was tolerable in the first one was intolerable in the second one. The only thing "better" in this installment was Mickey Rourke.
6/18/10	Margot at the Wedding	What an incredibly screwed up family.
6/19/10	Programmed to Kill (The Retaliator)	An all around crappy movie.
6/20/10	Ikiru	An all around great movie.
6/21/10	Kirchubel - Operation Barbarossa 1941 (2)	A solid book, part 2 in a 3 part series.
6/22/10	Herman - To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World	A really good book, sweeping in its nature, like a biography about one family member that explains the whole society in which the family lives.
6/25/10	Toy Story 3	A solid addition to the Toy Story dynasty.
6/26/10	Cassirer: Language and Myth	Cassirer advances several interesting and important theses in this exploration of the connections between myth, language, and religion.
6/28/10	Kirchubel - Operation Barbarossa 1941 (3): Army Group Center	This was the third and final installment of the series on Operation Barbarossa. All three books were good.
6/30/10	Godel - On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems	This book is exactly what the title suggests, a series of proofs concluding with the undecidability of, essentially, all numerical systems.
7/3/10	Ben Hamou - Practical Rubyfor System Administration	I could have done without the author's weird little jokes, but the book was pretty good overall.
7/5/10	Clinton - Ruby Phrasebook	A very good reference, which made me feel like I should have been following along and trying out every little snippet.
7/11/10	Stiglitz - Mis-measuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up	While there is a wealth of work to be done in the area of measuring and capturing externalities, this book doesn't really do any more than remind us that the work needs to be done.
7/17/10	Inception	A good job by Dicaprio and by Ken Watanabe. Overall, this movie was pretty good and Nolan continues to be one of the more interesting American directors.
7/18/10	Thompson - Teach Yourself Ethics	This book started out really well, when it focused on the history of ethics. As it devolved into "applied ethics," it got less interesting.
7/24/10	Fried - Rework	This isn't a bad book, but it's an overly simple book, which gets confused between "describing the culture of 37signals" and "stating general facts about corporate culture."
7/24/10	The Omen	I'm not sure if the plot felt predictable because it was predictable, or because this movie has been remade so many times.
7/25/10	Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols	Nietzsche was crazy, and a genius. He was, though, ultimately unable to rise above his criticisms of Christianity and Plato and to incorporate their contributions into his worldview.
7/30/10	Below	I wish Darren Aronofsky had directed this, in addition to having written it.
7/31/10	Breathless	I think this is my favorite Godard movie.
8/1/10	Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces	What a brilliant novel. Too bad Toole seems to have been as crazy as I. Reilly.
8/5/10	Outland	A strange movie, more 70s than 80s. Sean Connery was pretty good, but the movie overall was somewhat flat.
8/6/10	Strindberg - Miss Julie	Apparently, this is a classic of modern theater, not that I would know such a thing. This was a good play, if short and somewhat minimal. The intro in the book is just as good as the play itself.
8/10/10	Wolfman	Another good Anthony Hopkins performance (and several others) wasted on a sub-par script. This movie was trying to be as cool as The Brotherhood of the Wolf, but failed.
8/10/10	Runciman - The Fall of Constantinople 1453	A good overview.
8/11/10	Lowenstein - When Genius Failed	It's amazing how gripping a narrative about high finance and the Black Scholes formulae can be.
8/13/10	The Other Guys	The scene where Sam Jackson and The Rock die, alone, was worth the price of admission.
8/15/10	The Kids are All Right	Julianne Moore plays a very convincing mid-life crisis bisexual lesbian confused mother.
8/17/10	The Plague	A cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Ring, but not as good as either.
8/21/10	The Expendables	This movie wasn't exactly "good," but there were good parts in it, like Mickey Rourke's guilt speech.
8/25/10	Melville - Bartleby and Benito Cereno	It's amazing how gripping a narrative about high finance and the Black Scholes formulae can be.
9/5/10	Scott Pilgrim vs. the World	This movie was certainly novel, and there were appealing things about it, but it wasn't an all-around great movie.
9/24/10	The Town	Very good. Borrows heavily from Heat and The Usual Suspects.
9/28/10	Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps	Classic case of a decent movie dragged down by a ridiculously horrible and utterly senseless ending.
10/2/10	Catfish	A topical documentary that gently pierces the veil of modern identity issues.
10/15/10	Langer - Mindfulness	This seems to be a survey of one Professor's research. Several interesting anecdotes, good introduction to the concept of mindfulness.
10/16/10	Rucker - Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension	An excellent overview, with very good drawings/illustrations.
11/12/10	Due Date	Not as good as The Hangover, but with parts almost as memorable.
11/21/10	Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest	Basically, all sitcoms ever made seem like bad copies of this play.
11/21/10	Unstoppable	This movie is very exciting, but not terribly good.
11/24/10	The Next Three Days	This movie makes a strange point at the end of telling us that people who really, really care about justice are less cool than people who selfishly care about "justice."
11/26/10	Fair Game	This movie was so-so. There was one really interesting scene with Valerie Plame talking to her dad that did a great job of creating an almost paranoid nervous feeling. The rest of the movie was poorly directed and edited. The story is oversimplified and Wilson's hatred of Saddam Hussein is never "integrated" into the rest of his personality. Sean Penn doesn't seem to understand the character. This, I suspect, is because the character (Wilson)'s own autobiographical works are a sprawling mess. The tension between Watts and Penn is contrived. Watts's key monologue about her CIA training is strange and almost non-sensical.
11/27/10	Valmont	A decent Dangerous Liaisons Remake. Annette Bening was good.
11/27/10	Secretariat	A simple, but effective movie about the greatest racehorse of all time. Secretariat's time and margin of victory at Belmont still have not been surpassed.
11/27/10	Manhattan	I like Woody Allen, and this was one of his better movies.
11/28/10	Inside Job	This movie didn't succumb to the Michael Moore-esque temptation to revel in absurdity and conspiracy theory, but it still did miss a couple of things, or mis-emphasize a couple of things. While compensation is sort of important, executive compensation (where the film put the emphasis) isn't really the issue. The real issue is with the compensation of the middle levels of employees at places like Goldman and the perverse incentives that their current bonus structures create. Also, the film COMPLETELY failed to recognize that public employee pensions, for example, were also "participants" in the status quo scheme. They liked the higher returns of the sub-prime based securities and weren't eager to blow the lid off of the whole thing, either, despite often knowing what was going on. The film talks a little about the rating agencies, who should have gotten more attention for their roles in the mess, and didn't emphasize the accounting firms at all, who deserve a huge helping of blame. Finally, de-regulation is generally put forward as the cause of the problems, but the movie then makes a contradictory point that the regulators still had sufficient power to do something but chose not to. I agree with the latter. The regulators failed. De-regulation had little to do with it, unless one makes the argument that the pace of de-regulation was too much for the regulators toto handle (which I don't really buy). Finally, the movie fails to place any blame on the consumers who borrowed so much money. While some were de-frauded or tricked by lenders, which is certainly wrong, most knew full well they were borrowing tons of money, taking on huge risk, and decided to do it, anyway. That was, is, and will be reckless behavior for which individuals should take more responsibility.
11/28/10	The Social Network	Sean Parker is as much of an asshole in this movie as he seems to be in real life.
12/3/10	Waltz with Bashir	A very good movie, that uses the animated medium as well as anything I've ever seen.
12/4/10	The Warrior's Way	This was a solid movie, exploring through allegory the clash of cultures that results from Asian American immigration, the inevitable impact on both sides, and the sacrifices first generation immigrants have to make for their kids.
12/5/10	Centurion	A movie about what used to be the preferred explanation of what happened to the IX Legion of Rome. Apparently it's more common now to believe the legion perished further East, and later. This movie was OK.
12/5/10	Morning Glory	A feel good movie, and a good vehicle for Harrison Ford to do curmudgeonly grumbling.
12/10/10	Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street	A fascinating precursor to the existentialism and counter-cultural anthems of the next two decades.
12/11/10	Black Swan	Aronofsky has become one of the most exciting and talented directors alive.
12/12/10	Valhalla Rising	Aronofsky has become one of the most exciting and talented directors alive.
12/12/10	The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader	All of these movies are OK, and they're never excellent, and this one was no exception.
12/18/10	The Fighter	An interesting movie, which actually was less a boxing movie and more a movie about crack addiction.
12/23/10	Tron: Legacy	Like a big cross between Blade Runner, The Matrix and The Bible.
12/24/10	True Grit	Not having seen the original, I can only say that this one was pretty good.
12/24/10	Absence of Malice	A quality Sydney Pollack movie, expertly crafted and of medium depth and meaning.
12/27/10	The King's Speech	Overall an uplifting and good movie, but I wish it had aimed to be a great movie, because it might have succeeded.
1/4/11	Assault on Precinct 13	I don't know whether it's the camp or the mindlessly repetitive music, but John Carpenter movies always manage to hold my attention.
1/5/11	Holt - Stikky Stock Charts: Learn the 8 major chart patterns used by professionals and how to interpret them to trade smart	Technical analysis is, needless to say, mostly worthless. This book was very interesting, though, for its unique didactic style. I think the same style could be used to teach many other things effectively.
1/6/11	Cube 2: Hypercube	Not as good as the first one. The ending was too cleanly resolved and it negated many possible interpretations.
1/8/11	M	All Fritz Lang movies are good.
1/7/11	Webster - The Duchess of Malfi	Apparently, this book used to be considered "required reading" for most students.
1/10/11	Planet B-Boy	A solid documentary.
1/10/11	The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters	Billy Mitchell is a snake. Already the King of King Kong and hot sauce, he seems to be locked in a nasty, three-way duel with Wiebe and Chien, now.
1/12/11	Serbis	I will never understand homosexuality in Philippino culture. It's bizarre.
1/13/11	Quine: The Philosophy of Logic	A dry book, but nonetheless interesting.
12/13/11	Season of the Witch	A terrible movie. I was giving it a chance, hoping it was somehow about the sex-scandals of the church, but it descended into an absurd, unoriginal exorcism movie.
1/14/11	Soldier	I think Kurt Russel only has about 6 lines in the entire movie.
1/14/11	The Wild One	A fascinating precursor to the existentialism and counter-cultural anthems of the next two decades.
1/15/11	Triad Election	An odd movie, tackling the Honk Kong handover through the triads.
1/20/11	Coetzee - Disgrace: A Novel	As any good allegory should, this novel skillfully intertwines a commentary about South Africa with a more universal experience of the twilight of manhood.
1/17/11	Sanjuro	Another awesome Kurasawa movie, about the decline of the traditional, samurai culture.
1/23/11	The Seeker: The Dark is Rising	A surprisingly good movie about the psychological changes of adolescence.
1/23/11	Hour of the Wolf	Another excellent film by Bergman, about a troubled, tragic artist and his hard-to-read wife, as they both descend into madness.
1/23/11	Graham - Facebook API Developer's Guide	A quick and easy read, this book gave me what it promised to: an intro to the platform.
1/24/11	Voices	I think this movie was about a family with a history of paranoid schizophrenia, PLUS the terribly jealous and violent tendencies of Koreans.
2/4/11	The Adjustment Bureau	Predictable but not bad. The theme was weirdly personal for me.
2/12/11	A Tale of Two Sisters	Another sort of Korean psycho-horror movie. Borrowed somewhat from The Ring. Overall, pretty good. It was about the 'realities' we invent to deal with trauma and the jarring effects of their collisions with the actual reality.
2/20/11	9 Songs	This movie was almost really good. There is a compelling parallel between the concerts and the relationship, but it never fully materializes and it doesn't connect to the Antarctica theme at all.
3/20/11	Paul	A few good nerd-humor moments.
3/25/11	The Money Pit	A couple scenes in this really had me cracking up.
5/30/11	Bill Cunningham New York	A sad movie, but well made and interesting.
6/3/11	Homicide	This movie has all the best Mamet qualities.
6/22/11	Midnight in Paris	Lighthearted, but good. The Hemingway character was awesome.
7/10/11	Transformers: Dark of the Moon	On par with the first one.
7/13/11	The Eagle	Failed to do anything really interesting.
7/17/11	X-Men: First Class	Also on par with the first one, or maybe slightly better.
7/17/11	Robin Hood	A so-so Robin Hood. Dropped anything interesting it was saying as revisionist history or as sociology when it botched the ending.
7/18/11	They Came Back	Only believable because it's French. In any other country, the reactions of the officials would have been more sensible and prompt. I wonder if this was inspired at all by the summers where all the old people died of heat while the paramedics were on vacation.
7/19/11	Super 8	A modern ET.
7/19/11	Stone	An interesting movie. Didn't do quite enough on the plot side to take advantage of solid performances by DeNiro and Norton.
7/23/11	Tree of Life	This movie was what The Fountain should have been.