Reviews & such.

Last night on my TV, I watched a cartoon character with a squeaky voice and a tendency to mispronounce words. He was clearly lost, over his head, and out to sea, and it seemed to last for two hours. On the other hand, it was fairly entertaining. Yes, I was watching Finding Nemo. (Oh, was that on too?) I thought it was okay, but that's about it. Very good animation, some decent voice acting, but not much of a story. There's no reason why you can't have a good story with an animated movie - see Shrek, for instance.

A better movie I've seen on DVD recently was What's Cooking?, written and directed by Gurinder Chadha (who also did Bend It Like Beckham). A Thanksgiving movie that isn't a depressing farce about dysfunctional families, this looks at the Thanksgiving celebrations of four families and their interlocking stories. Well written, good actors - especially for this director's first movie made in the U.S. - and a good sense of fun. Well worth seeing, and the director's commentary is fun, too.

I've also seen Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which was fine as a mindless action picture, but clearly not up to the quality of the previous Terminator movies. And as a bonus, you get to see California's governor naked, not necessarily a good thing. And the commentary track was one of the worst I've ever heard - separate commentary tracks from the director and the leading actors, edited together. Arnold kept going on and on and on about how he had to get back into shape for his nude arrival scenes.

Among currently-playing movies, I've seen and liked "Something's Gotta Give". Admittedly, I like anything with Diane Keaton in it, and she does a wonderful job. Jack Nicholson does a great job of playing himself, and Frances McDormand excels at playing oddball characters. Great writing gives the actors a lot to work with, and they show themselves capable of handling it. The Hollywood-style happy ending is a bit much, but not unexpected. A good date movie, for those for whom that's not a hypothetical consideration.

On TV, I ended up being somewhat disappointed with Celebrity Poker Showdown. I've seen enough of the "serious" poker shows to realize that I don't enjoy them, so the attraction with this show would be to see the stars off duty. And for my money, only the show made up of folks from The West Wing was worth watching. I've heard that they're going to do a new set of shows; I can only hope that they'll have more interesting participants.

On the brighter side, though, Monk has returned with new shows.

And I don't spend all of my time in front of the tube. I've read Eragon - the fantasy novel by the then-15-year-old home-schooled kid that's been on the NY Times best seller list. It was okay, although not much better than that. It's clear that the book was greatly influenced by Tolkien (elves, dwarves, dragons, swords with names, and intended to be an "epic" trilogy), McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series (dragon riders, how they attach to dragons), and Luke Skywalker (an orphan who comes to terms with his identity as a Hero-in-training, who leaves his homeland in the company of an older mentor and in search of who his parents are). It comes across as a Tolkienesque book, written for the Harry Potter set, and in that particular context, succeeds. All in all, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't especially good, either. I didn't see anything in it that was original, and this particular culling of pieces of other, better fantasies isn't compelling. Still, it was better than some of the truly uninspired Tolkien imitators (like the endless Shannara series), and is a far better novel than I could have written at age 15.