The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

A few minutes in, I thought about leaving the theater. I only went because the person I went with seemed interested in it, but of course I'd forgotten that this person is quite uninformed about movies. And damn that Google movies website with it's 4/5 star rating. I'll never trust Google movies again. (I just checked imdb now, and it gave a more accurate 4.5/10 rating.) I had thought that this was going to be an action flick, but action flick, it definitely is not. This is really a teen chick flick.

Almost the only redeeming value is the eye candy later in the film in the form of Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black. Wow, what a body, and he has a pretty face, too. (For some reason, from looking at his nose, I was guessing that he might be part Asian.)

The movie assumes you've seen the TV series and know who everyone is. So dropping into this Twilight story cold is quite jarring and makes you think you're missing out on all the inside jokes, and you've made a serious mistake in coming, which you basically have.

Another serious negative for liberal/atheist movie-goers will be the references to human souls, and the brief but 'what-have-I-done,-have-I-come-to-a-red-neck-movie-but-I'm-in-California-dammit' Glenn Beck ad/preview which made my blood boil. But actually these agonizing moments are pretty fleeting, and surprisingly the story did take shape and have drama, if only in disconnected moments. I think it would be a reasonable film to watch on DVD, where you can gaze at some shirtless torsos for a bit longer.

There are at least a couple very strange and counter intuitive casting choices: the hairy chested guy plays the vampire, and the smooth chested guy plays the werewolf.

Fateful Choices by Ian Kershaw

I heard about this book while in Paris on CNN Int'l. It's a 2007 book which basically goes back to WWII and reviews ten choices made which altered the course of the war dramatically. They are all fascinating. A couple which I had no idea about were the choices of Japan at that time to continue its aggression against China and the rest of Asia -- it was at the time highly dependent on American oil -- and Germany to go back on its agreement with Russia and actually attack Russia, the two front war decision. But besides these there is also the decision by Great Britain to continue to fight Germany despite expectations of a near destruction of its army (expeditionary force, it was called) in France near Dunkirk and the imminent surrender of close allies Belgium and France. A really thick tome, but exceptionally well written as it considers the thinking at the time and the egos of the personalities involved in making the decisions.