V for Vendetta (2006)

The story is a protest against the Bush government in disguise. With the evil chancellor of Britain -- who sets curfews, throws dissidents in jail, tortures them and puts them through medical experiments, perhaps on mind control -- acting as a stand-in for Bush, the Republicans and the religious right. As an argument against big brother, terror laws and the like, it sort of works. It does give an idea of what would happen when the government gets the power to listen to phone conversations without warrants or to throw people in jails in other countries without rights, like the Bush government has. It's quite scary actually.

The evil Brits also use their power against gays particularly. It's a bit of a tenuous linkage, although somehow I am not unhappy about the inclusion.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Del Toro gives us an amazing world which is a mixture of the supernatural and reality. One strange incongruence is that while the story takes place in Spain, the Labyrinth's architecture and trappings have Native American looking roots. It makes sense only if you think about the director being from Mexico. The visuals are amazing regardless.

Daily Show (and Colbert Report) online video slowness

I'm been thwarted from my daily Comedy Central fix by the extraordinarily painful slowness of their video page. If only someone would embed all their videos in a blog every day, I could avoid this pain. Well, I've attempted this (not every day, but periodically) HERE.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

It is entertaining to read, but did not evoke in me any laughs out loud or weepy sadness. This book was more like a final reassembling of a puzzle. Tying up of loose ends. As I read the book, I got the sense of a bit of arbitrariness of the rules of magic and magical items set out by the author. Fans of the books, might argue it's just like the real world; surely I could comprehend there are exceptions to every rule. A key item in this book and, in fact, in the whole series, is a magical cloak with unfailing invisibility, impervious to other spells. This alone is a super powerful item and allows huge sections of this last book's storyline to move forward. It is analogous to the One Ring of Tolkien's series (that item interestingly also bestows invisibility, but also much else). Still, the cloak isn't really given the full lore than perhaps it deserves. And I think (and probably many would agree) the writing here is nowhere near as good as Tolkien's. Overall, Harry Potter's world is a bit fragile and doubt took hold of me with the least inquiry into its workings.

Link A NYTimes opinion piece along similar lines.

The History Boys (2006)

Originally a play, the storyline is based on experiences in the playwright's life. Alan Bennett who is gay wrote this play which is full of gay references and in fact the main storyline is related to the gay teacher. A somewhat surprising aspect is that the straights depicted seem so incredibly gay curious or at least gay friendly. The boys' camaraderie and friendships even between straight characters are intimate, yet without the fear and homophobia that usually comes with such close male relations. In this respect, it's such a fun, hopeful and friendly world (with a few ugly exceptions) that the movie was so heartening for me to watch.

And yet there are dangers too. A gay man's love of a straight man can be very painful, and having an object of affection willing to go just halfway might be terribly confusing, disappointing, and humiliating -- it's just not worth going too far down that road, it seems to me. (And so a love like this happens at least once to a gay man in his life, and after going through that probably he learns to avoid this pain in the future...) The movie does skillfully avoid such toxic fallout as was portrayed in Notes on a Scandal, but I could see this movie skating on the edges of it.

The movie has a fine demonstration of one of my new favorite Brit words: "Oi!", exclaimed to mean: "What the hell are you doing?!", "Pay attention!" or something similar.

Talk to Her (2002)

As with all Almodovar films, the music is great. It seems Almodovar likes to use some of the same players -- a couple actors in Talk to Her are also in Volver. Overall a very interesting story about women in comas and the men who take care of them, partially told in flashbacks.

Minor spoilers: One interesting theme in the movie is that one lover is sad and cries when he sees something beautiful without his beloved because he can't share it with her. There are interesting extensions to this used to great effect, such as what does it mean that he doesn't cry at something beautiful. Here is also an interesting reversal of common stereotypes. A man who lives with his mother, is a hairdresser and a nurse is straight! Also, looking back, you will realize why it is that the nurse wanted a hug from his friend.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Don't believe in God? This is a great book for you. Believe in God, but don't mind being disabused of the notion of God or think it can't be done (you've been indoctrinated to such an extent that there's no way you think you can be convinced otherwise), then you've nothing to lose by reading this (though you might want to read The Selfish Gene first to give yourself the full chance of being convinced). Dawkins who wrote The Selfish Gene and is an expert on evolution is an atheist. He takes a strong stand against the idiot zealots and encourages other non-believers to do the same. Stop letting these crazy people run the planet and spread their crazy ideas. I was pumped just by the preface.

It's actually quite funny in parts. People have made all kind of weird, illogical arguments for the existence of God. With well written prose, Dawkins pretty much takes apart all the faulty reasoning (circular, non-sequitur, etc). In fact, he points out that the founding fathers of America were in fact extremely secular for the day and fought to remove references to religion (Christianity) in founding documents. Overall he does a great job at systematically discussing and refuting all the reasons people have given for why God exists. He also discusses why religion came about (homo sapiens tendency to personify unexplained agency), but isn't needed and is in fact bad for humanity. (A key reason is that it indoctrinates children into accepting religious tenets as truth without question/thinking. This primes them for atrocities such as suicide bombing or setting abortion clinics on fire.)

One of the main reasons people have for the existence of God, is that things are too complicated to have come to be without some higher intelligence. As a scientist and key proponent of evolution, Dawkins obviously disagrees. Complex organisms have taken a long time but slowly evolved to become more complex. Looking at the end result or culmination of evolution -- people, trees, even the smallest ant, it's quite truly wonderous, but it's the end of a process which survival advantages benefited ancestors and propagation of their genes. Those less wonderously adapted to survival simply did not survive, but they have even left fossils behind as proof of their existence. There is no need for a God acting in 7 days. Dawkins excoriates people who are too lazy to understand the science appropriately and would rather cling to old superstitions which were used to explain the world before science came to understand it.

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Personally, I think it's just the idea of heaven which sustains religion (okay, in conjunction with early childhood brainwashing). People are just too blindly hopeful of something magically like life after life to accept the true deadness of death. Wishful thinking. Hey people snap out of it!